Season 2, Episode 3:
“We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think,” George R.R. Martin wrote in his short 1996 essay “On Fantasy.” “To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang.” By that standard, this week’s episode of “House of the Dragon,” a series based on Martin’s book “Fire and Blood,” is spicy fantasy indeed.
I don’t just mean the sex and nudity, though what there was of both blew my hair back on my head. For Martin, fantasy is about more than ribaldry. Describing it as a genre of “silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli,” he goes on to write of how its very largeness, the unbounded scope of its imagination, “speaks to something deep within us.” This episode certainly spoke to something deep within this critic.
Crumbling gothic castles and grotesque charnel-house battlefields, nightmares of murder and desperate pleas for peace, breakneck dragon chases and it-was-all-a-big-misunderstandings — this week offered the kind of maximalist storytelling that felt both over-the-top and vital. (Indeed it’s hard to have great TV without at least a smidgen of the outlandish.) From a story perspective, the episode’s biggest moment arrived right near the end. The brewing war between the Blacks and the Greens over the Iron Throne comes down to the wishes of one dead man, King Viserys. For years, he proclaimed his daughter, Rhaenyra, to be his heir to all and sundry. But on the night it most counted, the night of his death, he told his wife, Queen Alicent, that his eldest son, Aegon, must be the one to unite the realm — “The Prince That Was Promised,” as Viserys called the callow lad.
Or so it seemed to Alicent. We in the audience knew that when he mentioned the name Aegon, he was referring to his prophetic ancestor, Aegon the Conqueror, and to Aegon’s vision of an apocalyptic battle against the darkness, as depicted in the final season of “Game of Thrones.”
Did Alicent truly believe that Viserys was talking about their son? Or was that merely what she wished to believe? (As important, should a drama hinge its central conflict on the kind of verbal mix-up better suited to a sitcom? Answering that is, at this advanced stage, perhaps beyond the scope of this recap.)
The daring stealth mission in which Rhaenyra sneaks back into King’s Landing (with Mysaria’s help) to force a one-on-one meeting with her frenemy of frenemies clears all this up. Alicent really believes Viserys wanted Aegon. For her part, Rhaenyra really believes Alicent really believes it. But once the dowager queen mentions the Conqueror’s “Song of Ice and Fire,” Rhaenyra figures out what went wrong and offers a clarification … which Alicent refuses to heed, although she seems to knows in her heart that it is true.
So there you have it: The war will proceed because Team Green’s captain can’t handle the truth. Alicent’s refusal to change course undoes not only Rhaenyra’s peacekeeping efforts — and Princess Rhaenys’s before that — but also her own. The fan discourse about this ought to be fun, according to certain definitions of “fun,” anyway.
More than clearing up the wacky mix-up at the heart of it all, though, the scene’s primary value is in reuniting the actors Olivia Cooke and Emma D’Arcy. Their chemistry is as natural and compelling as that of any two performers on television. Their characters’ energies feel as entangled as the dueling dragons in the show’s Season 2 logo; watching them tear and pull at each other leads to results just as combustible. Quibble if you will with Rhaenyra’s rashness in seeking an unprotected audience with the Queen in King’s Landing. But adding this scene, which isn’t in the book, made for a better show.
While Rhaenyra and Alicent strive to keep the peace, though, the men surrounding them fight for the opposite. Rhaenyra’s Black Council, made up primarily of minor lords scared to lose what little power they have, pushes for an attack right away. Her estranged husband, Daemon, flies straight for the moldering ruins of Harrenhal, key to the important Riverlands region. He is greeted by a pragmatic castellan, Sir Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale), who hands the castle over to him without a fight, and a mysterious servant, Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin), who tells him that Harrenhal is the place where he will die. You win some, you lose some, I guess.
The Riverlands wind up on the radar of Blacks and Greens alike after a local feud between Houses Blackwood and Bracken, the Hatfields and McCoys of Westeros, who used the Targaryen dispute as a pretext to turn a simple border disagreement into a Lost Generation blood bath. King Aegon, whose advisers correctly see him as a thickheaded lightweight, is ready to rush into the fray himself before he is cowed by his younger brother Aemond.
The one-eyed prince responds to his brother and liege’s taunting in a bustling brothel by standing up buck naked and walking by as though completely unbothered. The young man seems to vibrate on a different frequency than his family does; like an evil Jane Eyre, he has a touch of the unearthly about him, conveyed skillfully by the actor Ewan Mitchell. As Aegon, Tom Glynn-Carney deftly parries Mitchell’s sang-froid with forced jokes and flop sweat. Their dynamic is as interesting and flammable in its own way as Rhaenyra and Alicent’s.
Will a similar rivalry arise between Ser Criston Cole, the increasingly headstrong hand of the king and head of Aegon’s army, and Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox), the brother Alicent sends to babysit her lord commander? It’s hard to say. Initially, it seems that Gwayne rightfully regards Criston as a volatile meat head, while Criston rightfully regards Gwayne as a spoiled summer knight. But Cole’s rescue of the Hightower lordling and his men from a fiery end at the hands of Baela Targaryen and her dragon, Moondancer, may have fixed things in Cole’s favor.
Green or Black, it’s as Princess Rhaenys says early in the episode: The headstrong men seem to have taken the reins from the two queens. Her own lord husband, Corlys, leaves her stammering alone in the shipyard after a conversation cleverly staged with the couple separated by a crossbeam. Aegon, who can’t bring himself to say a word to his bereaved sister-wife Helaena after the murder of their son, leaves her to grieve in her own peculiar way with their mother, Alicent.
Daemon abandons Rhaenyra for Harrenhal, remaining incommunicado even as he dreams of her as a girl (a returning and much welcome Milly Alcock), stitching Helaena and Aegon’s son’s head back onto his body. It is gratifying to see that in his dreams, at least, Daemon is horrified by the crime he commissioned. But with Alicent and Rhaenyra’s fateful conversation concluding as it does, any dreams of repentance and conciliation appear about to be dashed.
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