Season 2, Episode 2
Not even Rhaenyra Targaryen can imagine what she’s seeing.
This lady has flown via the sky on the again of a dragon. She has seen lords kneel at her toes, solely to rise in opposition to her years later. She has misplaced a toddler in her combat for the Iron Throne and recoiled to be taught that one other was killed in her baby’s identify. However watching Erryk and Arryk Cargyll (Elliott and Luke Tittensor), two equivalent twin knights, locked in a battle to the loss of life in her personal bed room, with the result to determine whether or not she lives or dies? You possibly can see it on the face of the actor Emma D’Arcy: Not even in Rhaenyra’s wildest desires did she see this one coming.
This capability to shock — not within the gross-out sense, though that is usually the case as properly, however moderately within the sense of a sudden, extreme shock — is the best energy “Home of the Dragon” possesses. Civil wars are sometimes stated to be battles of brother in opposition to brother; fantasy could make the metaphorical literal. What higher option to illustrate the mindless brutality of warfare than by having two males who look and sound precisely alike, who love one another, who say they’re one soul in two our bodies, perish in a brutal murder-suicide that achieves precisely nothing?
Your complete affair is a sordid one, one thing Ser Arryk by no means ought to have been requested by Ser Criston, his lord commander, to hold out. Certainly, Criston did so solely as a maladaptive method of venting his sexual frustrations throughout a second when his on-again-off-again relationship with Queen Alicent was dialed to off-again. By episode’s finish they’re again collectively and having tough intercourse — an altogether more healthy method of channeling these frustrations, if nonetheless an ill-advised coupling general.
Regardless of the clandestine nature of their relationship, Alicent and Criston are nonetheless faring higher romantically than Rhaenyra and Daemon. When the Black Queen learns that the younger Prince Jaehaerys was murdered and beheaded in his mattress, she is outraged that anybody may assume she had something to do with it. She is even angrier when she finds out that she did have one thing to do with it, regardless of herself: It was Daemon who, in a reckless try and make good on her request for vengeance in opposition to Prince Aemond, claimed one other baby’s life as an alternative.
You possibly can’t belief somebody like that, Rhaenyra determines — precisely. She dismisses him as “pathetic”; he dismisses himself from her firm.
Again in King’s Touchdown, Daemon’s deeds proceed to pay ugly dividends. Each of the lads concerned within the homicide of Jaehaerys are captured and killed, together with a rating of harmless males whose solely crime was to function palace rat catchers alongside one of many assassins. When his grandfather Otto upbraids him for this public-relations blunder, King Aegon — who for all his faults is genuinely devastated by the loss of life of his younger son — fires him because the king’s hand and replaces him with Ser Criston — a person of motion in contrast with the scheming however restrained Otto but additionally essentially the most tightly wound man in Westeros. There are literal dragons who would make higher fingers.
Not that Otto’s recommendation is half as sound as he thinks it’s. His grand plan for capitalizing on Jaehaerys’s loss of life was to stitch the poor child’s head again on his physique and parade him via the streets for all to see. However the baby’s corpse wasn’t alone: Jaehaerys’s mom, Helaena, and grandmother, Alicent, rode on a wagon behind him, just like the queens of some grim Rose Bowl Parade.
Otto was undoubtedly proper that this public show of each atrocity and grief would assist persuade the commoners that Rhaenyra is a monster. However by no means as soon as did he cease to contemplate the delicate state of his granddaughter Helaena. Already traumatized by her nonconsensual function in Jaehaerys’s homicide, she needed to watch him be jostled and grabbed at like a cartload of turnips for the equal of a marketing campaign advert. Your complete sequence performed out like a nightmarish precursor to Queen Cersei’s stroll of disgrace centuries later, as seen in “Recreation of Thrones.”
Of all of the individuals on Staff Inexperienced to echo Rhaenyra’s remorse that it has all come to this, it’s Prince Aemond who does so — Aemond One-Eye, whose manslaughter-by-dragon of Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys kicked off the hostilities in earnest. Cradled within the arms of the prostitute who took his virginity years earlier (Michelle Bonnard), he brags about Daemon’s try and have him whacked — “I’m proud that he considers me such a foe” — however he’s weighed down by his personal errors.
“I do remorse that enterprise with Luke,” he says, a faraway look in his eye. “I misplaced my mood that day. I’m sorry for it.” A day late and a greenback quick to make sure, but it surely’s frankly refreshing to listen to anybody with the final identify Targaryen take possession of his personal actions for as soon as. I truly imagine he’s telling the reality.
However what is alleged subsequent is extra essential. “When princes lose their mood, it’s usually others who are suffering,” says the lady in whose arms Aemond murmurs these regrets. “Small people,” she says, “like me.” Does this get via to the one-eyed royal?
The small people get a few extra turns within the highlight this episode, a comparatively rarity for a franchise centered on the aristocracy. Within the lands of Home Velaryon, the sailor Alyn meets up together with his brother Addam (Clinton Liberty), one other seafarer with a surprisingly aristocratic imply regardless of his humble upbringing. It quickly turns into clear that each males’s relationships with their lord, Corlys the Sea Snake, is extra difficult than easy service; a right away lower to intimate pillow speak between Corlys and his spouse, Rhaenys, appears pointed in that regard. Maybe these specific people will not be fairly as small as they seem.
What to make of Hugh the blacksmith (Kieran Bew), then? This prematurely snowy-haired laborer first confirmed as much as petition the king for money up entrance on all of the weapons he and his colleagues have been hammering out for the crown. This episode, we observe him dwelling, the place he has a sick daughter and a spouse who rightfully complains that the promised cash has not but come via.
Are Hugh’s scenes simply native shade, or will he play a task within the struggle to return? Provided that Otto Hightower spent a whole monologue yelling at Aegon for ignoring the plight of the individuals, we must always in all probability keep away from doing the identical.
