Photo: Theo Whiteman
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I never EVER skip an opening credit sequence. The best of them function as an overture, establishing tone, and suggesting where a series will travel. This works for dramas (Friday Night Lights, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under spring immediately to mind) as well as comedies. (You basically didn’t even need to watch Weeds — that’s how thoroughly distilled its themes were by its credit sequence).
The new House of the Dragon opener is particularly unskippable, as gorgeous as it is evocative. Watch closely, and you’ll find the history of House Targaryen woven in tapestry. But it’s the medium itself that caught my eye before episode two. Individual vignettes are rendered in richly-hued embroidery, but they’re connected by white fabric that goes inky red, like a fresh bandage on a seeping wound. The Targaryens’ is a story dressed up in brocade, woven into sheets of dried blood. Blood is spilling again now: Lucerys, followed by little Jaehaerys. What will the tapestry look like if it’s ever complete? Will Helaena Targaryen, who embroiders her dead son’s funeral cloak, eventually sit down to sew his short life onto the family’s tragic scroll?
When the episode opens, the guards are rounding up everyone in the Red Keep, hoping to apprehend Jaehearys’ killers before they can escape. From the nursery, a maid carries a blood-soaked towel, like something you could weave Targaryen lore onto later. (I assume Clare Kilner, who directed this episode, as well as the underrated Debra Messing rom-com The Wedding Date, also never skips a credit sequence.) Only moments have passed since the end of the season premiere. Everyone in the castle is running on fumes and anguish, no one more so than King Aegon.
Given that last week he was treating Jaehaerys more like a toy than a child, I was caught off guard by the depths of Aegon’s distress. First, in an early scene, screaming his vengeance into the void: “I am the King. I declare war!” (Thanks for clearing that up, Eggy, but I’m pretty sure war just declared you.) But again he displays it, more privately and earnestly, at the episode’s tail-end, when his outrage is all but used up and he’s sobbing into his own hands. “Aegon the Magnanimous”? I think not. “Aegon the Dragoncock”? Doubtful. But “Aegon the Human Being”? That might still be a title that suits him, at least when he’s not performing blazing indignation for an audience.
Alicent glimpses her son in that vulnerable pose, and yet she doesn’t go to him. She’s been her children’s champion but rarely much of a mother. I was horrified by how quickly her concern for Helaena gave way to her concern about whether Helaena planned to reveal her midnight lover. That Alicent is tormented by Christian-style guilt is clear. But that she could overcome that guilt to take part in the political spectacle of her grandson’s funeral and not offer her son comfort in his secret corner of mourning is telling. That she runs straight back to bed with Ser Criston Cole in the final moments of the episode screams everything I need to know about her. Alas, I get ahead of myself.
“We mustn’t be shaken by this,” Otto Hightower tells his daughter, who is clearly shaken by this, this being her baby grandson’s BEHEADING. Alicent’s “sins” were already working on her conscience in the last episode when she made a half-hearted attempt to call off the affair with Criston. Here, her guilt is compounded by the fact that the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard was abed with her when he ought to have been standing watch over the family. Otto, however, is too busy figuring out how to make lemonade from dead children to notice his daughter’s torment. When gods close a door, they open a parade route.
Aegon fears the crime will signal the weakness of his reign. It’s all Alicent’s fault for wanting Rhaenyra spared in the first place. Or it’s his guards’ fault for letting her operatives inside his castle walls. But Otto, the ultimate spin doctor, sees an opportunity to change the narrative. The smallfolk were there for Aegon’s sham coronation; they saw Rhaenys defect on dragonback. In short, they already know his grandson is weak. But this is a chance to show the people Rhaenyra’s savage desperation, regardless of whether or not she really was the one to order the execution. Otto recommends a state funeral, with a procession winding from the Red Keep to the Dragonpit. Don’t simply tell people that the Black Queen is a baby killer; shower them with the tears of Alicent and Helaena, who are to be pulled in a wagon behind the young scion against both their wishes.
The funeral is awful. In the low light of early morning, King’s Landing is even more of a monochrome wasteland than usual. The sun refuses to shine. The tawny castle walls read drab and gray. Jaehaerys looks ghostly white, as he did in life, the neckline of his gown pulled just low enough to make sure the stitches used to reattach his head — recovered from Blood’s sack — are conspicuous. And in case this vile murder porn is too subtle, a town crier slowly stalks the carriage, no doubt at Otto’s behest. “Behold the works of Rhaenyra … Defiler of the innocent.” What it lacks in solemnity, it also lacks in subtlety.
