House of the Dragon Recap: You Win or You Die
We begged for a dragon fight all season. We just had to see dragons fighting.
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Not Rhaenys. Anyone but Rhaenys.
Much like on Game of Thrones, the good guys of House of the Dragon always appear on the verge of collapse. In a single swoop, Queen Rhaenyra lost the lone dovish member of her small council and an experienced dragon. RIP Meleys.
And yet, my distress on these pages is somewhat performative. I can’t care too much because, unlike on Game of Thrones, it’s not clear how good the good guys are in the first place. Without Rhaenys’s steady hand, they’re undoubtedly worse.
What is clear is that season two has finally found its engine. Divvying up the map of Westeros in a succession of bloodless encounters hasn’t been riveting, but it’s lent the series orientation. The sides of the war need to sack castles to gain men, and they need men because “this war will not be won with dragons alone but with dragons flying behind armies of men,” Aemond tells Aegon’s council. At least theoretically. As evidenced by the Battle for Rook’s Rest, land armies are mere diversions, scraps of tinder by which dragon victories can be measured. Weapons win wars.
So, what is the score going into Rook’s Rest? By then, Ser Criston Cole’s host captured the lead for the Greens, having taken Rosby and Stokeworth peaceably and Duskendale with slightly more effort, though we only glimpsed the aftermath of the fighting. Along the way, Criston’s also earned himself the starry nickname “Kingmaker,” though it’s so sure to rankle Aegon that one has to wonder if Criston’s enemies started it. Ser Gwayne, too, has been impressed enough by Criston’s assault on the crownlands that he now addresses him as “my good Lord Hand” with only a touch of sass and smirk.
And Daemon? Like last week, Daemon still only has Harrenhal and insomnia. He dreams of beheading teenage Rhaenyra, who insults him in Valyrian from the Iron Throne; as her metal crown scrapes the dark flagstone floor, her decapitated head continues taunting him. But dream sequences are a lazy form of character development. As a person who sleeps, I know firsthand that you can dream pretty crazy shit that doesn’t mean anything. On the other hand, I don’t need dismal nightmares to tell me that Daemon’s jealous of his wife and desperate for his dead brother’s approval. I doubt these dreams are even revealing anything to the dreamer. Daemon knows he runs on rancor.
The king consort does finally arrange that meeting with Grover Tully, though it’s Grover’s young grandson, the future Lord Paramount of the Riverlands, that shows up instead. Daemon insults young Tully by wishing his absent grandsire a hasty trip to the grave. As is the show’s way, this insult will surely be relevant, yet it’s impossible to see its relevance from here. Instead, Daemon decides to engage directly with the hawkish Blackwoods. They are “men of action,” like himself, a man who has performed almost zero actions since fleeing Dragonstone.
Who else has blond hair, a dragon, and a heart rotted with resentment? Aegon, too, is simmering with petulance this week. He’s pissy over Criston’s so-called “kingmaking.” He’s frustrated that Larys has allowed the dreary Harrenhal to (tactically) fall to Rhaenyra. And he’s fuming that Aemond and Criston have schemed behind his back to take Rook’s Rest. He’s mad at Alicent for essentially telling him to “shut up and dribble” when he goes to mummy with his woes of disempowerment. And, deep down, I think Aegon’s mad at himself for not paying better attention in Valyrian lessons and thereby getting schooled in the ancient tongue of the nobleborn by his freaky little brother.
To be fair to Aegon, council life does seem like one endlessly recycled conversation. Oh, drats, we need to requisition more livestock to feed our dragons. Boohoo, the smallfolk are suffering. It’s the same old story each week on Dragonstone, too. Where is Rhaenyra? (She still hasn’t returned from her secret trip to King’s Landing by the beginning of the episode.) Why won’t she, you know, do anything? Corlys saunters into their meeting to admonish these men for doing the same thing he’s always admonishing them for doing: Nothing much.
House of the Dragon loves to draw a parallel, and this week is Drinks Week. Alicent is handling a toy dragon — itself a callback to Rhaenyra in “The Burning Mill” — when the Grand Maester arrives with the moon tea she ordered for a friend, wink wink. The medicine has historically been effective, so I think we can trust the dowager queen will not be having the Kingmaker’s baby. But it does leave her a bit addled, so much so that she admits Larys to her rooms with the empty cup still on the table. Lamely, Alicent tells him she’s been laid up by lamprey pie, which caused me to google lampreys. (Holy shit, what was wrong with the first person who hooked a lamprey, peered into its toothy-sucking mouth, and thought, “Looks good enough to eat!”)
Something I enjoy about Larys is that his love of secrets is nothing compared to his love of immediately lording a secret over someone. He lets Alicent know he knows she’s had the abortion juice. He lets her know he knows she’s sleeping with Criston. He even manages to let her know he knows Viserys didn’t truly choose Aegon. How does Larys know everything he knows? Who knows. As Alicent, Olivia Cooke has been given little to do this season but host these pithy little chats with men, but the actor consistently makes herself into a compelling foil for whatever their foibles. To counter Larys’ cryptic insinuations, she goes steely. To counter Aegon’s sulking, she’s sharp and unsentimental.
