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

Second Best Moment: King Viserys watches his family get along at dinner

If Episode 9 is the worst episode of the show so far, then Episode 8, “The Lord of the Tides,” is the best. That said, it’s a very quiet affair, revolving around the final days of King Viserys I Targaryen as he tries one last time to get the warring branches of his family to make amends.

The attempt comes to a head at a richly textured family dinner scene, where Viserys takes off his mask to reveal the ruin that’s become of his face and pleads with his wife, his daughter, his brother, his advisor and his grandchildren to put aside their differences, if not for the realm then for him.

And it almost works! Watching Viserys watch his family have a nice time together is unexpectedly moving, even if Aemond ruins everything not a minute after Viserys leaves the room. For one second, Viserys got to think that he made good. After everything he’s been through, after all the mistakes he’s made (and the mistake yet to come), we want that for him. We want that for everybody. That it ultimately falls apart anyway just makes this scene sadder and more beautiful.

Second Worst Moment: Rhaenys Targaryen interrupts Aegon’s coronation

In general, House of the Dragon wants to be a show for adults. That means the writers think first about what the characters feel, think and do; and second about how cool this or that will look onscreen. Ideally you want both, and the show does spectacle right on several occasions — the dragon chase scene in the season finale comes to mind — but the end of Episode 9 is an example of prioritizing spectacle over character and story.

This is the scene where Rhaenys Targaryen steals down into the Dragonpit during Aegon’s coronation and then burrows up from under the floor in the midst of the ceremony. (How did she not hurt her head? Whatever, don’t think about it.) She stares down the greens for a moment before flying away.

The most galling thing about this scene is the hypocritical framing. Rhaenys is presented as both a badass (she has the cool armor, she has the cool dragon, she gets the hero shots) and as merciful (she doesn’t kill the greens even though she has the chance). But the episode pays next to no mind to how she manslaughters dozens — maybe hundreds — of innocent people who were corralled in here to watch the coronation. I wasn’t in the writers room when they came up with this, but it reads as a “wouldn’t this be neat” kind of idea that they didn’t think through the implications of at all.

Rhaenys’ interruption also takes focus away from Aegon, the new king, and the greens at a time when we really need to be getting to know how they operate as a unit apart from Team Rhaenyra. The show did not trust that Aegon’s coronation would be compelling enough on its own and felt obligated to toss in a mindless action scene of the kind that never quite feels right on a Game of Thrones show. And the senseless violence cuts against the central tension of the final two episodes of the season: that neither side wants to draw first blood, which is what’s supposed to make Aemond’s murder of Lucerys in the finale hit so hard. Episode 9 undermines itself at every turn.