House of the Dragon is doing something fascinating with Helaena Targaryen that could be even better than the book

The second season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon is well underway, and battle lines are being drawn across Westeros. On the one side, the Greens, led by King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney), gather their strength in King's Landing. On the other, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) calls on her allies from the island stronghold of Dragonstone. Soon, they will clash in the most bitter civil war in Westeros' history: the Dance of the Dragons.

As is so often the case in war, it is the innocents who stand to suffer the most. Aegon's sister-wife Queen Helaena (Phia Saban) falls into that category; so far, we've never seen her be cruel to a single person in House of the Dragon...yet she was at the heart of the season's first bloody act of vengeance, when the mercenaries Blood (Sam C. Wilson) and Cheese (Mark Stobbart) stole into the Red Keep on orders from Rhaenyra's husband Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) and murdered Helaena's four-year-old son Jaehaerys right before her eyes.

In the book Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin, this signals the beginning of a terrible decline for Helaena. All the signs are still there that House of the Dragon will follow the same course, but it's doing so with far more nuance than the book, which only gives us the broad-strokes view of Helaena's life through the unreliable lens of biased historians writing years after the fact. In House of the Dragon, we're seeing it first hand, and it's casting this gentle character's story in an even more heartbreaking light.

Below, we'll compare Helaena's book story with what we've seen the show. Consider this a MAJOR SPOILER WARNING: We're going to cover everything up to and including Helaena's ultimate fate in the Dance of the Dragons.

What happens to Helaena Targaryen in Fire & Blood?

Everything changes for Helaena Targaryen after Blood and Cheese kill her son Jaehaerys. Believe it or not, this child murder is far more brutal in the book, where Helaena has another younger son named Maelor. Blood and Cheese make her choose which of her sons will be killed, she reluctantly chooses the two-year-old Maelor, and then Blood and Cheese turn around and kill her older son, Jaehaerys, instead. It's a classic George R.R. Martin bit of depraved brutality, and it utterly shatters Helaena Targaryen.

Following the death of Jaehaerys, Helaena spirals into despair. Here's the passage from Fire & Blood which describes the emotional fallout:

"Though Blood and Cheese spared her life, Queen Helaena cannot be said to have survived that fateful dusk. Afterward she would not eat, nor bathe, nor leave her chambers, and she could no longer stand to look upon her son Maelor, knowing that she had named him to die. The king had no recourse but to take the boy from her and give him over to their mother, the Dowager Queen Alicent, to raise as if he were her own. Aegon and his wife slept separately thereafter, and Queen Helaena sank deeper and deeper into madness, whilst the king raged, and drank, and raged."

That slide into madness eventually has tragic consequences for Helaena. After Rhaenyra captures King's Landing later in the Dance, Helaena is made a prisoner and eventually takes her own life by jumping out of a window of the Red Keep. Fire & Blood speculates about the exact cause, but it's left ambiguous. Perhaps it was just the brutality of the war as a whole finally breaking her will to live? Perhaps Rhaenyra's advisor Mysaria told Helaena that her other son, Maelor, was torn apart by a mob, and that drove the gentle queen to end her own suffering? We just don't know.

House of the Dragon is giving Helaena's grief more nuance than the book

Without Maelor in the mix, the Blood and Cheese incident and its fallout are fundamentally different. Thus far, it seems that House of the Dragon has cut Maelor from the series, and Helaena isn't suffused with guilt at the mere sight of her surviving daughter, Jaehaera. After all, she never named Jaehaera for death like she did with Maelor in the book. Instead, she protectively grabbed her daughter and fled the room while Jaehaerys was being murdered.

What's far more interesting is the way Helaena has been treated since the Blood and Cheese incident. Helaena has always been a quirky character on House of the Dragon, prone to muttering prophetic words that seem impossible to parse for those around her. But since the assassination of Jaehaerys, Helaena is actually being portrayed as more lucid than we've ever seen her.

When her mother Alicent Hightower informs her that the two of them must go to Jaehaerys' very public funeral, Helaena makes the rational argument that she would rather not be paraded through the streets in front of strangers. "I don't want them closer! I don't know them," she tells Alicent. After having her son murdered by cutthroats, Helaena understandably craves familiarity and comfort, not a crowd of people she doesn't know gawking at her. She ultimately goes through with the funeral, but her anxiety in that situation as a grieving mother who needs space and is denied it is palpable and extremely reasonable. That's not a slide into madness; it's emotional torture in the name of politics.

There's even evidence that House of the Dragon cut part of the funeral where Helaena bolted from the carriage and ran from the overbearing crowd, which would have been the closest thing to instability we would have seen of her in that episode since it would have likely put her life at risk. Instead, it leans into her panic and never shows her leaving the carriage, giving the impression that despite her feelings of unease she made it through the funeral without further incident.

Following the funeral, we get a heartbreaking scene where Helaena and Aegon cross paths in the Red Keep. As Jaehaerys' parents, these two were the most deeply affected by his murder out of anyone. Unable to offer any words to his wife, Aegon breaks eye contact and quickly walks away. The following shot of Helaena nodding to herself and accepting Aegon's decision to run from the conversation is heartwrenching. You can see the gears turning in her head as she accepts that she won't find any comfort from her husband and brother, the one other person in the world who might fully understand the depth of her grief.

And Aegon does understand. We see him lose his cool multiple times in the episode as he wrangles with the horror of what was done to his family. His final scene of "Rhaenyra the Cruel" shows him weeping alone, without anyone to comfort him. Helaena and Aegon are on parallel, tragic journeys through their grief.

In Fire & Blood, Helaena Targaryen is depicted as declining into madness in a way that feels Shakespearean and poetic. But House of the Dragon is grounding that journey by showing us how she didn't just snap and go off the deep end. Instead, she's being denied consolation and healthy opportunities to process her grief at every turn. That has the potential to make her slide into tragedy much more nuanced than in the novel. I'm both dreading it and can't wait to see what actor Phia Saban does with the weighty material she's being given. So far, she's been knocking it out of the park.

The tragedy of Helaena Targaryen continues in House of the Dragon season 2; new episodes air Sunday nights on Max and HBO.

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