The other drink on Drinks Week doesn’t have a name. For me, this is as good a reason as any not to down it, maybe just a sip at a time. But Daemon’s haunting dreams continue: he’s being pursued around Larys’ decrepit castle; he imagines himself one-eyed like his nephew Aemond. Eventually, Daemon chases his shadows to the castle kitchen, where Alys Rivers — a Strong bastard who lives at Harrenhal — makes him a potion to help him achieve the sleep that’s eluding him. It’s not his fault, she says. Harrenhal was built where ancient weirwood trees once stood, and there’s a long curse on those that felled them. Like her absent Lord Larys, Alys appears to be a student of deduction. Daemon has sent no ravens since his arrival; no ravens means a quarrel with the wife. And the reason to fight with the wife is self-evident: He covets her throne. Anyway, the potion doesn’t work. Or maybe it works perfectly, leaving Daemon even more incapacitated. The man can’t remember summoning the Blackwoods or why he did so. He imagines his past right in front of him, pouring him a glass of water in Harrenhal.
Harrenhal, Harrenhal, Harrenhal. It’s the castle that Aemond and Daemon have both identified as strategically significant since the start of the season, and yet somehow war breaks out in the east over Rook’s Rest, a shabby coastal pocket castle no one’s ever heard of. How inconsequential is Rook’s Rest? So inconsequential that a good number of the obsessively plotted interactive Westeros maps available online don’t even feature it. And yet it’s where the Dance of the Dragons starts in earnest. A missing little map dot that would change the course of history.
Criston and his army have been lately evading Baela’s surveillance by traveling at night and keeping to the treeline, but suddenly he tells his men to attack in broad daylight. Ser Gwayne balks — surely they will be spotted and met with Rhaenyra’s dragonpower. In retrospect, it smells exactly like a trap. And yet Rhaenyra, finally returned from her trip to King’s Landing with fresh determination, leaps in headlong with the declaration we’ve all been waiting for: “Either I win my claim or die.” (Who said it better: the Black Queen or Cersei?)
Rhaenyra suggests that she take Syrax to battle herself but in the end she’s persuaded to let Rhaenys ride to the aid of Rook’s Rest. That Rhaenys will never return from this errand is immediately apparent — not from what transpires around the Painted Table, but something that happened much earlier in the episode. Corlys and Rhaenys have been married for decades and now, on the eve of war, she confronts her husband’s fully grown man of a bastard son for the first time? This is the day she gives Corlys her blessing to reward Alyn for saving his life? On TV, this is the kind of closure exclusively afforded to the dead. Corlys and Rhaenys have been House of the Dragon’s least problematic model of romantic love, and now it can end without secrets between them.
When she arrives at Rook’s Rest, things are going poorly for Criston’s men, who are being showered by arrows from the castle ramparts. If Rhaenys suspects her job looks too easy, she doesn’t hesitate to burn his men to ash. It’s only when Criston gives the signal for Aemond, who’s hiding nearby with the mighty Vhagar, to join the clash that Green’s plan becomes evident. No one cares about Rook’s Rest. Not Criston. Not Aemond. Not the very online cartographers of Westeros. The attack is a ploy to lure a dragon from Dragonstone and improve the balance of dragons in Green’s favor.
And despite Aegon’s insolence, neither Criston nor Aemond could have predicted that the king would show up to the fight drunk on dragonback before Aemond can arrive. Meleys attacks Sunfyre on Rhaenys’s whispered command, “Attack Meleys.” I know there’s some strategy to it, but this part of dragon-fighting always seems a little too straightforward to me. (It also reminds me of how the kids in the Harry Potter books have to utter the incantations aloud when they’re first learning.) Meleys surprises Sunfyre from below and looks just about ready to gnaw off a wing when Vhagar approaches, dark and huge and ferocious. He makes those other dragons look like dragons for ants. But Vhagar doesn’t go for Meleys to protect the king. Aemond fires on his own brother, Aegon and Sunfyre plummet to the forest floor in a fiery ball.
If Rhaenys and Meleys headed toward the water right then, could they outrun Vhagar and live? We’ll never know. Rhaenys tightens the straps of her straddle and turns to make one last stand for Rook’s Rest. She and her stead share a poignant moment of eye contact before Vhagar confronts them — a fight he looks like he could win using just a single toe talon. Inevitably, they crash to their deaths.
It’s terrible to watch up close, but imagine how awing and grisly it might look from a distance, from the village next door or the one past that. The amassed soldiers and the smallfolk of Westeros alike have now seen what it looks like for dragons to tangle in the sky, and their accounts will spread. They will tell their neighbors what it looks like when a scaly red bird, as large as the moon, drops suddenly to earth like a kite that’s lost its wind. If Rhaenyra was struggling to amass a groundforce before, this surely won’t help.
Eventually, Criston finds Aemond, sword unsheathed, approaching Sunfyre and Aegon, both terribly injured. Was he contemplating a mercy killing? An assassination?
And back on Dragonstone, where word of Rhaenys’s death has yet to return, Rhaenyra decides it’s finally time to tell Jacaerys the Song of Ice and Fire as her own father told her — a key component to their shared inheritance. But hearing the prophecy in this context only serves to cheapen it. How many wars have been waged by men claiming to fight for the greater good? That the thrones they seek are incidental to their destinies? Beware the true believer. Rhaenyra’s convinced her victory is the only way to save Westeros, but can she resist destroying Westeros to win?