David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the Game of Thrones showrunners who transformed George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy saga from a collection of novels into a worldwide TV phenomenon, don’t watch House of the Dragon. They’re off working on a new blockbuster adaptation of a genre classic instead.
But if they were regular viewers of the Thrones prequel series, I wonder what Benioff and Weiss would think about the second episode of Season 2. “Themes are for eighth-grade book reports,” Benioff once said about building out a Thrones season. But the central theme of House of the Dragon drips from just about every pixel of this latest entry.
Families are fracturing as the Dance of the Dragons begins in full, and both the black and green factions in this war suffer from the fallout. This hour of television largely offers moments to breathe following last week’s episode-ending horror, but it’s punctuated by three family blowouts, between Queen Rhaenyra and husband-uncle Daemon; King Aegon and grandfather Otto Hightower; and Kingsguard knights/brothers Erryk and Arryk Cargyll.
“Rhaenyra the Cruel” picks up right after the traumatic climax of “A Son for a Son”—no more time jumps now that the war is here. The Red Keep is in turmoil, the City Watch is on the lookout for an assassin with a child’s head in a sack, and the king is smashing his father’s detailed model of old Valyria—talk about a symbol of this dragon dynasty’s decline—in a rage.
“This is war! I declare war!” Aegon screams, and he suggests that his half-sister Rhaenyra “sits across the bay, on her rock, laughing at [him].” But Rhaenyra does no such thing when she learns of young Jaehaerys’s murder—and Helaena’s loss of a son, so soon after Rhaenyra lost a child of her own.
Instead, Rhaenyra and Daemon spar in a gripping argument, which tears a hole in their admittedly complicated but heretofore mostly loving relationship. “I cannot trust you, Daemon. I’ve never trusted you, wholly, much though I wished to, willed myself to,” Rhaenyra says.
When Daemon approaches his wife in anger and reaches toward her face, Rhaenyra’s flinch is a physical manifestation of that lack of trust. Although not addressed directly in this episode, Daemon choked Rhaenyra in a similar circumstance at the end of Season 1, and she remembers the assault, even if it doesn’t recur.
But it isn’t Rhaenyra’s lack of trust that hurts Daemon the most in this exchange. Her small, surprised “You’re pathetic” is even more cutting to someone who sees himself as a warrior of legend. After this insult, Daemon walks out with no further words and flies away to parts unknown on Caraxes. “He must follow his own path,” Rhaenyra says afterward—one not necessarily entwined with her own.
Across Blackwater Bay, another royal couple is also following separate paths. While Aegon remains in the Red Keep, secretly sobbing in his room, Helaena is paraded out in public as part of a funeral procession for the departed heir. Helaena nearly wilts under the pressure, but her husband doesn’t so much as attempt to console her in this moment of need; rather, when the two encounter each other on the castle stairs, one going up and one going down, Aegon passes without saying a word to his wife.
Evidently, Aegon has grander plans on his mind—like firing his grandfather from the post of hand of the king and replacing the political schemer with a more martially inclined “steel fist.”
“The king is my grandson, and my grandson is a fool,” Otto yells, stressing the familial tie inherent to this relationship. But Otto’s florid speechifying—here are just some of the SAT vocab words Otto uses in this scene: deprivations, feckless, impetuousness, trifling, forbearance, judiciousness, and insolent—only makes Aegon firmer in his decision. “You are dismissed,” the king commands as Otto is already departing.
(Otto was previously stripped of his title as king’s hand when Viserys was king in Season 1. At that point, his departure from King’s Landing left Alicent alone, without nearby allies, forcing her to mature as a political figure. This time, that dynamic is potentially flipped, as Alicent has ostensible allies at court but perhaps little political power, if her fears in “A Son for a Son” that Aegon and Aemond are no longer listening to her are valid. Whether her relationship with Criston can extend from the bedroom into the Small Council chamber will be critical.)
Yet more families are torn apart by Aegon’s new hand, Criston Cole, who tells Aegon at the start of the episode that he wasn’t guarding Helaena and the twins because he was “abed.” (Ah, but in whose bed?) Criston tells Alicent that there is no absolution for his mistake, but he figures he can at least make an effort. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard goads Arryk Cargyll into an argument, accusing him of harboring traitorous sympathies because of his twin brother, Erryk, who joined Rhaenyra’s cause at the end of Season 1.
