If the fraying tapestry and drifting cinders of House Of The Dragon’s opening credits haven’t already made its dominant focus clear, let this week’s hour spell it out in big, bold letters: DOOM.
Doom, and the grace to accept it. No character has embodied this dramatic tension more distressingly than Ser Criston Cole, the series’ resident sad-boy knight. Since his unlikely ascent in season one, Ser Criston’s gnawing preoccupations with ambition, guilt, and death have finally metastasized into self-annihilation. Born to a minor house in contested lands and elevated far beyond his station, he never sat comfortably at court. To compensate, Criston indulged in two ill-advised love affairs—first with Princess Rhaenyra, then with the Queen Dowager Alicent Hightower—the first discernible blemishes on the honor he regards above all else. His pristine Kingsguard cloak is filthy with sin, and he’s been cleansing it with blood ever since.
Marching alongside Ser Gwayne Hightower and their diminishing army, Ser Cole’s campaign against Team Black has become incidental in this dance of dragons. King Aegon is broken, Ormund Hightower broods in Tumbleton, Prince Aemond is missing, and Rhaenyra Targaryen sits the Iron Throne—Criston is a soldier in a losing war. Yet so long as Aemond lives and this dance limps on, he’ll continue to seek absolution, if not in the eyes of the realm, then in the eyes of those he regards most affectionately: Alicent, and of course, himself.
Last week, he marched into Harrenhal expecting Aemond, only to find an empty castle and Alys Rivers haunting its corridors. Faced with this latest failure, Criston weighed his next move in Harren’s great hall and decided to finally drop any lingering pretense at knightly virtue. “Our fight will not be clean but it will be pure,” he said to Gwayne before ordering a nighttime assault on the Tully encampment. This week, the Hightower army saw his orders through, cutting throats and setting tents ablaze under the cover of darkness. Fire, that recurring symbol of purification and ruin, illuminates Gwayne, Cole, and their army, finding them smeared in blood and stained by treachery. What Criston said was true: this fight was not clean. As for “pure,” that comes down to perspective.
In a busy episode preoccupied with finality and Westerosi history (over a game of cyvasse, yet!), sitting on the precipice of doom offers time for reflection. Some are forced to take a hard look at themselves, like Aegon, who’s given the straight dope about his fall from grace by an exhausted Larys Strong: “You were a terrible king. But worse than that, you are a terrible man.” Later, in a fit of impotent fraternal rage, he draws blood and a dragon stirs within him. Over in Tumbleton, reflection is obscured by hate and ambition as Lord Ormund recounts the exploits of Princess Meria Martell, the fabled “Yellow Toad of Dorne,” praising the military mind that thwarted the Conqueror at his peak. We can chart the depths of Ormund’s destructive misogyny during this conversation with Prince Daeron; he drools over Meria’s strategies while taking every opportunity to dog on her appearance, praising one female ruler from a cozy historical distance while fighting to depose another in the present. “A cunning mind can resist the most savage of beasts,” he says. Idiotically, it’s not Rhaenyra’s dragons he refers to, but her gender—and Daeron’s victory over Ormund at cyvasse suggests an additional blindness to the dragons who remain in his midst.
This week’s episode provides more examples of people finagling an escape from fate. While Ormund grooms Daeron for rule, Aemond, surely no stranger to the encroaching abyss, finds himself ensnared by Alys’s maternal affection. As he cries out for his mother, Alys hums a soothing tune that echoes all the way to King’s Landing, her influence bleeding across the realm in a way Aemond’s never will. Her gift of greensight—seeing beyond what is to what was and what will be—has little trouble locating Aemond’s icky mommy issues. Exploitation in this respect is easy. Alicent’s love has warped many things: Aegon is jealous of how she favored Aemond; Helaena sees through her schemes; Aemond is a love-struck puppy seeking a way back to her, only to collapse into the comforts of Alys’s lap.
