House of the Dragon, season 1, episode 2 review

We’re back in the Red Keep, half a year later. From the beginning, this show is dealing in different time horizons than does “Game of Thrones”. So far, it works…mostly. We’ll get to the problem later. The new status quo is quickly established. Daemon has installed himself as Prince of Dragonstone, and Viserys refuses to act against him. Only when Daemon also steals a dragon egg and proclaims a marriage to his paramour, with whom he claims having a child – the inciting incident of the episode – is he finally willing to act. Otto keeps him from going himself – it’s dangerous, you see – and goes in his stead.

It's a bit unclear if the getaway here is supposed to be that Otto is putting the king and the realm before his own security or whether he just hates Daemon so much. Maybe it’s both. But Otto’s characterization remains too weak to be able to tell, unfortunately. In the event, Otto arrives on Dragonstone with a detachment of Kingsguard and his own household guard, presenting an ultimatum to Daemon, who shows off his dragon, cowing Otto into the defensive. It's at this point Rhaenyra shows up, cowing Daemon in turn and getting the dragon’s egg. The status quo is repaired, and Rhaenyra showed her worth.

This is, in barest plot terms, one of the two beating hearts of the episode, the other being concerned with Viserys’ impending marriage. But before we get to that, I want to stay with Rhaenyra and the Daemon plotline a bit. This is the element of the episode that’s beyond reproach. We meet Rhaenyra trying to do something more than just pour wine in her new position as heir, but when she proposes to use dragons against Daemon – to the delight of Corlys, who wants to see someone to act here – the king shoos her off to choose the new kingsguard in a way a parent sends the child away to play with some toys when the grown-ups are speaking.

Nothing bad will ever come from this, as Rhaenyra refuses the noble aspirants for the positions – houses Caron and Mallister, respectively – and instead chooses, whom else, Criston Cole. It’s because he has actual combat experience, you see. The tournament doesn’t seem to play a role in this decision; Rhaenyra is shown to care about her own sense of politics, looking for strength and disregarding custom and station, as Otto counsels. It’s clear why she sympathizes with Criston Cole here: he is disregarded because of his low birth, as she is disregarded because of her sex.

In case you missed that point, Rhaenys is making it perfectly clear when she calls out to Rhaenyra for a heart-to-heart, spelling out the leitmotif of the show (all that’s missing is her explicitly calling house Targaryen “the House of the Dragon” and looking into the camera) by stating that men will rather burn down the realm than to see a woman on the Iron Throne. Rhaenyra of course is having none of it, but the talk does inspire her to go against her father’s command and to fly to Dragonstone, scoring her first political success in the bargain and gaining some respect.

Her emotional state is also, shall we say, under development. When Alicent tries to get her praying in the Sept, she appeals to Rhaenyra’s need for closure about the death of her mother, but Rhaenyra is having none of that. She prays that her father will see her worth. Alicent is shaken for a moment but quickly adapts, counseling her friend that fathers aren’t able to talk to their daughters and that she needs to open the conversation. In an ugly scene later, we see just how unable Otto is to talk to his daughter when he berates her for ruining her finger nails; she’s a prop to him and has to follow his orders.

Viserys isn’t quite as bad, but when Rhaenyra tries to talk to him, he quickly shuts her off. “You will learn”, he says, in the way that says “by experience, not because I teach you, and the thing you will learn is to keep your mouth shut”, which is exactly what Rhaenyra doesn’t want to hear. No wonder she flies off to Dragonstone.

But the balance between ambition and the uncouthness of youth that the show is going for here works well enough. It’s a subtle characterization, but already, no one should be surprised when Rhaenyra turns out to be on the, let’s say, undiplomatic side of things later on in the Dance. On the other hand, the same is true for Daenerys in season 1 of GOT and nobody cared about that when season 8 rolled around, so there’s that.

The other big plot point of the episode is Viserys’ wedding. Aemma is dead for a half a year now, but Viserys doesn’t want to remarry. However, as everyone around him tells him, marry he must. He may be king, but he is not free (a lesson that he haplessly tries on to pass to Rhaenyra in the worst way possible). Things are expected of him, you see, and the realm is weak as long as there is only one heir – and that one being a woman, no less, the other half of the coin no one speaks out loud but that’s implied everywhere.

