House of the Dragon Review: Just another wedding in Westeros
Now that’s more like it!
In Sunday night’s episode, the House of the Dragon finally got down to business. There was plenty of blood and gore and intrigue. One incestuous royal wedding. Two funerals. And some queer canoodling.
The episode opens up with a murder, that of the pretty Lady Rhea Royce, Daemon’s estranged wife who he smeared across the continent, in the Vale. Daemon delivers the coup de gras, presumably ‘braining’ her with a rock, but not before she gets in a good zinger about how ‘he couldn’t finish’. A great start for an episode that ends with deadly nuptials, a royal feast, inflamed tempers, a fallen king and a rat drinking the blood of a recently murdered man. Really good stuff.
After Lady Rhea Royce’s murder, the king is seen puking his guts out from seasickness while on an undignified and ill-conceived journey across Blackwater Bay to Driftmark – the seat of House Velaryron – to ask for Laenor and Rhaenyra’s betrothal from Lord Corlys. It’s tough to watch.
“Let’s just get on with it,” Viserys says when Lord Corlys the Sea Snake and his wife, Princess Rhaenys, the Queen That Never Was, fail to show up to greet him as he disembarks from his ship.
But the indignities follow: look at Princess Rhaenys’s recoil when she grabs his left hand with the diseased pinky, and the look on the Sea Snake’s face at awful pre-COVID but detestable coughing fit as the King sounds as if he’s bringing up a lung triggered by some ancient species of Westerosi consumption.
It is obvious the King is wasting away, and when you add the festering highway of disease crawling up his left arm, you would be right to think: mi never know dem work obeah inna Westeros too.
The indiginities continue as the Sea Snake questions the potential surnames of the future grand-children and then the King relents, proposing an ‘equitable compromise’, saying that they can use the Velaryon surname until the time leading up to the firstborn ascending to the Iron Throne.
The ‘cousin and cousin boil good soup’ philosophy jumps out at us again in this episode, but the cousins, Laenor and Rhaenyra handle it with civility as they indulge in a tentative ‘chat-and-stroll’ about sexual appetites and cravings on the ugly khaki beaches of Driftmark.
“We perform our duties to our fathers and to the realm, and when it’s done, each of us dines as we see fit,” Rhaenyra proposes.
How very grown-up. And ghastly (seriously what is with this family). Then there is some canoodling between Laenor and some fair-haired boy. At this moment, you know that this marriage is going to end in blood, tears…and guts spilled on the floor.
In the meantime, Queen Alicent begins her character arc towards being a heel. Her deposed father, Otto Hightower, is leaving Red Keep and he accelerates Queen Alicent’s slide into villainy with a sly bit of political advice:
“Listen to me daughter, the king will die…he will not live to be an old man. And if Rhaenyra succeeds him, war will follow, do you understand? The realm will not accept her and to secure her claim, she will have to put your children to the sword , she will have no choice. You know it, you are no fool, yet you choose not to see it.”
When Larys Strong, a creepy-looking handicapped man with a serpentine voice informs her of the Morning After Tea brewed by the Grand Maester, and delivered to Rhaenyra’s chamber, Queen Alicent’s face changes colour. The slithery Larys proves to be a serpent in the garden, and his fruits of knowledge means that Alicent’s eyes are truly opened (Eve-like) for the first time. Strong, though physically challenged, might prove an interesting ally for her.
After Rhaenyra turns down Ser Criston’s proposal to elope into poverty in Essos, and the rapidly deteriorating King muses about the blood and glory that could have been his during his otherwise peaceful reign, the episode fast forwards warp speed to the feast to open Rhaenyra’s wedding to Laenor Velaryon.
During the feast, it is Queen Alicent who makes the first statement of intent to spill blood. It is here that it appears that she will, as her father suggested, not “cleave to Rhaenyra and pray for her mercy” but is ready for battle. She pulls off a small coup, interrupting the King’s ‘Second Age of Dragons’ speech as she strolls in, resplendent in emerald green, the colour of the torch fire lit to summon the Oldtown bannermen to arms in her home city. As the philosopher Vybz Kartel once mused: ‘the war get ugly’.
There are several subplots and intrigues at work during the feast. The arrival of Daemon irks the King, and Gerold Royce, uncle to Rhea. Unbelievably, Royce dares to accuse Daemon of his niece’s murder, which remarkably doesn’t end in drawn swords and blood pooling on the stone floor.
But worry not, neighbours and friends, lots of blood and gore is still in the offing.
The aptly named Joffrey Lonmouth, Laenor’s boyfriend shows his sharp tongue when he points out to Laenor who will be Rhaenyra’s paramour, the conflicted Ser Criston. Joffrey’s ‘Big mouth’ sparks his own demise as he doesn’t leave well enough alone and puts his ‘pied in his bouche’ when he approaches Criston with an alarming revelation of future indignities to come. The good knight, already reeling from being spurned by Rhaenyra and the reality of breaking his chastity vows, finds the sordid business utterly repulsive. What happens next?
Let’s just say they take bashing literally in Westeros.
A woman screams as a tussle breaks out on the dance floor. No one sees what is happening at first. Just seconds before the scuffle, we see – from the King’s perspective – the naughty uncle Daemon, grabbing the niece he recently tried to seduce in a brothel by the neck, and then it is all flailing arms and limbs and tousled hair.
At first, you think that Criston has gone after Daemon, but when Laenor pushes Criston off an unseen victim instead of running to his future bride’s defence, you realise it couldn’t be Daemon attempting to take up Rhaenyra’s invitation for him “take me to Dragonstone and make me your wife”.
Laenor gets a savage right to the face for his intervention, and it is only when Criston flips over the battered body of Laenor’s boyfriend — one eye bashed in like a yellow grape — you realise that the game is really and truly on. He pounds on Joffrey with his fists until he is a giant unrecognisable red stain on the stone floor.
The final scene is brilliant. The director juxtaposes the scene where Criston retreats to the weirwood tree while his beloved Rhaenyra weds a tearful Laenor in the same hall of a recently committed murder. Criston seems bent on disemboweling himself – hari kari style – with his own knife until Alicent, who spared his life and has so far kept his secret, swoops in. Maybe she wants a slice of what Rhaenyra has been having at nights, or maybe she needs a new ally. Who knows with these people?
It is perhaps fitting that the episode ends with a fat healthy-looking rat slurping up Joffrey’s blood from the stone floor while the King does a death swoon as his daughter is wed. Breath-taking stuff.
Next week’s episode is going to be E-P-I-C.