Tom Glynn-Carney explains why Aegon joins that deadly midair battle on House of the Dragon

The most recent episode of House of the Dragon, "The Red Dragon and the Gold," climaxed with an electrifying battle where three dragons fought in the sky. Rhaenys Targaryen flew her dragon Meleys, Aegon Targaryen flew his dragon Sunfyre, and Aemond Targaryen flew his dragon Vhagar. These three family members tore each other to pieces. By the end, one was alive, one was dead, and one...well, TBD.

Director Alan Taylor talked about filming the spectacular sequence with Entertainment Weekly. “The more I read the script, the more I realized it's not really a battle. It's something else,” he said. “It's an army attacking a castle, but the castle is never the point. It’s all a ruse to draw out a dragon. The challenge was to shake the story momentum, given that you're pretending to do one thing but actually doing something else. And when the dragons turn up, it really becomes about them.”

Does it ever. While part of the clash goes according to plan, Aegon's arrival on Sunfyre surprises everyone; before the battle, Aegon is ignored by his council, humiliated by his brother and talked down to by his mother (and let's all remember that his son was brutally murdered just a few episodes ago). Feeling miserable, he gets drunk and decides to ride in on Sunfyre like the burning hero he would like to be.

“It's all about concealing vulnerability with Aegon,” explained actor Tom Glynn-Carney. “He doesn't do a great, great job of it, but his intention is to give this impression that he's this formidable, strong, stoic influence across the entirety of Westeros, and yet really he's a young boy trying to work it out, not really knowing where to start.”

Taylor puts it more bluntly: “He is in the battle for the stupidest of reasons. Still, he was trying to do the right thing. The poor guy, he was trying to be heroic, he was trying to find a purpose for himself.”

You can't blame Glynn-Carney for wanting his character to come off as favorably as possible, even if his actions are reckless at best and braindead at worst. He even did his best to make Aegon look good riding the dragon, even though Aegon isn't that experinced. “I was riding it as if it were a horse,” Glynn-Carney said. “When you're riding a horse, you neutralize the horse's movements with your body so you can stay as steady and with the rhythm of the horse as possible. But what they wanted me to do was be at the mercy of the dragon and let it throw me about. I think it was maybe somewhere in their intentions to make Aegon look like he didn't know what he was doing, whereas in my head, I was like, ‘I want to look heroic, I want to look great, I want to look like I really know my way around this dragon.’ Everyone else just looks so f---ing cool, and then you get Aegon, who's clueless.”

So is Aegon dead or what? (Beware SPOILERS below)

Aegon has been my personal favorite character of the season so far; he is reckless, and feckless, and violent, and drunk. But he also earnestly wants to do a good job, but can't because he's in hopelessly over his head. He isn't getting support from the people around him, and oh yeah, his son was brutally murdered a few episodes back. My heart can't help but go out to this idiot.

Aegon and Sunfyre go down during the battle, and at the end of the episode we see them both prostrate on the forest floor. Sunfyre moves a little, but Aegon lies still. Is he dead?

Well, showrunner Ryan Condal is trying to keep that a mystery. “We come out of it with Aegon in an unknown condition. Certainly his dragon is not in good shape,” he said. Speaking to The A.V. Club, Alan Taylor agreed that keeping the ending ambiguous mattered

"It was important to be unclear about Aegon’s fate because Criston doesn’t know exactly what has happened. It’s also important to keep everything that happened at Rook’s Rest a secret because the realm cannot find out."

At the same time, the TV rule still applies: unless we get absolute confirmation that a character is dead, there's a good chance he's still alive. Aegon doesn't appear in the trailer for the next episode, but it's hinted he's still around.

Finally, if you've read George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, the book on which House of the Dragon is based, then you know that Aegon survives. He's beaten and battered and never quite the same again, but he lives, at least on the page. I can't imagine House of the Dragon would be so bold to kill Aegon off when he still has so much left to do in the book, but I guess we'll find out when the show returns on HBO and Max this Sunday night.

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