What the hell is going on with Daemon Targaryen in House of the Dragon season 2?

The second season of House of the Dragon is just around the corner, and the hype is starting to build to a boiling point. When last we left Westeros, Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) had killed his own nephew Lucerys Velaryon (Elliot Grihault), enraging Luke's mother Rhaenyra Targaryen (Rhaenyra Targaryen) and putting the kibosh on any hope that these two feuding factions of the Targaryen family could avoid all-out war. In season 2, we'll see open war between Queen Rhaenyra and her younger half-brother King Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney). There's two of them and only one Iron Throne. Things are going to get bloody.

One of Rhaenyra's most dangerous allies is her husband Daemon (Matt Smith), who in the first season proved mercurial, violent and ambitious to the point where even Rhaenyra could be scared of him. (Also he's her uncle, which is creepy to start.) Daemon was the breakout character of season 1; fans loved him despite or maybe because of how toxic and unpredictable he was, sometimes to the confusion of the producers. "I’m having trouble understanding it," showrunner Ryan Condal said of Daemon's popularity in 2022. "We established right out of the gate, in the pilot, that Daemon is a fascinating guy, but he’s not Ned Stark. So I didn’t see it coming… I did not think they would oddly apply this sort of super-fandom to him and try to justify every single thing he’s done as being intrinsically heroic. It simply isn’t. It’s not the case. Nor will it be in the future."

I certainly enjoyed watching Daemon. Whatever you think of the morality of his choices, he was an active character who always pushed the story forward. That's why I was confused when I started hearing Matt Smith tease a more passive arc for Daemon in the upcoming season. “We definitely meet Daemon at a point of crisis in this situation, and in many ways, it’s a different version of him,” Smith said in one intereview. “It’s one that’s much weaker.” In another, Smith said that Daemon "sort of tumbles into anonymity in a way."

"He gets sort of softer, lazier, fatter, slower. And he's sort of haunted by his demons, by ghosts, by apparitions...The weight of all the bad deeds that he's done really come home to roost, so to speak. And I think he becomes more exposed."

This is hard to square with the Daemon of season 1, who rarely seem to reckon with the morality of his questionable decisions, whether it was charging an army by himself, seducing his own niece or killing his wife with a rock to the head. So what exactly is going on with Daemon in season 2, and why?

House of the Dragon season 2 "excavates Daemon’s haunted past"

House of the Dragon is based on the book Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin, so we already know something of what Daemon will get up to in season 2. We know he'll have a hand in getting revenge on Aemond Targaryen's family for killing Lucerys, and that the revenge will be brutal in the extreme. After that, Daemon goes to the crumbling castle of Harrenhal in the Riverlands where he sets up a base of operation on behalf of his wife Rhaenyra.

Harrenhal is thought to be cursed, a reputation it's gained thanks to how many of its owners have perished in its walls. It sounds like the producers are taking this at least somewhat literally, as Daemon will have some strange experiences there. "We definitely were thinking of it as [The Shining's] Overlook Hotel. It's super fun in that it's atmospheric," said producer Sara Hess. "He can't sleep. There's weird shit going on. He's not sure if it's real or if it's in his own head. We just wanted to have unexplained things and then use that as a conduit to lay him open a little more than he would be in normal life."

This is almost certainly what Smith means when he says that Daemon will be "haunted by his demons" in season 2. It sounds like Daemon will take an internal journey, one that Ryan Condal is eager for us to see. "The story that I’m most particularly proud of this year is Daemon’s story," the showrunner told SFX Magazine. "It was very hard to break and very challenging to dramatize and film and then edit. But in the end, I think we succeeded and we stuck the landing on it. He’s still very much Daemon. But it further excavates Daemon’s haunted past. I’m excited for the fans to see it. It all comes back to the nature of his relationship to Rhaenyra. Is that as husband and wife? Is it as uncle and niece? Or is it as heir to the throne and also ran? Maybe it can be all three of those things."

Why is Daemon's story changing direction in House of the Dragon season 2?

I'm not opposed to Daemon getting a more internal story, but it feels a little odd to take arguably the most active character from the first season, the one who elicited strong reactions from every other character whenever he entered a room, and have him quietly reflect. I'm afraid that might blunt his effectiveness as a driver of the story, and at least some critics seem to agree with me. "Smith delivers a good performance, too, but the show doesn’t know what to do with Daemon," writes The New York Post in its review of the first four episodes of the new season. "Much of his plot feels like filler – an especially odd choice, given that Smith is the most famous cast member. It’s a waste of Smith for the show to bench him."

To be fair, plenty of critics didn't have any problem with Daemon's arc in season 2, with Yahoo News even singling out his chunk of the season as a highlight. "Smith matches this high bar well as Daemon, particularly when he steps into his own cerebral tale away from Rhaenyra which allows him to pull at his character's flaws and vulnerabilities," they write.

We'll see soon whether this new chapter for Daemon is worth watching; House of the Dragon returns on Sunday, June 16. But I still can't help but wonder why the producers would take this direction. I wonder if it had something to do with Condal and company being confused by how much the fans liked the unrepentantly problematic Daemon in the first season. Maybe they figured that any character who elicits that much love should feel badly about some of the very bad things he's done, and so they gave him an arc where he's haunted by the sins of his past. There are a lot.

Or maybe it's simply that Daemon doesn't have a ton to do during this stretch of Fire & Blood. He's at Harrenhal to convince the local lords to swear allegiance to Rhaenyra, and given that he has a dragon and they don't, he doesn't have much trouble doing that. So maybe they wrote a new soul-searching journey for Daemon so that he would have something to do over this stretch.

But that sounds like the kind of filler that The New York Post is upset about, and I wouldn't want that. Again, we'll see for ourselves very soon what exactly Daemon Targaryen brings to the table in House of the Dragon season 2. I have faith that he'll be as combustably watchable as ever, whether he's bashing in heads or inside his own.

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