The season 2 premiere of House of the Dragon, "A Son for a Son," ends with one of the most famous scenes from George R.R. Martin's novel Fire & Blood: Daemon Targaryen has sent a pair of assassins known only as Blood and Cheese into the Red Keep with instructions for them to kill Aemond Targaryen, who killed Daemon's step-son Luke the episode prior. Daemon wants "a son for a son." But Blood and Cheese can't find Aemond, so they settle on killing another son: the young Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen, son of King Aegon Targaryen and his sister-wife Helaena, who happens to be in the room when Blood and Cheese find her. The mercenaries saw off Jahaerys' head while Helaena picks up her other child, Jaehaerys' twin sister Jaehaera, and gets out of there as fast as possible.
This is a harrowing scene. But watching it, I didn't feel much of anything, which can't have been what the producers intended. I should have been horrified and distressed. What happened?
Well, one option is that I'm a sociopathic monster, but all my therapists agree that's not true. Another is that the scene is much changed from the book. In Fire & Blood, Blood and Cheese lie in wait for Helaena and the kids rather than stumble upon them. They also have to get rid of some guards; there are none in the show, which beggars belief a bit. Also, in the book, Helaena has another son named Maelor, and Blood and Cheese make her choose which of her sons will die only to murder the other one instead.
But here's the thing: even after the show cut all these elements, it's still a scene where a mother watches her young son get decapitated. That should get a reaction out of me, but it didn't. I think the problem lies elsewhere, and after mulling over it for a couple of weeks, I think I've figured out where.
From a certain point of view
In cinema, sympathy is established with point of view. The longer we spend seeing the world through someone else's perspective, the more sympathetic we become. It's why you can make a movie about a criminal and get the audience to like them by the end; the more we understand someone, the easier it is to sympathize with them.
House of the Dragon has a lot of characters, and we don't get to spend as much time with all of them as we'd like. By the time of "A Son for a Son," we haven't spent much time with Helaena Targaryen. That doesn't mean we can't sympathize when her son is murdered in front of her — that's very easy to do since the situation is so extreme and terrifying — but getting to walk around in her shoes would have deepened our sense of identification.
I went back and counted, and Blood and Cheese actually get around double the amount of screentime that Helaena gets in this episode, about 10 minutes versus five minutes. We see Blood and Cheese when Daemon approaches them with his mission; we see them sneak through the halls of the Red Keep, even walking through the throne room as Aegon lounges around with his buddies; we see them argue about how to proceed; we see them search the royal apartments, and finally we see them carry out their task.
We get a good number of perspectives on Blood and Cheese during this one episodes. I wouldn't call them fully rounded characters, but the show makes the most of their 10 minutes onscreen. In contrast, outside of a brief scene earlier in the episode, we only see Helaena after Blood and Cheese have found her; we only see her terrified for her children and under extreme stress. And even in that earlier scene, she's prognosticating about the terrors to come.
I actually think the episode is constructed so that we sympathize more with Blood and Cheese than with Helaena. We get more angles on the interlopers. We see that Cheese doesn't want to go into the royal apartments and only does it when Blood makes him. Are they going to make it out? This episode presents these events as Blood and Cheese's story, not Helaena's. I think that's why the scene didn't make much of an impact on me.
Hindsight theater: How should Blood and Cheese have happened?
Mind you, I don't think the producers meant for the scene to come off this way, but the episode is written and directed (by Ryan Condal and Alan Taylor respectively) in such a way that makes it kind of inevitable. So if the producers wanted to me to be sobbing for Helaena by the end, how should they have gone about it?
I think the answer is simple: put us in her perspective. Around the time that Blood and Cheese have their argument, I think we should have left them behind and followed Helaena for a few minutes. We should have seen her in a different context before the horror starts; we could have seen her saying goodnight to her mother, tucking her kids into bed, reading, knitting, whatever Helaena does in her downtime, anything to establish a baseline that's about to be violently upended. We should be in Helaena's shoes when Blood and Cheese find her, not the other way around. That way, we'll be firmly within Helaena's point of view when things go south, and have no question about where our sympathies should lie.
Of course, this is just all me speculating, pretty uselessly since the episode is in the can. I've been enjoying the second season of House of the Dragon and look forward to more, but the Blood and Cheese issues have been nagging at me for weeks and I'm happy to get my little theory out there.
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