Season 2, Episode 8
Chekhov warned writers against placing just one gun on the mantel without firing it by the end, let alone a dozen. In its second season finale, “House of the Dragon” calls Chekhov’s bluff 11 times over.
Vhagar, Dreamfyre, Syrax, Vermax, Vermithor, Caraxes, Seasmoke, Silverwing, Moondancer and the newcomers Sheepstealer and Tessarion: These are the living dragons introduced thus far, all available — theoretically, anyway — to take part in hostilities when the episode begins. (Aegon pronounces his dragon, Sunfyre, dead, so that takes him out of the action; more on Sheepstealer and Tessarion later.) Eleven beasts locked and loaded, and not a single one fired when the closing credits roll.
True, Vhagar torches a town off-camera at Aemond’s command, a horrific crime that shocks both the Black and Green camps. Still, the entire episode — the entire season — builds to a conflagration that never arrives. Even the abundance of dragons soaring together in the opening credits’ tapestry feels like a bait and switch.
That final cut to black knocked the wind out of my sails. Unfortunately, the episode is so good at building tension and anticipation for the three-front war on the horizon that it becomes a victim of its own success when the action doesn’t arrive.
In the Narrow Sea, Ser Tyland Lannister, the Greens’ master of ships, forges an unlikely alliance with a bawdy pirate queen, Lohar (Abigail Thorn), after beating her in mud wrestling. (Her demand that he impregnate her apparently many wives is either a caveat or a bonus, depending on your perspective.)
Their combined fleets will be arrayed against that of Lord Corlys, with his son and first mate, Alyn, by his side. But only reluctantly: The younger man angrily rejects his father’s overtures as too little, too late. Alyn grew up poor and hungry, watching Corlys and his heir, Laenor, strut around in their finery. Since Laenor is gone, now Corlys wants Alyn for a son? The sailor gives the offer a hard pass.
The bulk of the fighting on land looks as though it will take place in the hotly contested Riverlands. The rogue prince Daemon has massed the region’s armies under Rhaenyra’s banner — yes, Rhaenyra’s, not his own. He finally comes around to making a full-throated endorsement of his niece-wife’s claim to the Iron Throne after his witchy new friend, Alys, guides him to a weirwood tree to induce a vision. (Blink and you’ll miss one of the mystical Children of the Forest scampering away as he approaches)
In his vision, Daemon sees sights both familiar from “Game of Thrones” (Daenerys Targaryen and her hatchlings, the Night King and his undead army) and new (Rhaenyra on the Iron Throne, a telepathic message from Queen Helaena, who tells him they’re all just players in a larger story). This convinces him at last that the Song of Ice and Fire of which his wife and his brother Viserys once spoke is true. Chastened, and as close to apologetic as Daemon gets, he kneels at his wife’s feet when she surprises him at Harrenhal, declaring her at last to be the one true queen of Westeros. Everybody cheers.
Of course, no one in that army has seen dragon combat up close yet. Enduring the charnel house that was the Battle of Rook’s Rest has shaken the faith and courage of Ser Criston Cole, commander of the Green army, which is marching south to take on Daemon. (A closing montage shows Stark, Lannister and Hightower forces headed there as well. The Hightower army is accompanied by a dragon we haven’t seen before; based on the source book by George R.R. Martin, that would be Tessarion and his rider, Prince Daeron Targaryen, the youngest son of Viserys and Alicent.)
Confronted by Ser Gwayne Hightower about his illicit relationship with Gwayne’s sister, Alicent, the sullied Kingsguard gives a speech that’s more Rustin Cohle than Criston Cole. “The dragons dance, and men are like dust under their feet,” he says, eyes downcast. “And all our fine thoughts, all our endeavors are as nothing. We march now toward our annihilation. To die will be a kind of relief, don’t you think?”
But the move that could well end the war is one that players on both sides hope to make as bloodlessly as possible. Mirroring Rhaenyra’s surprise visit to King’s Landing in Episode 3 to negotiate peace with her old friend Alicent, the Green Queen returns the favor, arriving unexpectedly at Dragonstone to seek an audience with her Black counterpart.
