House of the Dragon (TV Program)

Not everyone gets to have a dragon. But maybe more people get to have dragons than everyone thought?Season 2, Episode 7: ‘The Red Sowing’Sometimes, in politics, a bold gamble in unprecedented times pays off. This is as true for the world of Westeros as it is for our own. The woman who wants to rule the realm staked it all on a long-odds play, and her odds came in.For several episodes, Queen Rhaenyra has been down one dragon. The formidable beast Meleys and her equally impressive rider, Princess Rhaenys, are dead. Prince Daemon’s war-hardened “Blood Wyrm,” Caraxes, is mired in his master’s endless quest to subdue the Riverlands. None of the mounts available to Team Black can possibly match Prince-Regent Aemond and his colossal creature, Vhagar, in battle, even when combined.On the advice of her counselor (with benefits?) Mysaria, Rhaenyra expands her search for potential dragon riders to the unrecognized descendants of her sprawling royal family — those born as commoners, outside of marriage. In a face-to-face meeting with the young shipwright Addam of Hull, revealed to be the new rider of the dragon Seasmoke, Rhaenyra has already learned that even those not of fully noble birth can ride a dragon. She doesn’t know that Addam is the son of Lord Corlys Velaryon, whose house has frequently intermarried with the Targaryens — and neither Addam nor Corlys tells her so — but since the young man’s mother was a commoner regardless, the point stands.When word of the search gets to King’s Landing through the usual back channels, Ulf and Hugh, two of the commoners we’ve been following all season, take the fateful trip to Dragonstone to test their mettle against monsters widely considered more god than animal. There, they learn the hard way that gambling is easier when you’re betting with someone else’s money.True, Rhaenyra talks about needing dragon riders to avoid bloodshed, not cause it. And she pushes back against her son Prince Jacaerys’s furious tirade against elevating lowborn part-Targaryen “mongrels” to the level of dragon rider. (In fairness to Jace, his shame about his own parentage, and his fear of becoming just another Targaryen-blooded bastard with a dragon and thus no more a claim to the throne than any other, play as much of a role as snobbery does here.)What Rhaenyra does not do is ask her potential dragon riders to proceed onto the barbecue grill — I’m sorry, the viewing platform — beneath Dragonstone to approach the mighty dragon Vermithor one at time. So what if the dragon keepers have gone on strike in protest of this “blasphemous” move? Surely the Black Queen is aware of best practices when it comes to large groups and hungry fire-breathing dinosaurs by this point in her life. I would call this a flaw in the writing, but the reckless disregard of even “good” Targaryens like Rhaenyra and Rhaenys for civilians caught in the crossfire of their boldness has been a through line of the series.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Rhaenyra sends a gift to the small folk. There may be some strings attached.Season 2, Episode 6The hug lasts 45 seconds before they kiss. Yes, I counted. In the terms of that episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where Larry hugs Auntie Rae for a little too long, it’s nine “five Mississippi”s. And like any long, drawn-out take on this densely packed show, it stops everything in its tracks.For three quarters of a minute, we watch empathy, respect, gratitude, warmth, heat, curiosity, desire and, finally, passion all play out in the silent embrace between Queen Rhaenyra and her friend and counselor Mysaria. For the first time in their lives, each of these two very different people has found somebody she sees as an equal, and who sees her as an equal in turn, and the thought quickly goes from comforting to intoxicating. Dragons are flying, men are burning, reigns are teetering, but for as long as that embrace lasts, the world of “House of the Dragon” exists between these two women’s arms.But this week’s episode of “Dragon” specialized in all kinds of people getting the things they want and need — or trying to, anyway — in all kinds of ways. Rhaenyra and Mysaria’s interrupted clinch was just one example.In King’s Landing, the acting regent prince, Aemond, is throwing his weight around. He boots his mother from his small council, and rejects Lord Larys Strong for the position of hand in favor of his cunning but loyal grandfather, Otto Hightower. He then sends Ser Criston — the man who knows he tried to murder his brother, King Aegon — off to root Daemon out of the hotly contested Riverlands, with his uncle Ser Gwayne Hightower in tow. The two men look as if they still haven’t washed off all the ash from their previous encounter with a hostile dragon, and this time Aemond is playing coy about