David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, game of thrones The showrunner who transformed George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy saga from a collection of novels into a global TV phenomenon House of the DragonThey are, new Instead, it’s a blockbuster film adaptation of a genre classic.
But if they Throne I’m curious to know what Benioff and Weiss think about the second episode of the prequel series. “The theme is like an eighth-grade book report,” Benioff once said. Throne season. But, House of the Dragon It oozes from nearly every pixel of this latest production.
As the Dance of Dragons begins in earnest, families are torn apart and both the black and green sides of this war suffer the aftermath. This hour of television primarily offers a moment of respite from the horror that ended last week’s episode, but it’s punctuated by three major family squabbles between Queen Rhaenyra and her husband and uncle Daemon, King Aegon and his grandfather Otto Hightower, and the King’s guard knights and brothers Eric and Arik Cargill.
This episode picks up immediately after the shocking climax of “A Son for a Son.” There’s no more time jump, now that the war is on. The Red Keep is in chaos, the City Watch is on the lookout for an assassin with a child’s head in a bag, and the King is enraged as he destroys his father’s elaborate model of ancient Valyria – a true symbol of the dragon dynasty’s decline.
“This is war! I declare war!” Aegon cried, as his half-sister Rhaenyra “sat on a rock across the bay, [him]However, Rhaenyra would have no such affair when she learned that the infant Jaehaerys had been murdered, and that Helena had lost a son shortly after Rhaenyra herself had lost a child.
Instead, Rhaenyra and Daemon have a heated argument that causes a rift in their relationship, which, while admittedly complicated, had been largely loving up until now. “I can’t trust you, Daemon. I’ve never fully trusted you, no matter how much I want to or will to,” Rhaenyra says.
When Daemon approaches his wife in a fit of rage and reaches for her face, Rhaenyra flinches, physically demonstrating this lack of trust. Though not directly addressed in this episode, Daemon strangles Rhaenyra in a similar situation at the end of season 1, and Rhaenyra remembers that assault, even if it doesn’t happen again.
But it wasn’t Rhaenyra’s lack of trust that hurt Daemon the most in this exchange. Her surprised, whispered words, “You are pathetic,” sting even more for the self-proclaimed warrior of legend. After this insult, Daemon walked away without another word, flying off to parts unknown in Calaxes. “He should follow his own path,” Rhaenyra said, one that did not necessarily intertwine with her own.
Across Blackwater Bay, another royal couple is also going their separate ways. While Aegon remains at the Red Keep, crying privately in his chambers, Helena is brought out in public as part of the funeral procession for the fallen heir. Helena crumbles under the pressure, but her husband makes no attempt to comfort her. Rather, when the two meet on the castle steps, one going up, one going down, Aegon walks past without saying a word to his wife.
Clearly, Aegon has grander plans in mind, such as removing his grandfather from his position as king’s adviser and replacing the political schemer with a more martial and steely fist.
“The king is my grandson, and my grandson is a fool,” Otto exclaims, emphasizing the familial bond inherent in this relationship. But Otto’s flowery speech (the SAT vocabulary he uses in this scene includes deprivations, feckless, impetuousness, trifling, forbearance, seudiciousness, insolent, etc.) only strengthens Aegon’s resolve. “You are gone,” the king commands, and Otto is already on his way out.
(When Viserys was king in season 1, Otto was stripped of his title as Hand of the King, at which point his departure from King’s Landing left Alicent alone with no nearby allies and forced to grow as a politician. This time around, that dynamic could be reversed; Alicent may have surface allies at court but little political power. If her fears in “A Son for a Son” that Aegon and Aemond would no longer listen to her were valid, then those fears will be valid. It will be important to see whether her relationship with Christopher expands from the bedroom to the Small Council chambers.)
More families are torn apart by Aegon’s new henchman, Criston Cole, who says at the beginning of the episode that Aegon didn’t protect Helena and the twins because of “Aved.” (Yeah, but… Whose Christon tells Alicent that his mistakes are unforgivable, but that he can at least try. The Kingsguard commander goes on to quip Arik Kargil that he harbors traitorous sympathies for Erik, his twin brother who sided with Rhaenyra at the end of season one.
