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A key question behind the scenes of House of the Dragon was where to start the TV show. Fire & Blood, the book on which the series is based, is a sprawling history of House Targaryen, so it's not as simple as starting from page one as Game of Thrones did with its source material.
The on-screen story starts in a flashback around a decade before the main events kick off, at the Great Council where King Jaehaerys must choose a new heir after both his sons, Aemon and Baelon, pass away. The two candidates are Baelon's son Viserys (Paddy Considine) and Aemon's daughter Rhaenys (Eve Best). The council chooses Viserys.
"I don’t know if I should reveal this," Martin said in a recent interview with his publisher, Penguin Random House. "That [beginning] was not handed down by some muse from Ancient Greece. We – myself and the other writers – had a lot of spirited discussions about where to begin that story."
He continued: "[A] possibility we discussed – which was actually my favorite possibility, but nobody liked it except me [laughs]. I would have began it much earlier. I would have began it like 40 years earlier with the episode I would have called 'The Heir and the Spare,' in which Jaehaerys’s two sons, Aemon and Baelon, are alive. And we see the friendship, but also the rivalry, between the two sides of the great house.
"You know, Aemon dies accidentally when a Myrish crossbowman shoots him by accident on Tarth and then Jaehaerys has to decide who becomes the new heir. Is it the daughter of the older son who’s just died [Rhaenys] or is it the second son, who has sons of his own and is a man and she’s just a teenage girl?
"But then you would have had 40 more years and you would have had even more time jumps and you would have even more recastings and, uh, yeah, I was the only one who was really enthused about that."
As it stands, House of the Dragon isn't lacking in time jumps – season 1 covers a span of around 20 years (not counting the aforementioned flashback to the Great Council), with some characters like Laenor Velaryon being played by three different actors over the course of the season. However, showrunner Ryan Condal has confirmed that season 2 won't have any more time skips, with all the current actors playing their characters "until the end".
All episodes of House of the Dragon are now available to stream on HBO Max and NOW TV. Make sure you're up to date with all things Westeros with our House of the Dragon season 1 reviews and our guide to House of the Dragon season 2.
