House of the Dragon is in fine form in slow, steady, riveting Episode 202

The second episode of House of the Dragon season 2, "Rhaenyra the Cruel," starts very strong. Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen, the son of King Aegon Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Queen Helaena (Phia Saban), has been killed within the walls of the Red Keep, previously thought all but impregnable. King Aegon rages. He smashes his father's model of Old Valyria, swings a sword at his attendants, flings cups and plates across the room. "I will kill them all!" he screams. "I declare war!" He's incredulous that his council could do anything but bend the whole of their military against his half-sister Rhaenyra Targaryen, who is obviously behind this plot.

Actor Tom Glynn-Carney was the highlight of the season premiere and continues to stand out here. It helps that he gets to be the raw nerve in a roomful of cool heads. Aegon's mother Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) feels like Jaehaerys' death may be divine punishment for her sleeping with Lord Commander Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) of the Kingsguard, but she holds it together for the sake of her son. And Aegon's grandfather Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) claims to be in pain, but it's hard to tell if anything but ice runs through those veins. He sees opportunity in Jaehaerys' death: if they blame Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy) for killing this child, it will be hard for the realm to see her as anything but a monster, turning the tide of war in their favor.

To leverage the moment, Otto arranges a royal funeral for the young prince, with Alicent and Queen Helaena riding beyond the tiny body in the wagon. While Aegon deals with his grief by lashing out at everything around him, Helaena draws within herself, refusing to talk about her mother's affair and passing through the funeral procession like she's in a dream. The camera lingers on sympathy confetti drifting through the air, on Helaena's muted senses through the gauze of her veil, on the solumn faces of the stranger smallfolk. She nearly has a panic attack as the crowds reach out to her, with only her mother's insistent hand keeping her from tumbling over the edge.

This early section succeeds in capturing the torpor that follows a traumatic shock. For the people Jaehaerys has left behind, everything is happening in slow motion, like in the opening shot of a handmaid carrying blood-soaked sheets through the halls of the Red Keep. Who is a suspect? Who's innocent? Confused residents of the Red Keep mill about the inner courtyard in a daze. Doors usually left ajar are closed and walls open into strange tunnels. Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) finds a coin the murderers forgot to steal and holds it up in front of his eye. It's surreal. It's pain without the prospect of healing. It's a great sequence.

House of the Dragon Episode 202 review, "Rhaenyra the Cruel"

This pain drives the Green family members apart. If there's one theme that runs throughout the sections in the Red Keep, it's the lasting damage of disconnection. There's a small, heartbreaking moment when King Aegon is coming down the stairs in the Red Keep as Queen Helaena ascends them. These two are brother and sister. They are husband and wife. They're both in pain, and they pause to look at each other, but they both keep walking. They're compounding their pain by keeping it to themselves, because they were never taught to do anything else.

House of the Dragon has been sold as a story of generational trauma, which was obvious in season 1 when the story jumped ahead years between episodes and we could see how the sins of the older generations were visited upon the younger. But it's still that show. There's a scene towards the end the episode where Alicent and Otto have a brief moment of connection, and Alicent comes perilously close to revealing her affair with Criston. Otto cuts her off. "I do not wish to hear it."

In the saddest moment of the episode, Alicent leaves her father to return to her room, where she sees Aegon — brash, blustering, angry Aegon — crying in the corner. He's violent, he wants vengeance, he's comtemptible, but he's also a father who's lost his son, a new king who's in way over his head and has nowhere to turn. And as much as I wanted Alicent to go to him, she doesn't have the skills either. She leaves and visits Criston Cole, hitting and shoving him until he pushes her against the wall and she can lose herself in the haze of hate sex.

House of the Dragon is one of those shows where it's hard to pinpoint one "villain," but if I had to pick someone, I'd choose Otto Hightower. His lack of empathy has spread to his children and their children, and it's tearing them all apart from the inside. In another strong scene, Otto becomes furious when Aegon, having discovered that a ratcatcher was one of the two brigands who snuck into the Red Keep and killed his son, has had all the Red Keep ratcatchers executed and hanged upon the walls, where the people of King's Landing can gawk at them. Otto rightly points out that this is a "thoughtless, feckless, self-indulgent" move. Any sympathy they gained over Jaehaerys' murder may now be undone.

It's cathartic to watch Otto chew out his vicious blundering grandson like this, but it's worth noting that Otto only shows emotion when his plan to turn the tide of public opinion goes awry, not when his great-grandson is brutally murdered. "Your father was right about you," he sneers at Aegon, who swiftly strips Otto of his position of Hand of the King and gives the honor to Criston Cole.

And I'm not saying that Aegon is absolved of his terrible decisions because Otto was a bad grandpa or Alicent a mean mommy. Aegon is every bit the savage screw-up Otto thinks he is. But House of the Dragon has emphasized that these characters are caught up in something bigger than they are; call it history, family, destiny or whatever you like. Maybe that's why this story sometimes seems driven by coincidence and mistake rather than purposeful action. There's a sense of tragic gravity that wasn't there in Game of Thrones, a feeling that some of these people were doomed from the day they were born. That, I think, is why I sympathize with Aegon. He's thrashing wildly trying to resist the sucking pull of fate. But that just makes it easier to see that he's sinking.

