‘House of the Dragon’ is the latest TV series to face review-bombing. The sixth episode of the second season is the lowest rated of the entire show on IMDB with an average star rating of 6.2.
This week’s episode of HBO’s prequel series to the ‘Game of Thrones’ franchise has received a raft of one star reviews, following its premiere on 21 July.
Of the 27,000 ratings the episode has been given on IMDB, around 9,400 (or 35%) have been just one star. Of these, 4,500 have come from Saudi Arabia as one of the largest voting countries on the episode.
It’s the lowest rated episode of the entire series, significantly behind the fourth episode of this year’s season, ‘The Red Dragon and the Gold’, which currently has a 9.6 star rating.
The episode, ‘Smallfolk’ featured a kiss between Queen Rhaenyra and Mysaria, two female characters in the show played by Emma D’Arcy and Sonoya Mizuno, respectively.
As Queen Rhaenyra has increasingly felt demeaned by her war council during her attempt to unseat the usurpers on the throne led by the Hightower family, she has turned to her one staunch ally, her own Master of Whispers, Mysaria.
Originally, the two characters were just meant to share a tense moment at the end of the episode, but D’Arcy suggested their character should go in for the kiss, creating the moment on set.
“Initially, there’s huge feelings of empathy and gratitude towards this person,” D’Arcy told Variety. “Rhaenyra is hugely affected by the life that Mysaria has lived so bravely. Then, they are two bodies completely overrun by touch.”
It seems that the kiss, hailed as a success of LGBTQ+ representation on screen, has been the main source of ire for those leaving the scathing reviews on IMDB.
“I have never seen someone ruining his own great work with just 30 sec of unnecessary scene that will drag the storyline to its doom,” user ahmedraheemjasim wrote. RetroRick posted a review with the headline: “thou shalt not escape from the agenda”.
Not all the worst reviews of the episode focused on the kiss with some pointing out the slow-plodding plot of the second series. A fair criticism, as the show is so inevitably pointing towards all-out war but has faced a mid-season slump with dry tableside conversations in place of action.
Just as with ‘The Last of Us’ last year when another HBO series faced disproportionate numbers of low reviews on IMDB every time it put LGBTQ+ characters to the fore, the ugliness of the internet has reared its head once again.
‘Smallfolk’ was hardly a scintillating hour of television from a show that has provided edge-of-your seat watching since it debuted in 2022. However, it also wasn’t an unwatchable snoozefest, instead focusing more on tense political scene-setting and tactics for future tense standoffs.
Also, for those allergic to episodes of television that don’t feature explicit action, a dragon literally burns two people alive, one of which slits his own throat as he is engulfed by the flames. It’s about as metal a scene as the show has ever featured.
The episode is clearly being judged so harshly almost exclusively by a polarised sect of the public that refuses to accept any form of LGBTQ+ representation on screen and is showing its displeasure in the only way it knows possible.
Over the years, showrunners have bent to the will of the public when creating their shows. Hopefully ‘House of the Dragon’ showrunner Ryan Condal will have the good sense to recognise the irrelevance of this episode’s IMDB rating and continue creating and expanding on George R. R. Martin’s ‘Fire & Blood’ source material book at will.
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