The opening credits for the first season of House of the Dragon featured a Targaryen sigil, that of Aegon the Conqueror, and flowing blood. You could infer from it the theme of lineage that would be important in the series where the crux of the first season was after the death of Queen Aemma and her stillborn son whether or not Rhaenyra (played by Milly Alcock as a teen and Emma D’Arcy as an adult) would be replaced after her father named her his heir. Of course, only those watching the series having not watched Game of Thrones or managed to avoid all book spoilers would have been able to watch that first season not knowing that everything was eventually leading to Rhaenyra’s crown being usurped and a war between the Blacks and the Greens leading to the end of Dragons until the events covered in Game of Thrones. And once you get to the new opening credits of season 2, with the bloody tapestry, there is no mistaking the promise of the bloody casualties to unfold in the series.
Episode three was the first episode to deliver on that tapestry’s promise. The previous episodes involved death, but this was the first episode to display the bloody carnage. In episode one little Jaehaerys is murdered, but his murder was done off-screen. The most violent thing we got in that episode was when Cheese (played by Mark Stobbart), kicked his dog. This act served to get the audience against Cheese before he even turned his eyes off his given target to a child. One of the things the series does a good job with is showing the disconnect between people behind the palace walls and the “smallfolk.” As King, Aegon II (played by Tom Glynn-Carney) thinks he can do well by the smallfolk by just giving them everything they ask for but then proceeds to hang all the ratcatchers in episode two in his rage to punish Cheese, leaving them on display for their families to mourn and as Otto (played by Rhys Ifans) noted, destroying the sympathies the Greens had been gaining after it was perceived that Rhaenyra ordered the killing of Jaehaerys.
Episode three begins further adrift from the heads of warring Greens and Blacks, to the countryside where two families that have long been in conflict have each declared for a different side, and use the excuse of their new allegiances to rage bloody war against each other. Now, like with most of the previous deaths in the series, we did not see the bloody action itself, it all takes place off-screen, but this time we are shown more of the result and scope. Making it feel like the fruition of the tapestry. But also, representative of the ripples of how their actions affect the smallfolk. Those families may have been in conflict for so long that no one could remember the cause, but if they were not presented with an excuse, they would not have taken up arms against each other and all the people who worked for them would have been alive too. One of the strengths of the world-building in Game of Thrones and, now House of Dragon, is how people use war to their own ends but how it always hurts those with less power.
The series, which began with Alicent (played by Emily Carey as a teen and Olivia Cooke as an adult) and Rhaenyra as friends before placing them in opposition, brought them back together in episode three. This episode served to make sure both characters knew exactly where they stood as the series ramps up to deliver on the promise of its tapestry and all the hinting of a war of dragons because, while Alicent may have made a genuine mistake when she said her husband changed his mind to make Aegon king (I still think Otto and his people would have usurped the crown regardless of what she said, that just made it easy for them), now that it has been done, and blood has been shed, both by Aemond (played by Ewan Mitchell) via his dragon and her grandson Jaehaerys’ (they are not considering the smallfolk), it’s too late and it must play out. And for us the audience, that means let there be blood.
This is a show that anticipates the audience knowing generally what actions will take place, it not trying to surprise you, it is trying to expand on the relationships and the breath of the effect in the world and how the actions of those on top effect those below as they jockey for power wielding incredibly deadly weapons in the form of dragons.
House of the Dragon airs weekly, and can also be found on MAX in the US or Crave in Canada on-demand.
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