The Kingsguard is like a family—a “sacred trust,” Criston says—especially because its members vow to never father children. And in the case of the Cargylls, that kinship is literal; they form, Arryk laments, “one soul in two bodies.” But to defend his honor and appease his commander, Arryk agrees to pose as his brother, sneak into Dragonstone, and attempt to assassinate Rhaenyra in her bed.
Of course, Erryk gets in the way. Taken as an action set piece, the Cargyll duel is not especially thrilling television. As Westerosi one-on-one sword fights go, it pales in comparison to, say, Brienne’s ferocious bout with the Hound or Oberyn’s duel with the Mountain. Nor do the relatively anonymous Cargyll twins offer the same level of personal drama as those other battles with better-loved characters.
But as a thematic summation of this episode’s message, the Cargyll duel is perfectly placed. “You parted us. But I still love you, brother,” one twin says to the other as they cross swords. The two are identical, so onlookers cannot distinguish which fighter is aligned with the blacks and which is aligned with the greens. Even their names sound the same. And they both end the episode dead, as a horrified Rhaenyra looks on.
A secondary focus for this episode is the importance of smallfolk—a key world-building ingredient missing from Season 1. The smallfolk play a key role in Otto’s plan to respond to Jaehaerys’s death, as he organizes a public funeral procession as a propaganda campaign, loudly blaming Rhaenyra for the prince’s death and showing off Jaehaerys’s corpse—with his head, recovered from the City Watch assassin, crudely sewn back on to his neck—and grieving mother and grandmother.
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The Cargylls themselves fit here, sort of, because they hail from a little-known house, even though they’ve been knighted and elevated to the Kingsguard. So too does Criston Cole, the jumped-up son of a steward who is not only the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard but also the hand of the king.
Aegon isn’t so kind to all the lower-born men in his employ, however. He orders the hanging of every ratcatcher in the Red Keep because he can’t be sure which one is guilty of abetting his son’s murder; the resulting wails from the ratcatchers’ wives and children filter in through the windows of the castle and contribute to Otto’s verbal clash with the king. And Hugh, the blacksmith who received Aegon’s promise of payment (but not the payment itself) in the season premiere, is suffering with a sick daughter as the Velaryon blockade drives food prices in the capital city skyward.
This dichotomy displays the promise and peril of a royal war for the masses who populate the realm. On the one hand, smallfolk can, with proper opportunity, luck, and fortitude, rise up to positions of power; on the other, they can be slain en masse on a whim. (And that’s even without the literal firepower of a dragon to do the slaying.)
It is almost too on the nose when Aemond’s matronly brothel companion cautions the dragonriding prince: “I would remind you only that when princes lose their temper, it is often others who suffer. The smallfolk, like me.”
That juxtaposition extends back across the Blackwater. Alyn of Hull, the sailor audiences met last week who rescued Corlys from death at sea, greets his brother, Addam, who’s excited by this potential. “To serve with the Sea Snake is to make your fortune,” Addam advises his brother, calling it “another opportunity to distinguish yourself, remind him of your worth.” Alyn seems reluctant to get involved with the highborns and their adventurous wars, but that doesn’t stop Addam from gazing in wonder at Laenor’s old dragon, Seasmoke, as it circles overhead.
Driftmark is the only place in the area, it seems, where families are not being torn in two. Addam and Alyn might disagree about their outlook on war, but at least they’re hugging and sharing meals. Baela and Rhaena aren’t making any trouble for Team Black. And Corlys and Rhaenys cuddle in bed, a stark departure from every other intimate moment in this episode—even the final scene, which depicts another sexual liaison between Alicent and Criston, begins with violence as foreplay.
Because throughout the halls of power, family relationships are dissolving as the civil war splits not only the Targaryen house at large, but the internal groups that compose the broader royal family. If that’s the thematic thrust of this show, then Aegon’s declaration about how to treat his relations might as well serve as its mission statement: “Fuck dignity. I want revenge.”
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