House of the Dragon review, Season 1, Episode 1

Game of Thrones is back! Or, at least its 172 year distant prequel is. House Targaryen is at the height of its power, and as the voiceover in the first episode reminds us, the only thing that can bring down the House of the Dragon is itself. You can see Robert Baratheon protesting a bit, but then, he didn’t have to contend with dragons. And dragons are the centerpiece of this new show, as our very first sequence tells us, when Rhaenyra descends from the clouds on her golden dragon Syrax.

She’s introduced as a soul sister of Arya Stark, trying to buck societal expectations and being aided in that by the forbearance of her father Viserys, a forbearance that can very easily be read as neglect. The pilot is giving us a strong framework in which to anchor what is to come, and aside from “Targaryens rule because of dragons”, another thing is that women are oppressed and sidelined in this society. Rhaenyra is a woman, and therefore she can never rule, and in case you doubt that, there’s the side character of Rhaenys to give precedent and a parallel running much deeper than only in the eerily similar name.

In quick succession, we’re introduced to other important players. There’s Aemma, Viserys’ wife and Rhaenyra’s mother, heavily pregnant. A tourney is about to start to celebrate the birth of her son, the presumptive heir. How do we know it will be a son? Viserys dreamt it. Alright, buddy. We meet his council, consisting of Master of Ships Corlys Velaryon, screaming “badass” with every fiber of his being. There’s Hand of the King Otto Hightower, obviously competent player at the Game of Thrones. Master of Whisperers Larys Strong is name-checked, as is Master of Coin Lyman Beesbury. There’s also Grand Maester…Grand Maester, I guess. He doesn’t get a name.

One seat, however, is conspicuously empty, which belongs to the Commander of the City Watch, Daemon. If that name sounds ominous, it’s because it is. The man is a major player, essentially introduced as Jaime Lannister with a dragon and a license for incest. His relationship with Rhaenyra is complicated; the one with the rest of the court is not: they hate him.

Lastly, there’s Alicent Hightower, Rhaenyra’s best friend forever who will never be separated from her, and Ser Criston Cole, hedge knight of no renown who will most certainly play no role whatsoever in the future. The stage thereby set, the very economic storytelling of the pilot can actually begin. It immediately sidelines a lot of these characters to instead concentrate on the big three: Viserys, Rhaenyra and Daemon. This is a very smart move, since the whole ensemble can be a bit overwhelming, and without the clear demarcations of “Stark vs. Lannister” that made the initial cast in “Game of Thrones” manageable, restraint is in order.

I already mentioned that Aemma Targaryen is heavily pregnant, and this pregnancy is the first of several plot strands in the pilot. Aemma informs Viserys that this will be the last time she wants to get pregnant, since so many children died in childbirth and she can’t bear it anymore, and just as with Ned Stark telling people they’ll talk upon his return, this is a clear warning sign of things to come. And indeed, the birth goes awry: the baby doesn’t turn, and Aemma, who told Rhaenyra that this is the “battlefield of noble women” (Catelyn would approve), faces an agonizing death on a bloody bed sheet. The Grand Maester tells a grief-stricken Viserys he, “as the father”, faces an impossible choice: letting mother and child die or kill the mother in hopes of saving the child by C-section.

In an incredibly disturbing scene, Viserys agrees to murder his wife, sitting by her side and telling her “they’ll get the baby now” and “I love you” as Aemma is totally panicked about her impending murder and then gets cut open while fully conscious, slowly bleeding to death. It’s absolutely gruesome, and given the current abortion debate raging in the US, darkly topical.

Already we can see – as with Steven Touissant’s casting as Corlys Velaryon – that HBO is intent on righting some wrongs from the original series. There’s more diversity, and there’s a clear message of woman power and oppression by the patriarchy imbedded in the narrative, both of which are not necessarily found like this in the source text. Not that such adaptational choices are a problem, but there’s a toxic segment in fandom that will get very hung up on this stuff.

The whole birth is brilliantly cross-cut with the tourney. It starts harmlessly, as the birth, with knights trying to poke each other with long sticks. When the birth starts to go bad, Daemon enters the lists, and immediately, things get twisted. He instantly tries to get back at Otto Hightower, his political enemy number one, by humiliating his son (and doing his level best to kill him, not succeeding).

But after that, the tournament begins to escalate: knights continue the fights afoot, killing each other in bloody ways as Aemma bleeds and cries in her bed. As Daemon finds his master in Criston Cole and the two of them slug it out in a manner that tries to outshine Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel”, all the while including Alicent and Rhaenyra by proxy in their fight, Aemma is murdered. While Alicent gets drawn in by Daemon, who all but forces her to give him her favor, who in equal parts makes Rhaenyra jealous and pisses off Otto and his son, Rhaenyra grants the victorious Criston Cole her own, getting back at her uncle. It’s clear that all of these actions will come back in a major way.

A second plot line revolves around Daemon’s exploits as commander of the City Watch. He reformed them into his personal goon squad, who instead of being corrupt stooges like Janos Slynt’s guard is a proto-fascist paramilitary terrorizing the city in order to “combat crime”. Their rampage through King’s Landing, where Daemon personally exacts his bloody brand of “justice” that would make the Taliban and ISIS ask him to moderate it a little bit, is hard to watch.

Here we come to what the creators themselves say they view as foundational for the franchise: the combination of sex and violence. And wouldn’t you know it, Daemon provides both. Seconds after he orders a man castrated – the result of which we get to see in its own close-up – we see him no less close-upped fucking whores with his goons in a brothel he rented out with his family money. The whole theme of a police force being essentially unchecked and violent, led and cheered by a legacy admission, is the other thing that cannot help but feel topical in this day and age.

After the death of Aemma and her son (the murder was all for naught, but Viserys doesn’t really reflect on his role in it, preferring to wallow in his own grief and making it all about him), the question of the succession with which the episode was introduced comes again front and center. Otto Hightower wants nothing more than to prevent Daemon Targaryen ascending the throne. Daemon himself wants nothing more and sees himself as the heir. And Corlys Velaryon is happy to either help Daemon or his own wife and therefore his children, whichever works.

It's Daemon himself who decides the whole affair, unintentionally so. In his cups, still reeling from the defeat against Criston Cole, he toasts the “heir for a day” and celebrates the death of Viserys’ son. When Viserys confronts him about it, he refuses to buckle and grovel and instead tells Viserys that he is weak, that everyone is taking advantage of him and that he should make Daemon his hand so he can “protect him from himself”. And with that, Viserys bans Daemon from court and proclaims Rhaenyra his heir, with all the realm swearing allegiance.

And so ends the first episode, and everything is resolved nicely, with hardly any problem on the horizon. Effective storytelling, as I said. If “House of the Dragon” will achieve more is hard to say and depends on the pivot to the other characters. But we’ll talk about that next week, hopefully.