Scenes From an Incestuous Marriage

So the Red Keep is a swirling vortex of dysfunction this season and I'm loving it. Things are more straightforward over on Dragonstone, where Rhaenyra is shocked to hear about what happened to Jaehaerys, and flabbergasted that the Greens would blame her for something she had nothing to do with. As she tries to puzzle her way through this quagmire, her husband Daemon (Matt Smith) sits unusually quiet, trying to look as close to innocent as a wife-murdering neice-seducer can manage.

Of course, Daemon was the one who hired the two guys who killed Jaehaerys. Sure, he wanted them to kill Aemond in revenge for the death of Rhaenyra's son Luke, but that's not what ended up happening and Rhaenyra isn't in the mood for excuses. The two have a long-in-coming conversation about their relationship.

Everyone brings it in this scene. Writer Sara Hess lets the pair hash out a lot of the problems that have been bubbling up since the start of the series. Does Daemon really love Rhaenyra or did he marry her to cling to power? Was his brother King Viserys (Paddy Considine) a coward or just wise enough not to trust someone as unstable as Daemonr? Can Daemon recognize Rhaenyra as his queen and ruler, or is he still holding out hope that he might sit the throne? Director Clare Kilner lets the scene play out without interruption and actors Emma D'Arcy and Matt Smith kill it. I imagine this scene will play even better if you've recently watched season 1 and have their history top of mind.

After that, Daemon leaves Dragonstone, maybe to establish a military toehold in Rhaenyra's name at Harrenahl, maybe to stand on a mountain and curse the heavens for making him a second son, it's hard to tell with him. I thought it a little odd that Rhaenrya let such an important military asset just kind of fly off without making sure she knew what he was doing, but it was a long day.

Between the chaos in the Red Keep and the Daemon-Rhaenyra blow-up, this episode burns hot and bright for the full first half. It slows down at this point to take care of some business. Rhaenrya meets with the spymaster Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), who furnished Daemon with the names of the mercenaries who killed Jaehaerys. Mysaria is more relatable and likable here than she ever was in the first season, which never fully felt like it had a handle on her. Also, she's lost her bizarre accent. All of this bodes well.

Farewell, My Brother

Meanwhile, in the Red Keep, a shame-ridden, judgmental Criston Cole hatches a plan to take out Rhaenyra: he emotionally manipulates a knight of the Kingsguard, Ser Arryk Cargyll (Luke Tittensor), into traveling to Dragonstone and killing Rhaenyra; the plan is for him to pose as his own twin Erryk Cargyll (Elliot Tittensor), also a Kingsguard knight. When the Greens installed Aegon on the throne last season, Arryk remained loyal to King Aegon while Erryk split for Dragonstone to follow Rhaenyra. It's an improbable, somewhat goofy drama amidst this slow-moving traumatic tractor pull of an episode.

So, like the season 2 premiere, this episode features someone infiltrating a fortress on an assassination mission. I think I liked this one better than Blood and Cheese's intrusion into the Red Keep. It's paced well, Arryk has a couple of near misses with his brother, and obviously the whole thing ends with a sword fight between the two twins. Erryk ends up killing Arryk, thwarting the assassination attempt on Rhaenyra. But then, unable to live with what he's done, he literally falls on his sword.

Although now that I think about it, we don't actually confirm which twin died first. Wouldn't it be deliciously ironic if Arryk had killed Erryk, but then instead of going through with his mission to kill Rhaenyra ended his own life instead? That would underline the point the show is trying to make about war tearing at the soul until you don't even remember why you're fighting.

I feel like the sequence needs some extra punch like that, because even though it was well-done, I couldn't help wondering how much better it could have been had it stuck closer to the text of the show's source material: George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood. In that book, after the coup but before Arryk is sent to kill Rhaenyra, the brothers meet and try to convince each other to switch sides. Neither budges, and they part knowing that the next time they see each other, they'll be enemies. Without getting to know the characters and what they mean to each other beforehand, this fight sequence can only have so much power. The scene is as good as it could be under the circumstances, but it could have been better.

Regardless, "Rhaenyra the Cruel" is still a very solid episode. I think most of the best stuff is in the front half, leading to a subdued final run, but the episode got a lot done in an hour and 12 minutes.

House of the Bullet Points

• Aemond visits a brothel and lays his weary brow upon the same madam he talked to in "The Green Council" from season 1. So he's another member of Team Green incapable of communicating with his loved ones. Naked and curled in a ball, Aemond looks vulnerable and fragile.
• Rhaenyra doesn't want her son Jacaerys to patrol the skies near King's Landing, presumably because she's afraid of losing him like she lost Luke. But she has no problem assigning the job to her step-daughter Baela.
• We check in on a couple of smallfolk characters who will be important later, including the blacksmith Hugh Hammer and the shipwright Addam of Hull, who gets a nice contemplative moment where he spies the dragon Seasmoke flying through the air over Driftmark.
• Speaking of smallfolk below is a picture of actor Tom Bennett, who plays one of the people looking up at the dead ratcatches hanging off the walls of the Red Keep. Bennett plays Ulf White, another important peasant we'll get to know better later.

• The Red Keep set is enormous and incredible. The characters regularly move from room to room as the camera follows them, and it looks like you could move in your furniture and live there. After the show is over, I hope HBO turns this into a theme park or an Airbnb or something.

Episode Grade: B+

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