5 best moments from House of the Dragon season 1 (and 5 worst)

Fourth Best Moment: Rhaenyra’s wild night in “King of the Narrow Sea”

The fourth episode of House of the Dragon, “King of the Narrow Sea,” is where it really starts to get good. The show takes risks here. Oh my god, is Daemon really going to try and seduce his niece? Oh my god, is Rhaenyra really going to sleep with Criston Cole? Rhaenyra’s night of self-discovery is thrilling from start to finish. As Rhaenyra escapes her room to see life beyond the palace, the show effectively mixes an innocent energy you might get from a Disney movie with a decidedly more mature HBO twist. It’s exciting TV.

“King of the Narrow Sea” also does a great job with the morning after, as nighttime explorations give way to lies and shame in the harsh light of day. This is one of the best written episodes of the season. Everything has its place, every scene contrasts or compliments the last, and the characters emerge as complicated people who do good things for bad reasons, bad things for good reasons, and everything in between.

And yes, I’m kind of cheating by essentially calling the entire episode one of the best “moments” of the season, but “King of the Narrow Sea” is so of a piece it’s hard to separate out any one part of it and call it the “best moment.” The episode is just good, front to back. It’s the high point of the first half of the season.

Fourth Worse Moment: Laenor Velaryon is spared

At the end of “Driftmark,” which is all around one of the best episodes of the season, Rhaenyra tells Daemon that they should be together. The only problem: they’re uncle and niece…well, actually, that isn’t a problem for this family. No, the real problem is that Rhaenyra is already in a political marriage to Laenor Velaryon. As Rhaenyra and Daemon talk about killing Laenor so that they can wed, we see their plot play out: Laenor fights his lover, Laenor’s mother finds his corpse, and Daemon and Rhaenyra are married. It’s a bold, shocking moment…and then it’s revealed that Laenor is fine, and that Rhaenyra and Daemon helped him to fake his own death.

I didn’t like this fakeout. To start, it’s one of those plot twists that makes less sense the more you think about it. Why did we see Daemon approach Laenor’s lover Qual Correy all sinister-like if the four of them were amicably planning this together? How long does it take a fire to blacken someone’s face beyond recognition like that, and is there no other way Laenor’s parents might be able to identify him? And if this is supposed to prevent us from thinking of Rhaenyra and Laenor as heartless, what are we to make of the fact that Daemon still has a kill a random dude for the plan to work?

But mostly, I don’t like that this twist pulls its punch when it comes to Rhaenyra and Daemon, who are more interesting characters if they kill Laenor than if they spare him. This show is supposed to be about morally grey characters who slowly destroy themselves, who in their heedless ambition hollow out their own souls and realize too late that they’ve given up something precious they can never get back. Killing Laenor, a good man and Rhaenyra’s husband, is very much in keeping with that. But then the episode reveals that they’re actually super nice…it’s lame, plain and simple.