“Well then – let us raise an army of bastards.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Now that’s more like it. This wasn’t a barnstorming, action-packed episode of House of the Dragon; but it didn’t need to be. It’s a penultimate episode, and what it needed was to set things up for the finale while providing a building sense of pace in the narrative. After last week’s ponderous instalment, I’d been uncertain it could do that, but it succeeded admirably.
The main thread, finally alluded to at the conclusion of last week’s ep, was that realisation that the closest relatives to Targaryens who still hadn’t had a go at riding dragons, were, obviously, the illegitimate ones. This raised questions about how, exactly, dragons ‘bond’ with their riders – do they somehow sense their ancestry? Even then, just being from the right family doesn’t seem to be enough, as Lady Rhaena has already discovered. There’s obviously more to it, and it’s a quality that even half-Targaryens can still have.
Not that Rhaenyra realised this at first. Her wary meeting with Addam Hull on the beach, epically shot with dragons snarling behind each participant, showed her to be a little slow on the uptake here. Addam’s deliberate vagueness about his father should have been a clue – along with the Driftmark tradition that illegitimate children bear the surname “Hull” (it’s a ship thing, do you see?). But it took Mysaria to point out the bleeding obvious – given the nobility’s fondness for houses of ill repute, there must be Targaryen and Velaryon bastards littering the Seven Kingdoms.
And so it proved, as a covert mission to King’s Landing gathered quite a throng of potential dragonriders to Dragonstone. That certainly put the cat among the pigeons where class snobbery was concerned. Rhaenyra, initially, couldn’t even conceive that the ‘low-born’ could have such an important part to play. Her son went even further. In a scene nicely played by the permanently angry-looking Harry Collett, Prince Jace turned out, as we suspected, to be more than aware of his own biological parentage – and was incensed at the idea that bastards other than him might threaten his succession.
Good luck with that. We, the viewers, know nothing will come of this; but if there’s been a theme this season, it’s been that of class, and the nobility’s constant underestimation of the ‘smallfolk’. The unrest in King’s Landing has already given us hints of that, and now it seems that the outcome of the war might depend on the ‘low-born’. It’s a bitter pill for these worthy aristos to swallow; none more so than the dragonkeepers, who snootily proclaimed in High Valyrian that they’d have nothing to do with such a heretical plan.
Still, needs must – and the Blacks need dragons, with Meleys gone and the royals themselves too valuable to risk. The selection process was the heart of the episode, and it was brutal. I must admit, I thought the script portrayed the volunteers as perhaps a little too trusting – they can’t all become dragonriders, and surely they must know what happens to those that dragons don’t choose.
There was also the rather convenient fact that a sudden massive exodus of Targaryen bastards from the capital went unnoticed by Regent Aemon’s forces – I thought the city was supposed to be under lockdown?
There again, there could be an explanation for that. Larys Strong, the ‘M’ to Aemon’s secret intelligence service, is none too pleased with his Regent, after being overlooked for the plum position of hand in favour of Otto Hightower (who comes and goes so frequently in the post they should install a revolving door for him). When a hesitant Lord came to Larys early in the episode with news of Addam riding Seasmoke, Larys dismissed it as “one of those whispers that should be left in the wind”.
On the face of it, given the Chinese whispers-style provenance, he’s right; but given his devious nature, I suspect he gave it more credence than he let on, and his decision not to inform Aemon was motivated by scheming malice. Certainly, it would then explain how rather a lot of smallfolk with similar hair to Targaryens (why do they all use the same stylist?) had suddenly departed the city for points unknown, without this quite important fact having been mentioned to anyone in power.
I don’t know what Larys’ endgame is, but clearly he despises Aemon, and has been spending a surprising amount of time building a relationship with the still-ailing actual King, with whom he claims a kind of kinship based on physical infirmity. Matthew Needham plays the devious schemer with such subtlety, his face giving away hints (but no more) as to his motivation, that he’s a marvellously ambiguous character.
In other scheming, though, things were finally actually happening at Harrenhal after Daemon having decamped there to mope for episode after episode while being tormented with portentous visions that did nothing to drive the plot forward. We did get another vision this week, and yet again it was Paddy Considine returning as Viserys, in a powerful scene where he toyed with the crown, explaining that he’d never wanted it, and asking Daemon whether he still did – a question that, significantly, went unanswered. Apparently it was at Considine’s insistence that the Viserys we saw was the ravaged figure from the end of his life – a revealing allusion to the toll the crown took on him. It was a very good call.
Paddy Considine and Matt Smith are two excellent actors, with very different styles. Considine tends towards the subtle, while Smith (here, at least) goes for full Shatner, devouring scenery left, right and centre. But in the following scenes, he showed his range, as a chastened Daemon was forced to behead the ally he’d sworn faith to, in order to gain the loyalty of the new teenage Lord Tully, who he’d previously dismissed as a weak child.
Smith’s face as he looks up from the execution shows that he’s capable of more than broad ham when required; it’s one of the things that made him so good in Doctor Who. Daemon knows he’s made mistakes, and suddenly he’s full of doubt. It was a tense, enthralling scene, but again, I wish we could perhaps have got to it sooner. Daemon’s brooding at Harrenhal has dragged on for so long now I was beginning to wonder if anything was actually going to happen there.
By contrast, the dragonrider selection scenes were fast-paced and gripping, as the vast majority of hopefuls found themselves gruesomely immolated, as though in a particularly brutal episode of The X Factor. While these were gripping sequences, it has to be said that the outcome was never in much doubt, and perhaps that was a little clumsy. We’ve spent episode after episode watching the travails of embittered family man Hugh Hammer and drunken blowhard Ulf; did anyone really think, when an actor we’d never seen before stepped up to trepidatiously approach the dragon Vermithor, that he’d be successful?
Still, it did justify the time the show has spent on the characters, and both reacted to the flaming carnage consistently with the men we’ve come to know. Hugh gained the trust of his dragon by trying (and failing) to save a screaming fellow-contender, then standing his ground and shouting; Ulf, meanwhile, ran for the hills and tripped over in a huge pile of shit. I wasn’t clear, but it looked like he also trod on (and smashed) the eggs of the dragon who sniffed approvingly at him. I’d have thought they’d be more protective of their nests than that!
Ulf it was, though, who then found himself buzzing the skies of King’s Landing on his newly acquired dragon; whether that was his idea or Silverwing’s was unclear. Nonetheless, it was a thrilling scene, as actor Tom Bennett nicely demonstrated Ulf’s slightly comical exultation at the position he had found himself in. It also led to a genuinely epic cliffhanger, as the incensed Regent Aemon hotfooted (hotwinged?) it to Dragonstone on Vhagar, only to flee in frustration at the sight of Rhaenyra flanked by her ever-growing squadron of fire-breathing beasties.
As an ep, this made me genuinely excited to see what happens next, which is surely the point of the penultimate instalment in a show like this. From having barely any dragons (Daemon’s not being one to count on), Rhaenyra has this week gained three; and with Daemon’s apparent success at recruiting the forces of the river lords as a ground army, it looks like the tides of the war might be turning in favour of the Blacks. It was a gripping hour of TV; it’s just unfortunate that there’s been so much meandering getting to it.
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