What is the deal with dragons?

I've been enjoying the first half dozen episodes of the latest George R. R. Martin series, House of the Dragon, since John recommended watching it on HBO.  I have to preface these remarks by saying that I tried watching a couple of episodes of its predecessor/sequel Game of Thrones, but despite being impressed by some of the visual effects, the soap opera nature of its character presentation put me off.  So far, this has not happened with House of the Dragon, at least, not enough to make me hit the off button.  I can stretch my sense of verisimilitude enough to tolerate a certain number of anachronisms and anomalies that have turned up as I wait for resolution of some issues.  It is interesting for me to observe that the wide audience of this drama probably has little actual understanding of what life was like in the Dark or Middle Ages, even for the privileged noble classes.  However, this is perhaps not that surprising, since people in the Renaissance went to plays that presented Julius Caesar or Pericles prancing about in doublets and tights.  

I was struck by the role the dragons play in the pseudo-historical process.  They are the instruments of ultimate power, the weapons of mass destruction that enable clans to achieve hegemony in greater Westeros.  As such, they are rather like flying, squawking atom bombs.  Inferior races, like the Crabfeeder's Triarchy followers (Terrorists? Axis of Evil?) do not have access to dragons for unspecified reasons.  Consequently, they can only fight a sort of guerrilla war against the victorious "noble" houses.  Fortunately for the plot, they do not seem to be able to enrich uranium or import technology to give them an equivalent force de frappe, and so are doomed to eventual defeat and devastation.  The mass impalement of Triarchy forces after Daemon's victory over them is in large part a parallel of the public humiliation of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.  Visually, the Triarchy forces are even portrayed as "ragheads." Dragons in this universe present the contemporary equivalent of Shock and Awe, the power that makes the hegemons rule.

Does it follow that House of the Dragon is a mythogenic instrument of the New World Order?  If so, it is a subtle one in that it invests women with a tempting role in this clan/corporate universe.  The princesses and queens, especially through their quest for sexual and matriarchal assertion, certainly have skin in the game.  The same can be said for racial minorities, as the great houses seem to be equal opportunity power structures.  This may reflect the increasingly female and non-Caucasian face of the modern military forces, which are willing to incorporate diverse elements in order to fulfill their quotas, whether or not they actually reward these elements with the trappings of luxury and power.  For it does seem to me that in many ways House of the Dragon is a fantasy double for House of Cards (and perhaps Game of Thrones a clone of the Game of Global Domination in the Bond film Never Say Never Again).  Perhaps pseudo-Medieval fantasy functions as a kind of psycho-drama permitting public audiences to vicariously participate in a level of power play that is railed off from them in real life, that they sense must be happening somewhere, but can only viscerally access through a subscription spectacle.  

At any rate,  these ruminations are interesting enough to keep me tuning in for awhile, if for no other reason than to understand better how my fellow Earthlings may be "trained" or experimented upon in the still evolving New World Order.  

   

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SPACE 1999, MAYA THE METAMORPH
AND THE PROSPECT OF SHAPE-CHANGING 

Before there was Odo of Deep Space 9, the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series Space 1999 (1975-76) explored the increasingly important story element of shape-changing.  Strictly speaking, even this forward-looking multiform character was not the first of its kind.  For example the 1958  film, I Married a Monster From Outer Space had shown an alien, played by Tom Tryon, who was able to assume the physical shape of a human captive in order to infiltrate and subdue the population of Earth.  How the aliens achieve this is not explained and sometimes appears to be a sensory illusion rather than an organic transformation.  Before this movie, such disguises were only partial.  In John W. Campbell's 1938 short story "Who Goes There?" an otherworldly creature in Antarctica can take on the shape and behavior of victims that it assimilates, yet when the tale was filmed in 1951 as The Thing From Another World, Christian Nyby presented the invader was as a "hominid carrot" that had apparently evolved in an anthropomorphic direction but could not change form.  John Carpenter's 1982 refacciamento of the story returned to the original shape-changing concept and enhanced it by making the intruder at times morph into several life-forms at once.  Another early precedent (1956) can be found in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where interstellar spore creatures in their pod stage can mimic the form of nearby sleeping humans and simultaneously absorb their thoughts.  However, this replication, though organic, does not seem to involve an act of conscious will on the part of the "larval" pod. 

To return to Space 1999, the character of Maya, played by Catherine Schell, represents for perhaps the first time in visual media a true, fully conscious shape shifter, independent of the need for illusion or a specific host to aid the transformation.  Moreover, the writers of Space 1999 insist on providing a back story for this process, since Maya was conceived as a new central character for the second season of the series and appears in almost all 26 episodes. When she appears for the first time in "Metamorph" (Schell had previously had a role in a Season One episode, but not as Maya), she is identified as the daughter of Mentor, a rogue member of the Psychon race.  Unlike her treacherous father, who seeks to lobotomize and enslave the Moon colonists, Maya befriends them and eventually turns away from Mentor (Brian Blessed) to join the wandering Earthlings.  In the course of "Metamorph", she transforms into a lion, dove-like bird, a fierce dog, a gorilla, and (unwillingly) into a weird and powerful hominid. Other animals whose form she assumes in later episodes include a caterpillar, a kestrel, a monkey and a ferret.  These transformations present a bit of a plot hole, since it is not explained how she would know what any of the Earth species look like, unless one assumes that Planet Psychon had exactly the same evolutionary track as Earth.  A deeper plot hole results when she manages to transform her inanimate clothing and other objects, along with her own body.  

It is further revealed in later episodes that Maya's transformations operate due to "molecular transformation," a deliberate process requiring special adaptability and training from a master.  This explanation, which seems plausible enough at first glance, nevertheless presents some problems.  Why break down matter all the way to molecules, when a convincing organic recreation could involve changes strictly on the level of cytology?  A physical copy woes not necessitate reorganization below the level of cells, perhaps even in non-carbon-based life forms.  This is the approach we take in the shape changers in our Forlani Saga universe.  Our characters Kelso and Horse, assume shape changing missions in the service of their masters, the Blynthians.  These adventures, rather like those in the original Mission Impossible television series, involve interventions among other cultures and planetary environments in order to deter activities that are harmful to the interests of the inscrutable Blynthians and the sector they seek to protect and manage.  Kelso and Horse require plans and models of their target identities, as well as time to adapt their own cellular makeup and sometimes implants or other physical adjustments, not unlike the wigs or false noses employed by Jim Phelps and his crew of television spies.  Some of their roles demand behavior that they would naturally find inappropriate or even disgusting, which causes the finicky Kelso a great deal more irritation than his more patient sidekick Horse.  But they are professional shape changers, well rewarded by their bosses for their efforts.  In this sense, we feel that they are descendants more of Philip Marlowe or Archie Goodwin than Maya or even Odo.  Still, we owe a tip of the hat to Maya as a precursor to our own experiments with shape changers.