House of the Dragon delivers a solid finale that pulls one too many punches

For most of its first season, House of the Dragon has stuck pretty close to the text of George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, and while things haven’t been perfect, it’s mostly been the better for it. But last week’s episode, “The Green Council,” started toying with character and plot in ways that rang false. For instance, Alicent Hightower, a character who is supposed to be a complex individual with overlapping, sometimes conflicting motivations, moved to put her son Aegon on the Iron Throne…but only because she misunderstood her husband’s dying words. The show largely put aside the idea that she might do this because of her own ambitions, meaning everything she did felt flatter than it should.

Maybe the show was unwilling to paint Alicent in an unflattering light? Whatever the reason it pulled its punch, “The Green Council” was weaker for it. We can like Alicent even though her heart desires things we don’t approve of; in fact, that makes her feel more real, which will make her more likable, not less. The finale, “The Black Queen,” mostly returns to the fine shading that has made the show’s best moments so compelling, with one major exception at the end. This is a solid episode of TV, but House of the Dragon is showing some bad habits I really hope it curbs.

A long, tense day on Dragonstone

“The Green Council” left out Rhaenyra and her blacks, but “The Black Queen” drills down on them. Rhaenys Targaryen arrives on Dragonstone and breaks the bad news: Viserys Targaryen is dead, and Aegon has been crowned king.

As in Martin’s book, a pregnant Rhaenyra almost immediately goes into labor, which could not happen at a worse time. The show has featured several birth scenes over the course of this first season and this one is definitely the most graphic. I was shocked to see that they kept in some of the brutal details from the book, such as Rhaenyra screaming at the child to “get out” and going beyond the pages to show her rocking back and forth with the bloody, stillborn child in her arms afterwards.

This dances perilously close to the edge of exploitative, but I think the episode narrowly avoids that trap by in two ways. First, I bought Rhaenyra’s pain over the loss of her daughter. Even if little Visenya never breathed the air, even if Rhaenyra resented her daughter for distracting her from the political crisis of her life, she loved her. Rhaenyra takes time out of the succession crisis to mourn her child, Emma D’Arcy is convincingly bereaved, and I bought it.

The show also builds Rhaenyra’s labors into the flow of the plot. After Daemon hears the news about his brother’s death and Aegon’s coronation, he jumps into action trying to plan a war. Rhaenyra isn’t so eager to draw blood, and advises her sons Jace and Luke to check Daemon from doing anything rash. That provides some real tension. Who can stop Daemon when he’s on a tear? Are Jace and Luke up to it? This feels a lot more organic than the trumped up tension between Alicent and her father Otto last week.

Anyway, after Rhaenyra recovers, Erryk Cargyll arrives from King’s Landing and presents her with the crown of her father King Viserys Targaryen, which I guess we’re supposed to recognize on sight; I wish a bigger deal had been made of him nabbing it last week, but whatever. Daemon puts the crown on Rhaenyra’s head right then and there, and her court kneels to her. It’s a moving scene that pays off something we’ve been waiting to see since the end of the very first episode. Emma D’Arcy sells how big this moment is for Rhaenyra and director Greg Yaitanes paces it beautifully. An episode highlight.

What’s the deal with Daemon?

It’s hard not to compare “The Black Queen” to “The Green Council” because the episodes have some similar scenes. For example, I liked the bits where Rhaenyra and her lieutenants gather around the Painted Table on Dragonstone (which looks splendidly cool, by the way) and discuss what moves to make. We hear talk of which lords can be counted on and which might waver, talk of which trade routes to strangle and which positions to defend. This is the kind of dimension I want from my war dramas, and it makes me wonder why Alicent and crew didn’t get the same treatment. The Green Council jumped right from “we should make Aegon king cause Viserys told me” to a silly race to find the guy. “The Black Queen” does these parts right.

And it doesn’t lose the human element. Corlys Velaryon returns to the fray here, barely out of the woods following his fever. He’s almost ready to hang up his spurs and retire to Driftmark, but Rhaenys — inspired by Rhaenyra’s careful handling of this crisis — inspires him to throw himself into this fight. His declaration for Rheanyra feels like the big deal it is.

The fork in the road comes when Otto Hightower arrives on Dragonstone bearing terms: if Rhaenyra bends the knee to Aegon, she can keep Dragonstone and will it to Jace, and Luke will remain the heir to Driftmark. They’re not bad terms, but they’re not the Iron Throne: Rhaenyra has some thinking to do. Her father charged her with keeping the realm together so that it might be ready when the threat came from the North. Does she fight for her inheritance and plunge the realm into war or accept Otto’s terms and bend the knee to Aegon?

It’s a compelling dilemma that works because these issues have been slowly percolating for the length of the season. Rhaenyra in general has benefitted from from this gradual buildup. At the top of the episode, her son Luke despairs that he’s not “perfect” like his mom, and we laugh along with her because we’ve seen just how imperfect she can be.

Daemon Targaryen, too, is far from perfect. While Viserys’ death seems to send Rhaenyra into a contemplative mood, it dredges up all of Daemon’s old ghosts. As he takes charge while Rhaenyra is in labor, we remember that he once wanted to be king himself, and was willing to go to some extreme lengths to achieve his goal. He becomes a scary presence as grief and ambition fuel him, to the point where he grips Rhaenyra by the neck when she cites the Song of Ice and Fire prophecy as a reason to consider bending the knee.

