How did Alicent ride to Harrenhal so quickly? Before that, how did she sail to Dragonstone and back to King’s Landing in no time? How is it that Kat said she spent days walking the road to Tumbleton, even though we’d seen she was still in King’s Landing only two episodes before we first saw her in that town?

During the later years of Game of Thrones, one of the most common criticisms the show started to get was that everyone was moving too fast—and I don’t mean the plot, although that was also true in the final two seasons, but the actual people: one moment we saw Littlefinger somewhere, and the next time we checked up on him he was on the other side of Westeros. In season six, Varys traveled from Meereen to Dorne between three episodes, and then back to Meereen within that same episode. This came to be cheekily known in the fandom as “Littlefinger’s jetpack.”

Of course, this isn’t always a problem. Scenes and episodes aren’t a measure of time. Days, weeks, months, even years can pass between them—and in the first season of House of the Dragon, that was often the case. Some of the criticism Game of Thrones got could be attributed to not understanding this. However, no one complained when in the very first episode we saw Cersei and Jaime in King’s Landing and then arriving in Winterfell the very next scene; we were told a month had passed and that was that. The reason for us accepting this and not later unseen journeys, however, was that there weren’t other storylines going on simultaneously but at distinctly different speeds. When it doesn’t work, when you can really feel Littlefinger’s jetpack being used, it’s because someone like Varys crosses a continent and back in two episodes while the rest of the story doesn’t seem to be moving forward at the same rate.

House of the Dragon didn’t initially get this objection. Sure, season one spanned 20 years, but every time jump—whether it was a few months or ten years—seemed to affect all characters in equal measure. Except perhaps in the aging department, but what can you do; you just have to imagine Daemon and Criston Cole were supposed to look like they were in their early 20s in the show’s first five episodes. It’s difficult to harp on the show for this, as the writers had to condense three decades of history into 10 distinct hours of television that didn’t make you feel like you were watching a history documentary. Their first solution was to compress the story into “only” 20 years rather than 30, and the second one to consolidate most of the events in those 2 decades into a few days or weeks per episode: after the prologue at the Council of Harrenhal, said to take place in 101 AC like in Fire & Blood by an older Rhaenyra’s narration, the show jumped 11 years to 112 AC, and then went through a few more time jumps ranging from a few weeks to three years until the mid-season, set in 116 AC. Of course, the big time jump came in episode six, moving the story 10 years into the future, to to 126 AC, and then another six to 132 AC, which, incidentally, is when the Dance of the Dragon starts in the show universe, 3 years after it did in Martin’s work. That’s a lot of time-jumping (although not nearly as much as a textually faithful adaptation would have required,) and the show did get some flak for the uneven pacing, but no one was complaining about jetpacks back then.

The next two seasons are a different story, however. There are no major time jumps to paper over characters traveling between locations, and with a civil war going on there cannot be any. Of course, the dragons help the writers massively with this—many of the main characters can cross the continent without resorting to weeks of arduous travel. Still, a few accusations started to spring up in season two that some characters, especially those with no dragons, were borrowing the Baelish-patented invention, and these complaints really flowered this year. I started to come across a lot of tweets bemoaning that geography had stopped mattering again, just like it did in later Game of Thrones. I started to wonder if it was true. I wondered if it was even possible to know if it was true; Game of Thrones made very few references to distances and even fewer to the passage of time; increasingly fewer as time went on, in fact, so it was impossible to tell just how true the accusations of jetpacking really were, except for the overwhelming feeling among the fandom that for any of it to make sense some characters would need to be in stasis while others traveled continents off-screen.

I did notice, however, there was something different with House of the Dragon —unlike Game of Thrones, this show never misses an opportunity to mark the passage of time. We get characters giving us pretty precise timelines for marching armies, and referring to past events with much more specificity. If House of the Dragon is truly jetpacking, there may just be enough concrete references to the flow of time to prove or disprove it. It would be long, tedious work, but it should be possible. So: I wrote a 40,000-word document outlining the timeline for the show, from the very start to the end of season three. What I found out may surprise you—and you can read all about it in the timeline page, but to offer a short answer to the big question of whether House of the Dragon is jetpacking or not: surprisingly not. The show has proven to be remarkably consistent with the passage of time, which, to be honest, should be the case given how obsessed this show is with characters saying things are happening “in a fortnight” or “on the morrow.” If they weren’t consistent, they were setting themselves up for failure. Still, there are some caveats and inconsistencies I’ll be sure to mention.

Before really getting into it, something that must be understood is that the Westeros of this show is evidently much smaller than the one in George R.R. Martin’s imagination. If you have ever looked at a map of Westeros you may be shocked to learn that Martin pictures Westeros to be about the size of South America, rather than the Great Britain it resembles, or even something in-between, like continental Europe. This just can’t be the case in House of the Dragon, or Game of Thrones for that matter. In this very season, Gwayne said King’s Landing was less than 30 leagues away from Tumbleton; in The World of Ice and Fire and Fire and Blood, it is said to be 60 leagues away. The Westeros of the show is about half the size of the one in the books—likely a bit smaller than that even—, which to be honest makes a bit more intuitive sense; even in a medieval society it’s difficult to accept that a continent the size of South America with nine culturally distinct historical regions would only have 5 cities, only 3 of them highly populated. So, although the distances the characters make in this show are definitely not consistent with the books, they’re consistent with the show itself as it’s chosen to depict Westeros.

The methodology to establish a timeline was quite simple, if tiresome—to take note of every reference to days, weeks, or months; of how long certain journeys are said to take; and of the actual days and nights we see pass on-screen. The result was so remarkably congruent —even with some predictive power, as the timeline document developed while season 3 aired— that it became clear this was something the writers were paying attention to, even if they don’t always decide to draw attention to it on-screen.

Before you go read the entire timeline or watch Pete Peppers’s video summary on it, I feel like I have to say one’s enjoyment of this—or any other show—shouldn’t be based on whether it’s following a strictly coherent chronology—a story can work perfectly well as long as it feels like everything makes intuitive sense and the inconsistencies don’t get in the way of the story; as long as the willing suspension of disbelief isn’t broken. The opposite also appears to be true: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the loudest accusations of jetpacking have been about Rhaenyra and Alicent’s reunions in season two or Alicent traveling to Harrenhal in season three; all of which didn’t happen—and probably couldn’t have happened—in the source material. When something happens that some people dislike and the narrative spell is broken for them, they’re more likely to find fault in something objective —like the passage of time— rather than something subjective —like their view of the characters— as the real cause, even when the objective truth actually checks out, as it does in all these cases. For these people, however, it feels like it doesn’t make sense, like the characters have teleported just to do something unlike them, because they’re seeing something that’s broken their personal suspension of disbelief. Obviously, I can’t do much about that—I can’t convince anyone to like the show, the season, or these scenes, nor would I want to, but what I achieved with this project is to provide an evidence-based argument as to why the timeline in these and almost all other scenes makes sense.