The latest episode of House of the Dragon, “The Green Council,” was definitely the most controversial yet. And I’m gonna admit right up here at the top that I didn’t enjoy it. I am not unbiased here.
One of the things I didn’t like was how the script flattened out the character of Alicent Hightower. Alicent’s motivations have shifted throughout the season. Sometimes she’s been friends with Rhaenyra, at other times she’s screamed at her children that Rhaenyra will murder them if she takes the Iron Throne. She pulled a knife on Rhaenyra after Rhaenyra’s son dashed out the eye of her son, which you’d figure would be a hard thing to come back from, but the two seemed to make up in Episode 8.
There’s a long history here, and when Alicent’s husband the king dies, Alicent did indeed support their son Aegon’s claim to the throne over Rhaenyra’s. But she didn’t do it because she was afraid for her children’s lives, or because she wanted to advance her own family’s interests, but purely because she misinterpreted her husband’s dying words to mean that he wanted Aegon to succeed him.
Does Alicent believe Viserys wants Aegon to be his heir, or is she just convincing herself?
My problem with this is that…why can’t Alicent do things for multiple reasons? Why does the script have to reduce her motivation to one thing? Sara Hess, who wrote the episode, talked to The Hollywood Reporter about what she felt Alicent was going through when she heard her husband’s final words:
"I know what my feeling is, and I later talked to [actor Olivia Cooke] about it and she had the same feeling: When she misunderstood him and hears him saying “I want Aegon to be king” — which is not what he’s saying, but what she sincerely understands him to be saying — that her thought at the moment was, “Oh, fucking Christ.” She was genuinely ready to let it go. She was like: “You know what? Rhaenyra is going to be the queen. It’s fine. I’m tired of being angry all the time. I’m done. This is the end.” Then he says that and she’s super annoyed."
Seating Aegon on the Iron Throne will lead to disaster, but Alicent can’t know how much. Still, the machinations of the greens have already led to some deaths. “I think in her mind, all this was a necessary evil,” Hess said. “She’s focused on: ‘We’re not going to kill Rhaenyra, that’s ridiculous, she’s Viserys’ daughter, he would never have wanted this, I’m not gonna let that happen.'”
"And as far as the sympathetic thing goes, in [George R.R. Martin’s Targaryen history book Fire & Blood] the history was written by these unreliable narrators and nobody really knows what happened in those rooms. They know the big events that happened historically, but they don’t know what anyone’s intention was…We were able to step back and go: The history tellers want to believe Alicent is an evil conniving bitch. But is that true? Who exactly is saying that? That’s part of the thing we’re playing with in this and in season two."
I think the problem I have with this line of thinking is that while I don’t want Alicent to come off as “an evil conniving bitch,” I don’t think the scripts should be afraid to have her act in ways that are less than saintly, or to let her have base motivations. I want Alicent to be complex, and complex people have light and dark impulses. Daemon Targaryen literally murdered his wife and has emerged as a fan favorite, because Matt Smith has been great in the role and because the script has allowed him to be complex. Yes, he’s done deplorable things, but he’s also done sympathetic things like be there for his ailing brother, who he’s also treated awfully at times. If you let a character be good and bad as the situation demands, the audience will learn to love them for themselves. They don’t need to be “sympathetic” all the time.
Aegon Targaryen can still be sympathetic despite his deplorable acts
On that note, I like how Hess talks about Alicent’s son Aegon, who is a s**t weasel of a person. Just last episode, for instance, we saw the aftermath of him sexually assaulting a servant in the Red Keep. Does this mean that he can’t be a complex character with whom we sympathize? Of course not.
“He’s the only firstborn son in the history of Westeros, and in the Targaryen family, who was not named his father’s heir,” Hess said. “What does that do to you? He tosses it off by pretending he doesn’t give a shit, that it’s stupid anyway. But he deeply cares and he’s deeply crushed by it. His father’s lack of trust in him eats away at his soul. He needs validation in whatever ways he can get it.”
"I think just because somebody has committed this act that it’s not a reason that we can’t have a more nuanced discussion — or to even feel sympathy for him — while acknowledging that what he did was indefensible. It’s simplistic to say: “He raped someone, he’s horrible and evil and we can never find anything likable or interesting in him”…I think there are many otherwise fairly decent, upstanding men walking around this world who possibly committed some kind of unwanted sexual advance in college and have no idea what kind of effect it had on the person and genuinely think of themselves as a good person. While for the person in the room with them, it was received in a completely different way. Nobody’s ever taught Aegon about consent or what a relationship is supposed to look like and his mother married his father when she was 16. So this is a very long way of saying: It’s more complicated than, “You raped somebody, this is the end of your story.”"
I wish we’d gotten more of Aegon’s story in “The Green Council”; I didn’t like how so much of the episode revolved around him but he didn’t show up until pretty late in. I did enjoy the moment between him and Alicent in the carriage on the way to his coronation, when he asked if she loved him and she smirked and called him an imbecile. As it ends up, that was improvised, as director Clare Kilner detailed: “I said [to the actors], ‘OK, if you could say whatever you wanted to each other’s character, what would you say?’ And Sara rushed in [with the idea].”
I may not have enjoyed the latest episode, but I think the talent is there to pull out a good finale. See you Sunday:
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