I think the script went a bit too far there. I can believe Daemon would do this — we’re talking about a man who murdered his ex-wife with a rock here — but it risks taking him from “complicated man who does bad things” to “bad man with a complicated inner life.” Or maybe he was already there? I’m torn on this one and curious to hear the discourse.

As for the scene where he sings to Vermithor, a dragon last ridden by King Jaehaerys Targaryen, I really don’t know what to make of it. It reminds us that there are other, rider-less dragons on Dragonstone, which will be important later in the story, but we already knew that from the dialogue. It looked cool, I suppose, and I liked the mood. Maybe HBO had some extra dragon money to spend? What’s your interpretation of this one?

The spectacular, accidental death of Lucerys Velaryon

Okay, let’s get to the part of the story everybody will be talking about: Rhaenyra sends her sons Jace and Luke out on their dragons as messengers to various lords of the realm, hoping to recruit them to her cause. Jace will fly to the Eyrie and Winterfell while the younger Luke will take the shorter flight to Storm’s End to treat with Borros Baratheon.

The show did well to visit Storm’s End briefly back in Episode 4, so we’re already a little familiar with it. Unfortunately, Borros isn’t as welcoming to Luke as his father was to Rhaenyra back when she was on her courtship tour of Westeros. He’s already welcomed Aemond Targaryen, who is there on behalf of the greens and has promised to marry one of Borros’ daughters, into his hall. Now that the greens and the blacks are nominally at war, Aemond feels free to express to Luke just how ticked he is over the time Luke slashed out his eye. He threatens to take Luke’s eye in return, but Lord Borros won’t have an envoy harmed under his roof. Luke, unable to promise himself to one of Borros’ daughters since he’s already engaged to Baela Targaryen, hops on his dragon Syrax and flies off to Dragonstone to deliver his mother the bad news that Lord Borros will not be helping them. Aemond follows him into a storm, mounted on Vhagar.

This chase scene looks spectacular. There’s a maniacal energy to it as Aemond, riding a dragon that dwarfs Luke’s own, pursues his prey laughing like a bond villain. But that’s the moment people will be talking about. Confused, Luke’s much smaller and younger dragon Arrax takes it upon himself to spray Vhagar with a gout of flame, which is a mosquito bite to a creature as huge as she. Vhagar, also disobeying her rider, attacks Arrax, gnashing both dragon and rider to bits.

Our final scene takes us back to Dragonstone as Rhaenyra learns what has happened. We see war in her eyes and I get chills.

But the dragon-on-dragon violence…this was odd. Why, we have to ask ourselves, are the writers on House of the Dragon taking agency away from their flesh-and-blood characters and turning it over to CGI monsters? Why wouldn’t Aemond simply murder Luke because he wants to, rather than having his will ignored by his dragon, who will never have a line? Characters who want things and then do them are more interesting than characters whose actions aren’t really their own, but House of the Dragon keeps shielding its characters from responsibility. It did it with Alicent last week, when it boiled down her fight to sit her son on the throne to “my husband wanted it”; heaven forbid some part of her want this for herself. And now it’s pulled its punch with Aemond.

I wasn’t as put off by it this week as I was last week — Aemond clearly chased after Luke with malice aforethought, so he isn’t completely free of blame, and Luke’s death will set off a war regardless of how it happened — but it’s bad form. Maybe they want to explore a character arc for Aemond where he develops a reputation as a merciless kinslayer and eventually decides to just embrace it? That could be neat.

Basically, I question House of the Dragon’s choice to hang so much of its plot on coincidence and happenstance rather than on characters making choices and taking action. There’s a sheepishness here one could never accuse Game of Thrones of, a fear that we won’t like the characters if they act too badly. But making characters out to be victims of randomness is worse; it turns characters into spectators of their own stories. We can’t love or hate them because there’s nothing there to love or hate.

And since when don’t people love heartless villains, anyway? Game of Thrones itself is full of complicated characters who did the wrong thing and ended up becoming fan favorites, from Jaime Lannister to Cersei Lannister to the Hound. And while Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton were loathed, at least they were exciting. They weren’t perfect, but Game of Thrones let them be themselves. House of the Dragon is a good show, but it needs to have more confidence in its characters and in us watching at home, that we will love them (and hate them) as they are.

House of the Bullet Points

• Last week, I complained that Otto Hightower’s plan to send a bunch of knights to Dragonstone and kill Rhaenyra didn’t make any sense, both because it would behoove both sides not to start a war needlessly and because Dragonstone is a fortress one couldn’t get into “quickly” or “cleanly.” Well, I still think it’d be a dumb move unworthy of Otto’s intellect, but maybe it could have worked on a practical level; the time we spent on Dragonstone this episode helped clear that up. Sorry for getting mad at you, Otto.
• I liked the scene where Daemon intimidated the two Kingsguard knights into swearing anew to Rhaenyra. It’s possible he was overcorrecting — if those two guys were on Dragonstone they may have already been loyal to Rhaenyra — but he was overcorrecting in a way I could believe of Daemon. Jace being there added another element. Is his step-father someone to look up to or oppose? The more layers, the better.
• Daemon mentions that Seasmoke is still hanging out on Dragonstone. I guess he didn’t follow Laenor after he made his escape into obscurity.
• Along with delivering terms, Otto gives Rhaenyra the page she tore out of the book she and Alicent were reading way back in the first episode. It’s a nice touch, although it didn’t hit me as well as it might have had the show not bungled Alicent’s arc last week.

Episode Grade: B+

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