when, or even if, he’ll fly out to protect them.Aemond saves his harshest cruelties for his big brother the king, whom he torments in his sickbed, the threat of murder hanging thick in the air. “I remember nothing,” the barely conscious Aegon repeatedly croaks, clearly scared for his life. Fortunately for Aegon, though, someone else recognizes what’s going on: the Clubfoot, Larys Strong.In his most emotionally unguarded moment to date, the cagey Master of Whisperers lays bare the pain and humiliation of a lifetime of being looked down upon because of his physical deformity and disability. This, he says with a tear falling from his eye, is the life Aegon now has to look forward to. But it comes with an upside: He will now be underestimated, and he can use that to his advantage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Prince Aemond makes a move — another move, that is, after the one where he blasted his own brother with dragonfire.In his series of epic fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, the author George R.R. Martin has based a trio of men-at-arms on Curly, Moe and Larry, the Three Stooges. He has used the superheroes Blue Beetle and Green Arrow as the basis for noble houses’ emblematic sigils. During the events depicted in “House of the Dragon,” the important House Tully is variously ruled over by Lords Grover, Elmo, and Kermit, with a Ser Oscar thrown in for good measure, as if “Sesame Street” had come to the Seven Kingdoms.So do I think it’s possible that in his book “Fire and Blood,” the basis of “House of the Dragon,” Martin put Prince Aemond Targaryen in control of Westeros just as a cheeky way to illustrate the maxim “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”? I wouldn’t put it past him.Compared to the all-out dragon warfare of last week’s outing, this week’s episode was a low-key affair, though not an inconsequential one. Aemond One-Eye’s ascension to the regency as his comatose brother, Aegon, clings to life in a burned and battered body is an alarming development in several respects. Already in possession of the Targaryen civil war’s deadliest weapon, the ancient dragon Vhagar, Aemond now has the political power to match his firepower. That sort of consolidation of control can’t bode well for any of the other prominent voices on the small council, particularly that of Aemond and Aegon’s increasingly marginalized mother, the dowager Queen Alicent.Even his nominal supporters visibly chafe at their choice of regent, though they feel that choice is limited at best. Ser Criston Cole saw firsthand how Aemond tried to kill his brother, first with Vhagar and then up close and personal, but he tells none of this to Alicent. He goes along with Aemond’s rise not despite the horror he witnessed but because of it. This is now a war of dragons, he tells Alicent, and as such they must be led by a dragon rider.The logic of Ser Larys Strong is more political than martial. How would it look, he asks, if they rejected the claim of Rhaenyra on the grounds of her sex, only to raise up another woman, Alicent, as Queen Regent? The legal and sociopolitical waters would be muddied considerably, and support put at risk. With the exception of Grandmaester Orwyle (Kurt Egyiawan), a habitual voice of reason, the men of the council all back the male candidate over the female.The episode’s director, Clare Kilner, lets the camera linger on the face of the actor who plays Alicent, Olivia Cooke, at this point. As the music of the composer Ramin Djawadi strikes an ominously modern tone, the camera draws ever closer, as Queen Alicent struggles to contain her … anger? Embarrassment? Fear? Pain, especially over her abandonment by both her lover and her son? All of the above are visible in Cooke’s extraordinarily communicative eyes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Rhaenyra acts on a risky hope that cooler heads might prevail. But are there really any cool heads left?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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Aemond knows those assassins got the wrong prince. He says he feels flattered. He had also better watch his back.Season 2, Episode 2Not even Rhaenyra Targaryen can believe what she’s seeing.This woman has flown through the sky on the back of a dragon. She has seen lords kneel at her feet, only to rise against her years later. She has lost a child in her fight for the Iron Throne and recoiled to learn that another was killed in her child’s name. But watching Erryk and Arryk Cargyll (Elliott and Luke Tittensor), two identical twin knights, locked in a battle to the death in her own bedroom, with the outcome to decide whether she lives or dies? You can see it on the face of the actor Emma D’Arcy: Not even in Rhaenyra’s wildest dreams did she see this one coming.This ability to shock — not