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

Best Moment from House of the Dragon: Viserys walks into the Iron Throne room to defend his daughter

Yes, the top two moments of the show so far are both from Episode 8. What can I say? “The Lord of the Tides” is really good.

We’ve talked about some of the drawbacks of the time skip format the show chose for its first season. But it paid benefits too. By this point in the season, we’d watched King Viserys slowly degrade over the course of nearly 20 years. In Episode 8, we see what his disease has done to him, but we also know him; we know his spirit is still strong. So to watch him drag his broken body across the floor to the Iron Throne in front of everybody just so he can keep defending his daughter…I get misty just watching the clip. It’s the most powerful moment of the season, and it’s just an old man trying to get into a chair.

This scene also pays off the roller coaster relationship between Viserys and his younger brother Daemon, who’d had their differences over the years. A great scene shows you who characters really are. Under all the dithering and indecisiveness, Viserys is a guy who believes in keeping his family together; and under all the smarm and violence, Daemon is a guy who just wants his big brother to be proud of him.

What a great scene.

Worst Moment from House of the Dragon: Criston Cole kills a guy at a wedding and no one cares

Okay: lemme set the stage. The young Kingsguard knight Criston Cole has recently rejected Rhaenyra’s offer for them to continue their relationship clandestinely. His honor won’t allow him to contemplate that kind of a romance, and we assume that it’s eating him up inside. Meanwhile, Joffrey Lonmouth, the lover of Rhaenyra’s fiancée Laenor Velaryon, assumes Criston is a little more worldly than that and approaches him about entering into an alliance of sorts: Joffrey, Criston, Laenor and Rhaenrya are all involved in this love rectangle, it would be bad for all of them if it got out, so why shouldn’t they protect each other and keep each other’s secrets?

Well, Joffrey didn’t know that Criston has repressed every emotion he’s ever felt. Criston snaps and beats Joffrey to death in a bloody, brutal scene, right there at the wedding feast for Laenor and Rhaenyra.

Apart from the show choosing to indulge in the Bury Your Gays trope without doing anything to freshen it up, I actually don’t have problems with the progression of events here. Sure, this scene would have been more powerful if we’d known Criston and Joffrey a bit better before it happened, but it works. Criston is a psychotic incel; psychotic incels exist.

The big problem with this scene is what comes after, or rather, what doesn’t. Criston Cole has just beaten a man to death at the wedding of the daughter of the king. And not just any man: an anointed knight in service to House Velaryon, the powerful house that the king is trying to win to his side, and who was here as a guest, not as a guard or combatant, and who has a special relationship with the king consort to be. And yet, Criston Cole is allowed to just…walk away from this. In the next episode we pick up with him 10 years later and there’s no indication that he was ever executed, exiled or even punished.

In Fire & Blood, Alicent Hightower speaks for Criston and gets him off the hook…but that’s after he goes a little too far during a tourney fight against Joffrey — y’know, an event where two people are supposed to be smacking each other with weapons — and Joffrey ends up dead. I can imagine Alicent arguing that it was a tragic accident — we even saw a tourney get bloody in the premiere episode; it’s unfortunate but it happens. But how in the hell could she argue that Criston beating a wedding guest to death in front of tons of witnesses was in any way excusable?

The answer is, of course, that she can’t. No one can. The writers changed the circumstances of Joffrey’s death but didn’t change anything else to match; they just assumed the “Alicent gets him off” beat would still work. They’re so confident that we don’t even see her trying to convince her husband the king. And maybe they could have skipped that beat had Criston killed Joffrey during a tourney like in the book — again, accidents happen — but beating a wedding guest to death? We needed to see how Criston got out of that one. This was not something the writers can assume we assume.

I think what rankles most about this turn is that it makes Criston a walking, talking impossibility. Whenever I see him onscreen after this, I’m always reminded that he’s here because the writers failed to write him a plausible origin story. And because he’s an important character who gets up to a lot of important stuff, that hurts. This is the low point of the season for me.

And that’s that! What moments, good or bad, did we miss?

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