Recently there have been quite a few instances in the entertainment industry that have been implementing what I like to call “character dragging.” Which means a show that has a character with technically very little to do for an extended period of time and/or a full season. Thus their storyline is dragged at a snail’s pace, with very little happening from scene to scene.
Two shows that I especially noticed this with recently are “Silo” and “House of the Dragon.” Specifically, they both are guilty of this in their second seasons. Spoilers ahead for “House of the Dragon,” “Silo,” “Severance,” and “Attack on Titan.”
“House of the Dragon”
Starting off with “House of the Dragon,” in Season 1 there was quite a bit of jumping around, almost too much information to be stuffed into one season. The span was about 20 years of establishing the groundwork for the eventual war to come between the Targaryen factions. Throughout that first season, Daemon Targaryen tended to be the fan favorite episode to episode and for good reason. He’s very intricately well written and has conflicting motivations between family and self interest. Matt Smith, the actor playing Daemon Targaryen, delivered a great performance.
A few paragraphs…
That first blood had been drawn at the end of Season 1. The story came to a point in the book “Fire & Blood,” which the show is based on, where Daemon simply was not written about much. There are only a few paragraphs explaining that he left to go to Harrenhal and returned with bannermen for Rhaenyra.
At that moment, the writers had a decision to make between cutting Daemon out for almost an entire season. That would allow them to focus on some other storylines that could be developed better. Or, get scared of people losing interest because Daemon isn’t on the screen, dragging his barebones storyline over eight episodes. They went with the former.
Priorities in character development versus plot
Instead of developing some characters that are not clearly woven into the story, it almost feels like they should be written out entirely. Daemon stumbles around Harrenhal having trippy visions and losing an army but then gaining it back. Essentially this plot loops back to his starting point.
There was a very clear quality drop, not only from Season 1 to Season 2, but also drop between storylines. The Greens had much more interesting things going on compared to the Blacks, who only barely started to get their momentum toward the end of the season. Rhaenyra also had very little agency in Season 2.
Dream on Daemon
House of the Dragon Season 2 – Episode 8
There were many different options to employ when it came to this issue between erasing Daemon from a good chunk of the season versus writing more for Daemon to do. It was the repetition of a trippy dream to him starting awake every episode that became monotonous.
Personally, I think getting rid of him for the middle of the season would’ve been just fine. They’ve already shown that they aren’t afraid to leave Otto Hightower out, so why drag out Daemon’s story?
They could’ve used that valuable screentime to show us more of why Rhaena needs to be included in this season. The last episode is her just running in the mountains looking for a dragon and she doesn’t even get to ride it. Show us more of Hugh the Hammer and Rolf since they become important towards the end. More of the war could have been developed throughout the season, since it feels like we started with “We’re going to war,” and by the end “We’re still going to war.”
“Silo”
“House of the Dragon” isn’t the only show that did this in 2024. Apple TV’s sci-fi drama, “Silo,” which had again a very tight well-written Season 1. It ended with a good cliffhanger, but by Season 2, our main character Juliette simply had nothing to do.
Plot battles
The difference in quality is very stark in this case since there is quite a bit of movement inside the original “Silo.”
Juliette’s friends were in the depths, organizing a rebellion and making move after move against IT and Judicial. There’s also quite a bit more lore dropped in the rebellion storyline as well as many character arcs. But, when you look at Juliette’s storyline, the first episode is her building a bridge, then the second episode is her talking to Solo. The puck isn’t moved very far and there is quite a bit of the B plot in between each A plot scene.
There is some interesting stuff going on towards the end of course, with Juliette finding a few more survivors of the run down silo, and there is mention of the group having discord with the girl they call “Eater.” There’s some good backstory there that the show intentionally decided to not go into in order to have a full episode of Juliette trying to convince Solo to do every tiny thing. It just added more monotony.
The fix
There are a few ways to fix this. Again, one of which being just a single full episode of Juliette going through about 70% of her story in one episode that is focused only on her, placed about halfway through the season.
I’m not a huge fan of single character focused episodes, just look at the episode “Sweet Vitriol” from “Severance” Season 2. But in contrast, that show also had another single character focused episode before called “Chikai Bardo,” focusing on Gemma and it was captivating. The reason for this I think is because there was just so much story to get through in that amount of time. Regardless, I think with “Silo” you could put a lot of Juliette’s story in one episode with enough going on that the pace isn’t so slow.
Who’s the story about anyway?
It’s hard to justify each of these examples as being slow burns because it’s specifically focused on a single character that’s going so slow contrasted with other, technically less important characters having way more interesting things going on.
Is character dragging about the greenbacks?
There are obviously different reasonings for why this all happened. Things like budget and marketing purposes come into play. If the main character of the last season suddenly disappears for half a season it would be met with some initial hate, like “Attack on Titan” for example.
In time, I think disappearance is the better route, since it will overall end up being a better paced story.
What do you think of character dragging? Is it steadily becoming a bigger problem in the TV and entertainment world or is it not that big of a concern? Let me know in the comments and be sure to like and subscribe.