in the gross-out sense, although this is often the case as well, but rather in the sense of a sudden, severe surprise — is the greatest strength “House of the Dragon” possesses. Civil wars are often said to be battles of brother against brother; fantasy can make the metaphorical literal. What better way to illustrate the senseless brutality of warfare than by having two men who look and sound exactly alike, who love each other, who say they are one soul in two bodies, perish in a brutal murder-suicide that achieves exactly nothing?The entire affair is a sordid one, something Ser Arryk never should have been asked by Ser Criston, his lord commander, to carry out. Indeed, Criston did so only as a maladaptive way of venting his sexual frustrations during a moment when his on-again-off-again relationship with Queen Alicent was dialed to off-again. By episode’s end they’re back together and having rough sex — an altogether healthier way of channeling these frustrations, if still an ill-advised coupling overall.Despite the clandestine nature of their relationship, Alicent and Criston are still faring better romantically than Rhaenyra and Daemon. When the Black Queen learns that the young Prince Jaehaerys was murdered and beheaded in his bed, she is outraged that anyone could think she had anything to do with it. She is even angrier when she finds out that she did have something to do with it, despite herself: It was Daemon who, in a reckless attempt to make good on her request for vengeance against Prince Aemond, claimed another child’s life instead.You can’t trust someone like that, Rhaenyra determines — accurately. She dismisses him as “pathetic”; he dismisses himself from her company.Back in King’s Landing, Daemon’s deeds continue to pay gruesome dividends. Both of the men involved in the murder of Jaehaerys are captured and killed, along with a score of innocent men whose only crime was to serve as palace rat catchers alongside one of the assassins. When his grandfather Otto upbraids him for this public-relations blunder, King Aegon — who for all his faults is genuinely devastated by the death of his young son — fires him as the king’s hand and replaces him with Ser Criston — a man of action compared with the scheming but restrained Otto but also the most tightly wound man in Westeros. There are literal dragons who would make better hands.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The second season of HBO’s very successful “Game of Thrones” prequel gets off to an earthbound start.Diplomacy versus violence. Dignity versus unbridled passion. Duty versus the selfish desire for revenge.Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be about dragons?HBO sent critics four of the eight episodes of the second season of “House of the Dragon,” its “Game of Thrones” spinoff. For three and three-quarters of those four hours, we are in one of this highly rated fantasy franchise’s less interesting regions: the land of the medieval civics lesson. Small Councils meet. Allies are recruited. Rivals for the throne strut and fret. When battles do start to break out, they take place offscreen.The two shows (based on the novels of George R.R. Martin) have traditionally used palace intrigue leavened with sex to fill the gaps between expensive scenes of mass violence and close-up dragon action. But nearly half a season is a long time to wait for the flames to fly.“Thrones,” which ended in 2019 after eight blockbuster seasons, compensated with the epic scale and sadistic frisson of its treachery and debauchery. It also had one great performance, by Peter Dinklage as the noble dwarf Tyrion Lannister, and big characters stylishly played by actors like Lena Headey, Charles Dance and Jonathan Pryce. And its dragons were truly terrifying beasts.“Dragon,” for all the money HBO has reportedly spent on it, is a more buttoned down and drab affair, a condition that carries into the second season. Besides Eve Best as the dragon-riding matriarch, Princess Rhaenys, and Ewan Mitchell as the fearsome Aemond, no one in the cast rises far enough above the show’s general level of dogged professionalism to make a significant impression. And when they do appear, its dragons look and sound more domesticated.The new season begins with the truculent alpha Targaryens, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), plotting in their respective castles. Rhaenyra, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne — it’s just easier to use the jargon — is in exile with her uncle-husband, Daemon (Matt Smith). Her half brother Aegon sits on the throne and governs like a petulant child, to the consternation of his mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who was Rhaenyra’s best friend until she married Rhaenyra’s father, the previous king.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More