Meanwhile, Helaena and Queen Mum get to work, staring blankly and tired at the smallfolk gathered along the procession. Except their WHAM campaign hits a literal pothole — where does all the tax money Aegon’s been levying go? — and Helaena struggles to hide her writhing discomfort with the unwashed masses. The unwashed masses, for their part, mistake her reticence for a mother’s mourning. “A curse on Rhaenyra the monstrous,” someone calls from the crowd, so I guess Otto’s plan is working.
This is the pageantry of death for political gain. I pitied Helaena, but I didn’t mourn with her until we were back inside the nursery, watching servants disassemble her dead son’s small canopy bed. The bed disappearing, not to be replaced by a bigger bed for a child who’d outgrown it, achieved poignance in the style of “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” The servants’ work is hampered by Criston blocking the doorway, right where he should have been standing guard the night prior. Later, Alicent will submerge herself in the tub, but there’s no absolution for what she’s done. If you ask me, though, she doesn’t need forgiveness from the gods for her affair; her sin was to raise feverish lunatics like Aegon and Aemond.
To convince Blood to give up Daemon, Larys Strong needn’t pick up his instruments of torture — just display them. Before word of the murder has even reached Rhaenyra, Aegon has bludgeoned her would-be flagbearer to death with an ornate mace. Thanks to Otto’s quick dispatching of ravens, all of Westeros is talking about Rhaenyra’s depraved tactics. Back on Dragonstone, Rhaenyra obstinately demands that ravens be sent kingdomwide to deny the allegations. A raven for a raven? I understand wanting to clear her name, but this isn’t a cold war anymore. Trading ravens isn’t just bad TV; it’s a waste of time when you should be raising an army. Plus, who is going to believe Rhaenyra when even men who sit at her council, like Ser Alfred Broome, think it’s plausible that the grieving Black Queen ordered some hasty little nepoticide?
The consequential showdown isn’t between Rhaenyra and her council; it’s between Rhaenyra and her husband. Daemon, pleased with the chaos he’s brewed, can’t be bothered to conceal a smirk. He wanted a war, so he made a mess to help it along. We can’t know for certain whether Blood and Cheese acted with his explicit approval in killing Jaehaerys or only a wink and a nudge, but Daemon doesn’t apologize to his wife and queen for damaging her reputation or threatening her ability to win new allies. She tells him that she doesn’t trust him, which doesn’t wound Daemon as much as it should because he’s not trustworthy.
In private, they dig at old wounds. Her throne is his “stolen” inheritance; her hero of a father is his “weak” older brother. Honestly, this feels like a conversation they should have had before they got married. Rhaenyra calls Daemon “pathetic,” and he wordlessly leaves the room. Presumably, to prove he’s a big, strong dragon guy and not at all pathetic, he dresses in full armor and mounts his giant red steed. And thank ye Gods. The image of Caraxes flying from the cave, his shadow darkening the sea below, was exactly what the episode needed. Because while the cast puts in some stellar performances, House of the Dragon is at its best when it looks like a million bucks. What’s the point of having HBO money if you don’t blow it all on extreme wide shots of dragons?
Which leaves Rhaenyra home alone with the kiddos. She is the good parent, after all. Even Baela, Daemon’s daughter by Laena, prefers her stepmom to her father. And Rhaenyra relies on her, too. She charges Baela with riding Moondancer — one of two new dragons to share their names with characters from the My Little Pony universe — to surveil King’s Landing. But what does Rhaenyra think about when she plays toy dragons with her own towheaded toddlers in the sunlight? Does she worry that they won’t grow old enough to claim their own dragons? Does she imagine that they will die in her war, or in some future war she can’t foresee?
Rhaenyra’s reluctance frustrates Daemon, who, by temperament, seems to belong with the impetuous Greens, though he has more guile to be sure. For example, it’s hard to imagine him blundering as hard as Aegon does when, unable to find the one royal rat-catcher who aided and abetted Blood, he decides to execute them all, then uses their bodies to decorate the castle’s exterior walls. Their mothers gather to mourn as desperately as Helaena did earlier, as heavily as Rhaenyra did in the season premiere. A son for a son for many more sons…
It’s a misstep by Aegon, but Otto makes his own when he baldly admonishes his grandson. A special Emmy should be invented for Rhys Ifans, who has come up with a thousand different ways to make his face collapse: in disbelief, in shame, in regret, in disapproval. His “tired dad at wit’s end” energy will be familiar to anyone who has ever had or been a dad. Otto wants Aegon to be more Viserys, dignified and judicious. But this is the wisdom of age and Aegon is a kid; Otto would be smart to show more forbearance himself. He all but says out loud that Alicent was wrong when she last spoke to her late husband — that Viserys never intended Aegon to be king.
