Almost every important character on House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones is a member of a broader collective, such as the Kingsguard, the Night’s Watch, or—most commonly—a great house. Houses are of paramount importance in Westeros; they each have their own mottos and logos, theme songs and castles, family histories and support networks.
Many characters spend their entire lives surrounded by kin. When houses must split up, as the Starks do after Ned’s death in Thrones, it is typically only because of a great tragedy. As Maester Aemon, one of the last surviving Targaryens, says, “A Targaryen alone in the world is a terrible thing.”
About 170 years earlier, in the time of House of the Dragon, no Targaryen is truly alone in the world. The royal family is still near the apex of its power, with plenty of dragons and vassals following its lead. But the family is fracturing, and in the third episode of Dragon’s second season, the show’s primary characters are increasingly alone.
The episode starts, however, with no Targaryen—nor any other central character—in sight. In the Riverlands, the burgeoning war manifests amid a border dispute between the Brackens and Blackwoods, ancient rivals à la the Hatfields and McCoys. After a Bracken insults Rhaenyra and a Blackwood responds in kind about Aegon, the Bracken draws a sword—and then the episode skips forward in time. Thrones was often at its best when it staged a big battle, but here, seeing only the aftermath—a field strewn with corpses—is just as effective.
The Small Council in King’s Landing is unsure whether it can even declare victory in this fight, called the Battle of the Burning Mill. Both sides took heavy losses, so the clash didn’t leave a clear winner, only heaps of dead bodies and chaos. This ambiguity makes the Bracken-Blackwood battle symbolic of the larger war. As Rhaenyra tells Alicent at the end of the episode—in one of the best scenes of the entire series to date; we’ll get there—“Even victory may be so bloody as to be counted a loss.”
Not every victory is so bloody, however. Elsewhere in the Riverlands, Daemon captures Harrenhal with ease, landing Caraxes atop an old tower and searching out castellan Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale), who pledges for Rhaenyra right away.
Yet during this sudden conquest, which brings the largest castle in the Seven Kingdoms into the blacks’ fold, Daemon is both physically and emotionally isolated as he walks through Harrenhal’s spooky, deserted corridors. Daemon still sneers and swaggers, but that outward projection compensates for his internal uncertainty. At a personal “point of crisis,” as actor Matt Smith put it, Daemon holds his sword tight, demands to be called “Your Grace” instead of “prince” (reminiscent of Tywin’s observation that “any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king”), and is afraid to eat dinner lest he lose his life to “poisoned peas.”
“I’ll admit that my cook’s peas aren’t exactly the stuff of legend, but poison?” Simon quips. Dragon newcomer Beale is so charming in this scene that it made me want to rewatch The Death of Stalin, another story (also featuring HotD Season 1 standout Paddy Considine) about the struggle to fill a power vacuum after the death of a longtime ruler.
Later, Daemon locks himself in his room, with a sword barring the door, only to be haunted by a vision—an ominous turn for a man who scoffed at his brother’s zeal for dragon dreams. The image of Milly Alcock, who played the younger version of Rhaenyra in Season 1, sewing Jaehaerys’s head onto his body provides quite the jump scare. And Daemon ends the vision in a godswood—an unfamiliar location for Targaryens, who don’t follow the old gods—where a strange woman tells him, “You will die in this place.”
At least one person still constantly keeps Daemon in his thoughts: his nephew Aemond, who spends a Small Council session twirling the coin that reminds him that Daemon sought his head. Yet Aemond remains reserved and withdrawn as his curiously quiet season continues.
In this episode, Aemond’s solitude leaves him naked and vulnerable. He is mocked by his brother—“what a fine, sweet thing!”—when the king finds him cuddling with Sylvi for comfort.
Aemond seeks out a substitute mother figure in part because of his distance from his actual mother, the next character who illustrates this episode’s theme of isolation. Alicent has no real relationship with her children, is ignored in the Small Council chamber, and doesn’t even appear allied with Larys anymore. “She goes nowhere without many eyes watching her,” Mysaria says about Alicent—watching her but not with her. Despite often occupying crowded rooms, Alicent is alone.
“My father is gone from court,” Alicent says. “Cole is on the march. Aemond—you know what Aemond is.”
Alicent offers that rundown to Rhaenyra, who might be the most isolated Targaryen of all. Her father is dead, her throne is stolen, her husband is gone, and her public image is tarnished. After the death of little Jaehaerys and Otto’s public relations coup, the realm views Rhaenyra as a “babe killer” and “kinslayer,” as the Bracken boy says.
