“The air is thick with ghosts.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
As expected after the shuffling of episodes between seasons, this week’s House of the Dragon came across very like a season opener, complete with a rather unusual (for this show) pre-credits scene. Rhaenyra has successfully taken King’s Landing. She sits on the Iron Throne. She has everything she ever wanted. And this week showed that, like so many conquerors before her, she’s finding actually running a kingdom even harder work than conquering it.
The smallfolk of King’s Landing are starving – a situation caused, as she was unhelpfully reminded, by Rhaenyra herself with her naval blockade during the war. She has no idea of the loyalties of the remaining nobles in the capital. And to cap it all, all the Treasury’s gold has gone missing, and the only people who might have known where it was hidden were killed during the taking of the city.
Peace is a lot harder than war, and this ep shows Rhaenyra flailing around trying to win hearts and minds, while also asserting her still fragile authority. The ever-present rats scuttling everywhere, even around the Throne itself, are an unsubtle metaphor for the situation she finds herself in; a symbol of the decay of this once great citadel, and a reminder that hardly anyone around her can be trusted.
Daemon is, of course, no help; he’s even more ill-suited to governing than she is, seeing executions as the solution to every problem. The episode’s cold open shows him in his element as he subdues the remaining Hightower forces by dint of having three bloody great dragons standing behind him. Matt Smith plays it less crazy than usual as he calmly lays down the law to Ormund Hightower; well, his side have won, everything else is just admin.
Trouble is, he’s not very good at admin. Swords are his area of expertise, not ledgers. Which might explain how Ormund managed to pull a fast one on him by giving him a fake Daeron Targaryen as a hostage.
It’s an obvious problem, in a medieval world with only paintings as a means of identification. Not knowing precisely what Daeron looks like, Daemon is simply swayed by the trademark Ridiculous Targaryen Wig the boy sports, which of course can be faked with a bit of bleach. You have to feel for the poor little sod, threatened with his mother’s death unless he takes part in Ormund’s masquerade. The scene where this deception is revealed had me wondering if Rhaenyra would have the boy killed out of sheer spite.
So Ormund, with his great big army, still has the real Daeron. And his dragon; I did think it was a bit odd that Daemon didn’t insist on taking that too, which would have scuppered the whole deception. After all, a fake Daeron could hardly ride it, could he? Chalk that up to something writer Sara Hess probably hoped viewers wouldn’t ask.
It’s clear then that, despite Ormund’s apparent contrition at the beginning of the ep, the Hightower forces – large, well-equipped, and with a dragon of their own – have no intention of actually surrendering to the Blacks’ new order. As I said last time, taking the capital doesn’t mean that the war is over. Aegon, the supposedly legitimate King, is still out there somewhere, waiting for Larys Strong to play his hand; and while there’s no sign of the wounded Aemond this week, I’d bet that he (and his enormous dragon) will be back in action soon, healed by vengeful witch Alys. Criston Cole and his Green army are presumably garrisoning Harrenhal. And now there’s Ormund’s fresh, thousands-strong army to add to the mix. King’s Landing may have fallen, but things aren’t looking rosy for the Blacks.
So it proves at the end of the ep, as a scorched-looking dragonkeeper turns up at the Red Keep, with news that the Hightower forces have taken the town of Tumbleton and are using its population as human shields. Rhaenyra can scarcely move against them without causing a massacre of civilians, which would very much undo her efforts throughout the ep to win the hearts and minds of the potentially rebellious populace.
It won’t help that Rhaenyra’s attempts to win the love of the smallfolk are increasingly alienating the nobles she sorely needs as allies. Yes, they obviously do deserve some chastisement for hoarding food while the city was in the middle of a famine; but they’re more than aware that said famine was actually the fault of Rhaenyra herself. A few cabbages distributed to the peasants won’t make up for that, if the nobles decide to play that card. And that stunt of serving them all roast rat at a banquet, satisfying though it presumably is, isn’t going to help get them onside.
Not content with pissing off the potentially traitorous Court, Rhaenyra also misguidedly sets about alienating her most important ally with an act of breathtaking hypocrisy. Knighting her three new, commoner, dragonriders, she persists in naming Addam as ‘Hull’ rather than Velaryon, despite Corlys’ insistence on legitimising his two sons. This earns her a well-deserved tongue lashing from Corlys himself, pointing out the (usually unspoken but well-known) fact that both her now-deceased sons were illegitimate themselves.
As was pretty clear last week, Corlys, his wife dead, his son missing and his castle destroyed, has had more than a bellyful of war. So Rhaenyra’s latest misguided act, in an ep full of them, is likely to prompt him to sit out whatever conflict remains. That could be fatal for the Blacks, now alone and facing enemies on every front.
After the sound and fury of the previous two eps, this is a much more leisurely paced affair, as befits what would have been a season opener. It’s following Martin’s broadly sketched history of the Targaryen civil war very well – as I recall, the town of Tumbleton is about to become very important.
And yet, I can’t help feeling that some of it rings rather hollow. Yes, in the books Rhaenyra doesn’t exactly endear herself to her now-conquered subjects; but surely it’s implausible that someone lectured by her father about ‘Royal Duty’ so frequently in her youth would be quite this incompetent as a ruler?
And the bait and switch over Daeron only works if Daemon doesn’t consider taking the boy’s dragon too, which he surely would have. He may be wildly impetuous, but he’s not an idiot, and this makes him look like one. Plus, if Ormund really had given him Daeron without the dragon, what would he have done with it? Dragged it around in a cage, feeding it sheep that would have served better as rations for his army?
These basic implausibilities rather undermine an otherwise… ok episode. However, it seems we’ll have to accept them, possibly as a price for compressing the story to fit in fewer episodes than was originally planned. It looks like next week, the war will be very much back on. At least we can hope for some spectacular battles to carry the show through, but it could still do with injecting some of the sorely-missed humour that was so much a part of the original Game of Thrones, and front and centre in more enjoyable spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
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