The Kingsguard are like a family, Criston says, a “sacred trust,” especially since its members swear not to have children. And in the case of House Cargill, that kinship is literal: They form “one soul in two bodies,” Arick laments. But to protect his honor and appease his commander, Arick agrees to sneak into Dragonstone posing as his brother and attempt to assassinate Rhaenyra in her bed.
Of course, Eric gets in the way. As an action scene, the Cargill duel isn’t particularly thrilling TV — as a Westeros one-on-one sword fight, it pales in comparison to, say, Brienne and the Hound’s fierce battles or Oberyn and the Mountain’s — and the relatively obscure Cargill twins don’t get the same personal drama as some of the other fights with popular characters.
But as a thematic summary of the episode’s message, the Cargill duel is perfectly placed. “You drove us apart, but I still love you, brother,” one twin says to the other as they clash swords. They’re so similar that onlookers can’t tell which warrior is on the black side and which is on the green side; they even pronounce their names the same. And they both end up dead by episode’s end, as Rhaenyra looks on in horror.
The second focus of the episode is the importance of the common folk, a key element of world-building that wasn’t present in Season 1. The common folk play a key role in Otto’s plan to respond to Jaehaerys’ death: Otto organizes a public funeral as a propaganda campaign, loudly blaming Rhaenyra for the prince’s death, and displaying Jaehaerys’ corpse (with his head, retrieved from a City Watch assassin, crudely sewn to his neck) along with his grieving mother and grandmother.
The Cargills fit the bill here to some extent, as they come from a lesser known family, despite being knighted and promoted to the King’s Guard, and the same goes for Christon Cole, the son of a butler who is not only a commander of the King’s Guard but also a minion to the King.
But Aegon isn’t so kind to all of the lower-class men in his employ. Unable to find out who aided and abetted his son’s murder, he orders the hanging of all of the ratcatchers in the Red Keep, which leads to the cries of the ratcatchers’ wives and children echoing through the castle windows, further fuelling an argument between Otto and the king. Hugh the blacksmith, who received a promise of payment from Aegon in the season premiere (but never received it), is struggling with his sick daughter as Velaryon’s blockade causes food prices to skyrocket in the capital.
This dichotomy represents the hopes and dangers of royal warfare for the masses living in the realm: on the one hand, smallfolk can rise to power with the right opportunity, luck, and fortitude; on the other, they can be slaughtered en masse at a whim (and it doesn’t take the literal firepower of a dragon to do the killing).
Aemond’s mature brothel-mate’s warning to the dragon-riding prince is far too explicit: “Remember, when the Prince loses his temper, it’s usually someone else who suffers – a commoner like me.”
The contrast stretches all the way back across the Blackwater, where Arryn, the Hal crewman we met last week who saved Corliss from death at sea, greets his brother Adam, excited by the possibility. “In serving the Serpent you make a fortune,” Adam advises his brother, calling it “another opportunity to distinguish yourself and remind yourself of your worth.” Arryn seems reluctant to get embroiled in the highborn and their adventurous wars, yet Adam can’t help but gaze in wonder at Béla’s dragon, Moondancer, circling overhead.
Driftmark is apparently the only place in the region where families haven’t been torn apart. Adam and Arin may disagree about their views on the war, but at least they hug and eat together. Béla and Rayna aren’t bothering the Black Team. And Corliss and Rhaenys cuddle in bed, which is quite different from all the other intimate moments in the episode. Even the final scene, depicting an alternative sexual encounter between Alicent and Cryston, begins with violence as foreplay.
Because civil war is not only ripping apart House Targaryen as a whole, it’s also splintering the inner groups that make up the royal family as a whole, tearing apart family relationships across the halls of power. If this is the show’s thematic thrust, then Aegon’s declaration of how his kin should be treated functions as the show’s mission statement: “Fuck dignity. I want revenge.”
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