Season 3, Episode 2
“What have you done? Jace. Jace! What have you done? How could you? How could you do this to me? Answer me!”
Like the bereaved King David crying “O Absalom, my son!” repeatedly in his despair, Queen Rhaenyra is facing a grief so total that her brain short-circuits and runs on a loop. As she looks at the corpse of her son and heir, Jacaerys, all she can do is upbraid him over and over, like the disappointed parent she is. But disappointment doesn’t come near to what she’s feeling. Devastation is more like it.
Rhaenyra is bedridden with sorrow when her husband, Prince Daemon, returns from the Riverlands after hearing the news. To him, she spells out the grim absurdity of her situation: “The boys who clung to me, who hid their little faces in my skirts, dead, so that I may sit upon a throne of swords?” She has lost two sons, Luke and Jace, to her cause. To fight on seems pointless.
“Will you let them die in vain?” Daemon responds.
The prince reminds her, too, of the Song of Ice and Fire, the prophecy he glimpsed firsthand thanks to the witchcraft of Black Alys Rivers and the cursed halls of Harrenhal. With that the matter is settled. For the deaths of Jace and Luke to mean anything, for the realm and humanity to survive, Rhaenyra must sit the Iron Throne.
Getting there will still take some doing. Rhaenyra’s Blacks triumphed at sea over the Greens and their allies in the Battle of the Gullet, but they can take no joy in it. You can hear it in Baela’s zoned-out voice when she announces that the battle has been won. Jace is gone and with him his dragon. Diligent search efforts by Baela and her uncles Alyn and Addam of Hull help locate Lord Corlys; he is alive, but his castle has been reduced to ash by the Triarchy’s pirates. They now roam the lands, running amok.
“If this be victory,” Corlys says to his reunited family as they survey the wreckage, “I hope I never see another.”
The man known as the Sea Snake may have been located, but the dragon called Sheepstealer, ridden secretly into battle by Corlys’s granddaughter Rhaena, to disastrous consequences, is still on the loose. Rhaenyra blames the dragon and its unknown rider for Jace’s death. Although Daemon notes that no one has ever been known to tame a wild dragon, he and his wife assume the Greens are responsible.
Daemon agrees to hunt not only for Sheepstealer and whoever commands it but also for his nephew Aemond and his gargantuan dragon, Vhagar. I suspect Daemon will dislike what he finds at the end of both hunts, albeit for very different reasons. Any battle with Aemond and Vhagar will come down to experience versus raw power, while any encounter with Sheepstealer will put Daemon face to face with his own daughter. It may also put him at odds with Lady Jeyne Arryn (Amanda Collin), the steely ruler of the Vale, who grants Rhaena asylum in exchange for protection by her dragon.
Throughout this episode, the formerly rogue prince demonstrates his loyalty to his queen. He departs the war in the Riverlands at her command. He refuses even to entertain Alys’s request that Rhaenyra grant her control of Harrenhal, finding it quite beneath a queen to grant a castle to a commoner. He comforts Rhaenyra in her grief and rallies her to rise again. He browbeats the new dragonriders for failing to follow her orders. He spars with Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), his former lover and Rhaenyra’s recent one, over which of them has the queen’s ear.
But he has never been forced to choose between his wife and his daughter before. If and when he finds Rhaena, will he take her head, as Rhaenyra demands — or will he commit treason against the woman he loves, in whose hands he believes lies the destiny of the world?
For now, another mission takes precedence. With Ulf and Hugh flanking them on their dragons, Daemon and Rhaenyra soar into the Red Keep, the palace of Westeros’s ruling family. Despite the skepticism of her cowardly small council, the Black Queen was right to trust in her Green friend. Alicent and her daughter, Queen Helaena, successfully stand down almost all of their defenses, including the City Watch and the grapnel teams on the parapets of the city.
The guards within the Red Keep provide some resistance, having been tipped off to Alicent’s maneuvering. But they are no match for Daemon’s sword or for his loyalists among the city’s police force, still known as the Gold Cloaks for the showy raiments Daemon granted them 20 years earlier.
Before long, nothing stands between Rhaenyra and the Iron Throne except the surrender and execution of her rival claimant, Aegon. That vicious little creep, however, is far away. He escapes an ambush by Triarchy pirates with his minder, Larys Strong, in tow, heading for a garrison established by the king’s hand, Ser Criston Cole.
Garrisons, however, do not fare well in this episode. Finally taking his mother’s advice — and thus making Rhaenyra’s seizure of King’s Landing possible — Aemond flies off on Vhagar to confront Prince Daemon at Harrenhal. They’re too late to do that, but they’ve got plenty of time to rally the spirits of Ser Criston and his forces, then casually roast the entire contingent Daemon left behind. Aemond slays by hand poor old Ser Symon Strong (Simon Russell Beale), the stronghold’s castellan, along with his two sons. You can trust Targaryens no more than frogs can trust scorpions.
But the wound the one-eyed prince incurs in the fracas brings him down … at the feet of none other than Black Alys, to whom he appeals for help. With his long blonde hair hanging from his helmet and his sapphire eye glowing blue, I’ve got a feeling he’ll make it through, if only because you can’t keep a good villain down. And the prospect of a relationship between him and Alys, another certified weirdo, really fires the imagination.
With the king and the prince regent gone, other heads must roll in King’s Landing in order to establish Queen Rhaenyra’s primacy. One victim practically serves himself up on a platter. Lord Jasper Wylde (Paul Kennedy), the small council’s master of laws, takes advantage of the panicked atmosphere in the castle ahead of Rhaenyra’s arrival and tries to rape Alicent. He is stopped at the last moment by Grandmaester Orwyle (Kurt Egyiawan) and arrested, making him ripe for the chopping block.
But the biggest rat Daemon catches comes as a surprise. Lord Larys has secretly kept Otto Hightower prisoner deep in the castle’s darkest dungeon, leaving him behind as a “gift” to the capital city’s new rulers. Arguably no man bears more responsibility for the civil war tearing apart the Targaryens and the realm.
Rhaenyra and Daemon work as a team throughout all of this. Even as they enter the throne room, they briefly hold hands like the old friends and confidantes they are; Rhaenyra then draws her sword to help Daemon fight the household guard before the City Watch saves the day.
But when it comes to Otto’s execution, Daemon encourages Rhaenyra to act on her own. “In this moment you will become queen,” he tells her.
Over Otto’s protest, Rhaenyra swings the executioner’s sword herself. It takes two horrible strokes to sever his head from his body. Then Daemon kills Lord Jasper, and Rhaenyra ascends to the throne, leaving a literal trail of blood behind her.
Rhaenyra faces one more surprise before this powerful, unsparing episode is over. Despite their plans, Alicent, Helaena, and Helaena’s young daughter, Jaehaera, fail to escape King’s Landing before the fall. They are hauled into the throne room, where Alicent sees the head of her father, Otto, lying on the floor in front of the throne.
Alicent’s eyes communicate shock but not surprise. The death of her father, like the deaths of so many others from the Gullet to the Riverlands, is indeed shocking. But when it comes to war, horrors are as predictable as the sunrise over the Gullet.
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