Two hundred years before the events of Game of Thrones, King Viserys Targaryen waits nervously for his first male heir as his daughter Rhaenerya rails against expectations of her and his brother Daemon causes trouble.

The closing credits music (and indeed the refrain which underpins much of the show’s score) will be instantly familiar to any Game of Thrones fan, being an update (though not necessarily a better one) of that show’s iconic theme, which feels rather fitting as a metaphor for the entire show.

Nothing here is inherently bad (although the dragon CGI if anything looks slightly worse, somehow) but also nothing here feels especially new. We have a laundry list of characters with oddly spelled names to try to keep track of out of the gate, bucketloads of political intrigue, plenty of nudity, some graphic violence and the odd insistence of yet another fantasy show set in a world utterly different from our own but still hidebound by patriarchal ideas with regards to royal succession and the duty of women versus men in the world. Between this and that musical repetition, it’s difficult to escape the nagging suspicion that what we have here is a Game of Thrones knock-off rather than a show that was needed in its own right.

That’s a shame, because a lot of what we get here is very good. Paddy Considine is decent as King Viserys, desperate for a son to assure his succession, a need which can conflict with the love he has for his wife. Milly Alcock does her best with Rhaenyra, his daughter and a feisty young white-haired princess who likes riding on dragons, who forcibly reminds you (as does the show in its opening text crawl) that Daenerys Targaryen is Not Appearing In This Show. Alcock doesn’t have a lot to work with, portraying the princess who’s bored of what the world and her father want for her because she’s not like the other girls, but she wrings what she can out of the material.

Matt Smith easily has the most fun as Daemon, Viserys’ troublesome younger brother who would rather be fornicating, fighting and drinking than doing any of the things the brother to the king and potential heir to the throne should be. Daemon feels like an odd hybrid of Joffrey and Bron, with the cruelty and ambition of the former mixed in with the appetites of the latter, but also carries a certain spark of his own, with indications, unlike either of those other characters, that there are people for whom he cares beyond himself. Regardless, it seems certain that Daemon will be one of the show’s more interesting characters, for good or ill.

But it is difficult to escape the feeling that we’ve done all this before, down to the arguments about women being allowed to sit on the throne. You’ll see locations and bits of set dressing you recognise from Game of Thrones, you’ll hear familiar names from that show too. You’ll see the same sort of ultra-violence and pointless nudity that were hallmarks of the former show, and you’ll even get some blatant foreshadowing exposition dialogue in case you happened to hit your head on the way in or lived under a rock forever before today and somehow missed that this is a Game of Thrones spin-off.

A tentative start then, and one which doesn’t inspire the most confidence for what’s to come. Hopefully, having got this introductory episode out of the way to get everyone in the mood, the show can grow to become its own thing – certainly it seems to have the cast and the budget to do so.

Verdict: Sport of Kings’ Seats this may be, but there are enough flashes here to suggest we may yet get a standalone show worthy of the time and resource that have clearly been poured into it, now it’s got the opener done. 6/10

Greg D. Smith