Rhaenyra’s reception of her guest is chilly at first, a smorgasbord of sneering and sarcasm. Alicent had her chance, and she rejected it. Thousands are now dead as a result. So what if she now realizes she made a terrible mistake? Rhaenyra is not about to offer “absolution.”
But Alicent isn’t there for forgiveness — she is there to surrender. She wipes the sardonic smile off Rhaenyra’s face by revealing the battle plans of her increasingly out-of-control son, Prince-Regent Aemond. When he takes off on Vhagar to back up Cole in the Riverlands in a few days, King’s Landing will be undefended. If Rhaenyra arrives in force, Alicent will have her own forces throw down their swords and throw open the gates, ending the war.
But Rhaenyra knows that it wouldn’t suffice for Aegon Targaryen to bend the knee — assuming his mother could convince him to do so, as Alicent seems to believe she could. Rhaenyra needs his head on a platter. It’s the only way to put an end to his competing claim definitively, and to all the power amassed behind it. Alicent knows that Rhaenyra is right; her son’s death is the final condition Rhaenyra forces her to choke down in order to forge the surrender agreement. “A son for a son,” the Black Queen snaps, Daemon’s words sounding ugly and artificial in her voice.
And so Aegon’s ultimate betrayal comes at the hands of not his brother, but his mother. Lucky for him, though, he gets out of King’s Landing just in time. As we learn in that closing montage, his protector, Larys the Clubfoot, spirits him away before either Aemond or Rhaenyra can kill him. (It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Larys is behind Otto Hightower’s mysterious incarceration; what better way to ensure this kind of chaos than to take perhaps the one man who could put an end to it off the board?)
But violence, and the proximity to it, changes people. Although the lack of climactic action was a letdown — and an engraved invitation to expect a ton of dragon combat next season — this is not to say that the dragons did nothing. They change people by virtue of their very existence as living, breathing, flying, fire-breathing existential threats.
Look at Criston and Gwayne, two battle-tested knights completely staggered by the destructive power they have witnessed and may soon face again. Look at Aemond, a victim turned bully, using Vhagar to lash out at innocent bystanders by the thousands when he finds his will thwarted.
On Dragonstone, Jacaerys’s self-image continues to crumble because, in his eyes, the new dragon riders make his own bond with a dragon less special. One of those new dragon riders, Ulf, has already undergone an unpleasant personality transformation. This friendly drunk is now a mean one, arrogant and insolent and borderline hostile to the rest of the Black dragon pilots, even Rhaenyra. You can almost hear his newfound power rushing to his head.
And off in the Vale, Rhaena Targaryen nearly dies of thirst and exposure as she chases down the region’s wild dragon, an ugly beast that the source book tells us will be named Sheepstealer. For her, mastering a dragon is worth potentially losing her life.
A parting thought as the forces gather
During her final cannonball run toward King’s Landing in “Game of Thrones,” Daenerys spoke of “breaking the wheel” — rather than control the system of servitude and suffering that governs the world, she wants to smash it to pieces. Her willingness to stand atop a mountain of corpses to do so spelled her undoing.
It is remarkable that, of all the characters in “House of the Dragon,” it is Alicent who now wants off that wheel entirely. She spent her whole life in service of goals that weren’t even hers and has nothing to show for it; she will go down in history as a grasper who foolishly seized power only to lose it; she will sacrifice the life of her oldest child; she will live the rest of her life in obscurity.
But for her, it is the price of peace, for the realm and for herself — not everyone touched by the horror of the dragons is changed for the worse. In this context, her last-second request that Rhaenyra leave it all behind and leave with her and Helaena was all the more gut-wrenching: You can virtually see Alicent building up the courage to ask, and Rhaenyra anticipating that she will, all conversation long. She doesn’t ask with much evident passion, and Rhaenyra bats it aside kindly but summarily, bound as she is by the Song of Ice and Fire to stay and rule the Seven Kingdoms.
There’s a sense that a crucial opportunity has been lost. More than any other characters, Alicent and Rhaenyra understand why this war, in which each has had a hand in starting, is wrong and must end. For all their faults, their moral conviction binds them as tightly as duty or honor or even love. Two such women ought to be extended the grace to ride off into the sunset to be free, together. But what ought to be and what is are, sadly, as different as Black and Green.
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