Yet king Aegon is. It was Otto that plotted hardest to make sure that he would be. And Aegon’s getting more comfortable with the mantle and is more interested in flexing his power. Why listen to moany old grandad when he could just as well replace him? This is not the first time we’ve seen Ser Otto be removed as Hand of the King; ironically, the last time he fell out of favor was for advocating for Aegon’s ascension to the throne over Rhaenyra’s. Licking his wounds, he later tells Alicent he’s bound for Oldtown to reunite with Daeron, but she asks him to visit the Tyrells in High Garden instead. Either journey will keep him away for some time. Without dragons of their own, the Hightowers, for all their Machiavellian might, still travel in coach.
Removing Otto as the Hand could be considered a shrewd move; he had an allegiance to an old way of doing things and a barely concealed contempt for the new king. But what Aegon does next is sure to plunge the kingdom into ruin. Ser Criston Cole — the king’s mother’s useless boyfriend — starts the episode as the Lord Commander who slept through the heir’s assassination and ends it as the Hand of the King. I’ve never seen someone fail so far upward. He earns it, in part, by sending Ser Arryk to Dragonstone to pose as Ser Erryk to kill Rhaenyra — a scheme that seems more like a Punk’d episode than an act of cunning. Arryk knows it’s a suicide mission, but it’s suicide to defy the order, too.
Loyalty and absolution are the big ideas the show is trafficking this week. But the episode does spare a few minutes to catch up on some subplots. On Driftmark, Alyn, the vaguely anonymous sailor who was given a name last week, is now given a vaguely adoring brother named Addam. Watch this space! In King’s Landing, we’re given heartbreaking evidence that Black’s blockade is working. The blacksmith that Aegon agreed to pay in “A Son for a Son” still hasn’t seen any coin from the crown; his daughter is sick and his wife says people are stockpiling what food is still available for sale.
And on Dragonstone, Rhaenyra meets with Mysaria, both women who know something of being abandoned by Daemon. Eventually, the Black Queen gives the White Worm the freedom she was promised for helping Daemon infiltrate the Red Keep. It’s gracious of her, sure. But given the tenuous state of her royal claim, I can’t help feeling Rhaenyra’s spending too much time smoothing things over with her estranged husband’s ex-lover, though, of course, she quickly comes to benefit from her own mercy.
Mysaria is headed to board a boat for Myr when she sees Ser Arryk walking up from the docks. Having just left the queen, attended by Erryk, she immediately understands what’s afoot. Shockingly, if it wasn’t for Mysaria, it actually did seem like Criston’s Parent Trap caliber scheming could have worked. Arryk breezes into Dragonstone like he owns the place. For a few tense minutes, the twins both walk the castle halls under threat of discovery, but Arryk breaches Rhaenyra’s bedchambers. Presumably tipped off by Mysaria, Erryk meets him there to save the queen’s life. (The choreography here is so bizarrely slipshod that I half-expected Ashton to show up and let everyone know about the hidden cameras.)
The brothers draw swords and fight. Much faster than Rhaenyra, who is struggling from stress-induced insomnia, I immediately lost any sense of which Cargyll was which. And what’s there to say, really? The twins attack each other until Erryk gets the upper hand and kills his own kin. “We were born together,” Erryk reminded his brother in battle. Now, he won’t see them parted again. He makes a quick apology to Rhaenyra before falling on his own sword.
As far as duels go, this one was especially tragic and unremarkable. Both sides have proved they can penetrate the other’s castle walls. Then, a son for a son; now, a guard for a guard, a brother for a brother. It’s a draw really. There are no winners. But as a proxy skirmish, the Battle of the Cargylls will perhaps prove telling. Aegon’s champion runs into the fight at his king’s heedless command; Rhaenyra’s soldier might be reluctant, but he cannot refuse. She wins, but both sides are destroyed along the way. “I do not wish to rule over a kingdom of ash and bone,” Rhaenyra said last season, sounding like Viserys, more like the kind of king Otto and Alicent would both prefer to see on the Iron Throne.
But perhaps you can’t win a crown in the same way you would wear one. Rhaenyra might not want to scorch Westeros with dragon fire, but her willingness to do so may be the real test of how much she wants to rule.
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