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Rhaenyra’s shrinking family support system grows even smaller in this episode. She decides to send her son Joffrey to the Vale to fulfill the terms of her pact with Lady Jeyne Arryn and her two youngest sons—Aegon and Viserys—to Pentos, where they won’t be in range of another assassination attempt or dragon attack. Just a short while ago, in the show’s timeline, Rhaenyra was living with her husband and five children, with a sixth on the way. But after a stillbirth, Luke’s death, an argument, and now this parting for safety, she’s down to just Jace, her oldest.
“It breaks my heart to send my boys away, not knowing when I will see them again,” she tells Rhaena, who will accompany the children on their journey. “But you have seen what may befall them here. Rhaena, I need you to be the mother to them that I cannot.”
The dragonless Rhaena doesn’t want to leave—she’ll be alone, too, apart from her sister and the islands where she’s spent most of her life—but she does receive “some consolation” for this sacrifice: a chest containing four dragon eggs. “Should all come to ruin here, you will bear the hope for our future,” Rhaenyra says—which can’t help but make viewers wonder whether three of these eggs will eventually make their way to Daenerys, after the Targaryen dynasty falls “to ruin.”
But that potential end point remains distant; for now, Rhaenyra sends her children away with a hug and kiss on the head, accompanied by the same score that has previously played during funerals. It’s only fitting that in the very next scene, in King’s Landing, Alicent observes, “Sadness is a condition of motherhood.”
Rhaenyra’s isolation extends beyond her family; she feels increasingly detached from her war council as well. Other than Rhaenys, her advisers are now relatively anonymous old men attempting to dictate her actions, which underscores—for both character and audience—the shift in her surroundings from familiar to unknown, comfortable to suspicious.
When they suggest Rhaenyra retreat to a safer redoubt, she bristles and accuses, “You propose to conduct the war in my absence.” When one of her councilors says, “It would be caution,” she retorts, “It would be treason.”
With the help of Mysaria, who just recently helped Daemon sneak into King’s Landing, Rhaenyra crafts an alternate plan: She approaches Alicent at the Grand Sept to make one final attempt at peace talks before the Battle of the Burning Mill blooms into further bloodshed across the continent.
The setup of this scene—which notably does not appear in the Fire & Blood source text—is somewhat contrived, as Rhaenyra walks into the capital city disguised as a septa and makes it all the way to Alicent’s side unopposed. How does Rhaenyra reach the dowager queen so easily? Where is the security around the royal family after Jaehaerys’s death? (Though perhaps Aegon’s decision to place all his drinking buddies on the Kingsguard—where they’re evidently more concerned with helping a squire lose his virginity than standing guard—wasn’t the smartest choice.)
But the scene itself is a gripping, exquisite tour de force—one of the best in Dragon’s history, along with Viserys’s walk to the throne on his death day. This is no massive set piece or grand spectacle, but rather an intimate, whispered conversation between two relatives, former friends, and mourners that showcases the acting talents of Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke.
The two haven’t seen each other since Viserys died and Alicent helped steal Rhaenyra’s throne. And that was the only time they’ve interacted in the many years since Season 1, Episode 7, when Alicent stabbed Rhaenyra with a knife as the two mothers defended their sons, following the children’s brawl.
But Rhaenyra tries to sway Alicent anyway, starting the conversation by calling back to their closeness in Dragon’s pilot episode, before Alicent’s surprise marriage to Rhaenyra’s father tore the girls apart. Her attempt is unsuccessful—at first because Alicent remains adamant that Viserys changed his mind on his deathbed and named Aegon his heir.
So resolute is Alicent in this claim that even Rhaenyra seems to believe her, and she asks for details. Then the scene reaches an even higher pitch: When Alicent explains that Viserys, on his deathbed, “spoke Aegon’s name; he said he was the prince that was promised to unite the realm,” Rhaenyra startles. The way D’Arcy contorts their face in shock might be the episode’s finest bit of acting.
“It’s a story he once told about Aegon the Conqueror,” Rhaenyra says, and Alicent realizes her fateful error. “The Conqueror,” she mutters, then swallows, averts her gaze, and considers for a few tense beats of silence.
But at this point, Alicent is pot committed, and the escalating war has gone too far to be reined in again. “There’s been no mistake,” Alicent declares, and she ignores Rhaenyra’s final pleas to avoid the carnage sure to come as a result of this very mistake. Then Alicent repeats, voice rising for emphasis: “There’s been no mistake.” The music rises, and she flees, leaving Rhaenyra alone, again, to stare into the candlelight.
Will the two women ever see each other again? And if they do, how high will the death count rise before then? Rhaenyra is left to wonder, and fear, as the episode fades to black.
“Maybe he’s lonely,” Mysaria muses about Seasmoke in this episode, when Rhaenyra says that Laenor’s old mount has grown restless on Dragonstone. It’s no wonder: Dragons are the main symbol of House Targaryen, and the family’s leading lights have grown lonely, too.
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