The show does great work of communicating that everyone just assumes Rhaenyra will only be heir as long as Viserys has no son. They would immediately back Daemon’s claim if Daemon wasn’t, well, Daemon. Rhaenyra doesn’t really want to hear it, but it becomes clearer with every scene.

The question for Viserys, now, is whom to marry. Corlys takes center stage again, as he did when he demanded action against the pirates in the Stepstones (we’ll come back to them). He has a daughter, the lady Laena, and he proposes to marry her to Viserys, joining their houses, sending a strong message to the realm and the Free Cities and to strengthen the bloodline. It would also heal the rift from the Great Council in the bargain.

The rub is that Laena is all but twelve, and as she informs Viserys in a perfectly awkward scene together, she isn’t expected to fuck him until she’s fourteen. Viserys is visibly uncomfortable with the idea of having her anytime; she’s younger than his own daughter, after all. He unsuccessfully and without a lot of drive tries to argue for himself staying a bachelor, but everyone is adamant, with the exception of Otto, who wants to keep the king warm until he falls for Alicent.

The latter is doing a great job of getting into Viserys’ good graces, and it seems like it’s honest on her part, which will make the following developments all the more dramatic for sure. Over Viserys’ model of Valyria, his one passion project and the only place in the Red Keep where he is truly happy, they bond more and more.

However, this bond remains underdeveloped. And this is where the time jump falters. When Viserys announces, in the major end-of-episode twist, that he will marry Alicent, it comes out of nowhere. Otto looks smugly, but there’s no reason to assume he was informed of this development beforehand – or anyone else, for that matter. It’s not even clear Alicent knew what was to come. It certainly works on plot terms – producing a likely unhealable rift between Rhaenyra, who failed to get an open relationship with her father, and her best friend – and alienating Corlys, who immediately goes to Daemon. But on a character level, I’m told what happens, but I just don’t feel it. The impression I get is rather that I missed an episode worth of character development.

The last big player of this episode is Corlys Velaryon, who joins the rank of main characters (as I predicted last week). The importance of the Stepstones and the pirates for his fortune is established over the course of the episode, as is his penchant for decisive action rather than discussing stuff in the Small Council. Already you can see how much sense the future alignment between Daemon, Rhaenyra and Corlys makes; they’re all alike in that regard.

The antagonist of that plot, which will surely become much more prominent next week, is the Crabfeeder, a pirate only shown in Dutch angles, with weird lighting and his face covered with a mask. He’s clearly evil, and therefore someone everyone can get behind to fight against. His method of execution, namedropped in episode 1, is to feed prisoners to the crabs, which is a gruesome and painful way to die and gets shown in graphic detail.

The Crabfeeder is supposed to be financed by the Free Cities – although it remains unclear if Corlys just says this to get the action he wants or whether it’s really true – and seems on the verge of ruining house Velaryon. The stakes are established, and Corlys talks Daemon into a strategic alliance against him. That scene is strong, establishing once more the complications of the family dynamics within the titular House of the Dragon – Daemon may talk shit about Viserys, but not Corlys – and you can clearly see how these two get together. It’s a strong setup for what’s to come.

With that, I want to go into some general observations.

One thing I neglected to say last week is the marked improvement in costumes over “Game of Thrones”. Not only are they much richer in style and flourish – depicting the height of power the realm is supposed to be – but the show also made an effort in giving the house sigils their place in the sun. From the Hightower helmet and Daemon’s dragon-winged helmet in the tournament last episode to the utterly useless yet lovable statues representing the kingsguard aspirants to their lavishly embroidered coats of arms, I really love this attention to detail.

The production crew is also knocking it out of the park with the design of the Stepstones and Dragonstone, both of which are shown in a nebulous haze, pierced by the full sun in the sky (and Syrax, of course). As with “Game of Thrones”, the production values are just impeccable and very pleasing to behold.