The latest episode of House of the Dragon, “The Green Council,” ends with Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) stealing into the depths of the Dragonpit while Aegon is being crown king, mounting her dragon Meleys, and then bursting through the floor. She has the opportunity then and there to kill Aegon and the rest of the greens, but opts not to. Instead, she flies out of the Dragonpit to go tell Rhaenyra that her half-brother has stolen her crown.
I’m sure a lot of fans watched that and wondered why Rhaenys didn’t take action. House of the Dragon producer Ryan Condal breaks it down in this week’s Inside the Episode feature. Skip to about the five-minute mark to hear Condal talk about Rhaenys:
“She knows if she sets fire to that dais, she ends any possibility of war and probably sets peace throughout the realm, but I think probably doesn’t want to be responsible for doing that to another mother,” Condal says. “And it’s a complex choice, and one that people might dispute or have a problem with, but that’s the choice that Rhaenys makes at that moment.”
Why didn’t Rhaenys Targaryen kill Aegon?
Condal’s right that some people may take issue with Rhaenys’ choice, and with his explanation. Me, for one. I don’t think I buy any of that. To start, if Rhaenys kills them all there, I don’t think that ensures peace; it guarantees war, since all of the Hightower allies will seek revenge. Moreover, explaining away Rhaenys’ reluctance to kill the greens as sympathy for Alicent strikes me as very weak. I could see her doing it to avoid shedding family blood and thus making war inevitable, or because of the prohibition on kinslaying, which we haven’t heard much about.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t not like this episode at all, and this explanation is kind of emblematic of why. There are lots of potentially interesting reasons why Rhaenys might choose to spare the lives of the greens; why would you flatten it to just be about her personal feelings about one other character, especially when it raises other questions? For instance, if Rhaenys is so concerned with not killing mothers, does she care that she probably killed dozens of people on her way out of the Dragonpit, some of whom likely have kids? I feel like the show doesn’t want us to think about that.
I thought the whole dragon-from-the-floor scene was a dumb idea to begin with; it felt like they wanted something dramatic and didn’t trust the coronation scene to work on its own. Listening to co-showrunner Miguel Sapochink, I think I’m onto something: “We needed a penultimate scene, so we tried to come up with, ‘What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen at a coronation’?”
I’m hoping the show recovers in the finale.
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