As for Alicent, she’s suffering from buyer’s remorse. After helping Rhaenyra secure the throne, she’s learned that the queen’s appetite for vengeance leaves little room for mercy, making the child growing in Helaena’s belly a potential threat to Alicent’s family. As Helaena speaks of dark visions and has moon tea foisted on her, Alicent plots a way out—or through. Wriggling under the gaze of Mysaria, the White Wyrm, she quaffs Helaena’s tea to spare her daughter from Rhaenyra’s wrath, a choice that only deepens her desperation to escape King’s Landing, its new queen, and her own insidious part in this war. Helaena finds one in Maegor the Cruel’s secret passageways; unfortunately, they pose their own immediate dangers.
Which brings us back to Criston Cole, whose own path is blocked by events a less nihilistic mind might have foreseen. Being denied passage south by the young Lord Tully (who plays Criston’s game of sabotage on his terms) makes plain the fallen knight’s true plan: a glorious death as the greatest warrior in the realm, unbent—a deliberate word choice that evokes Dorne and its legacy of defiance. “They will sing songs,” he says, pausing. “And Queen Alicent herself will hear them.” As Ser Criston marches toward oblivion, determined to meet it with sword in hand, leagues away his queen wanders into the same darkness in search of a door that might lead her out. Their paths may never cross again.
Stray observations
- • Truly terrific moment between Freddie Fox and Fabien Frankel toward the end of this week’s episode. A beautiful, minor-key exchange of defiance in the face of doom that encapsulates Criston Cole’s surprising character arc in this series. That poor idiot.
- • Alyn’s cats appear to be working, ridding the Red Keep of Aegon’s rats and constantly being underfoot, as all good cats so often are.
- • Perversely curious to see Freys and Manderlys so cozy on the small council. It’s like the folks who make this show are fans of the books, or something.
- • Look! A game of cyvasse, as old histories are shared and pondered over—has HOTD stumbled into a Tyrion chapter of A Dance With Dragons?
- • Is Helaena keeping Jaehaera from touching a nightshade-nibbling caterpillar—“you can’t touch that”—another poke in the ribs at George Martin for his “toxic butterflies” post? Maybe! Plus, the symbolism takes on another dimension when it puts that caterpillar in a cage, which Helaena clutches miserably.
- • Aegon, seeking revenge on Aemond: “Every one of my miseries is of his making, and I swear before the Warrior himself, I’m going to find him and fucking kill him—or die in the attempt.”
- • Baela laments the turn her life has taken and fears she’ll one day be married off to bolster Rhae’s rule—that’s why she seeks Vhagar with such selflessness, wanting to be seen as worthy to her queen. Addam offers her adventure and a happier future. Maybe they’ll fly off together to wherever her uncle Laenor went.
- • Fun bit of subtle foreshadowing this week as Cole and Gwayne march their men through a bog—note the spider’s web, indicating they’re walking into a snare.
- • “[We’ll] melt into the streets of King’s Landing,” Alicent says. Thankfully, this time she dons something a touch dowdier than Hightower greens and blues.
- • “Who are you?” “One who has been grieved.”
- • I think the bandits who attacked Alys were Ironborn; one used “salt wife,” an, erm, unique term to those people.
- • Rhae says something stirs against her, crouched and formless. Rhae is correct about treachery in King’s Landing; Hightower loyalists are slaughtering goldcloaks. A raven flies from the capital to Tumbleton with the message: “Gold blood spilled. Three marked in the tally. The account lies open.” Eerie!
- • Rhae’s quest for vengeance for Jace’s death makes her too busy to visit her living son and heir, Joffrey, returned from the Vale.
- • Tyland Lannister lives! It’s a glorious day for Jefferson Hall fans.
- • Aemond impaling a man on the roots of a weirwood tree after Alys’s words about Harrenhal’s founding stones, drinking deep the blood of men, is a fun and demented bit of immediate foreshadowing. I also appreciated the goofy Hammer Horror thundercracks this week.
- • Ser Luthor and his goldcloaks are clearly assembled at their feast for traitors like Jesus and his disciples at Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” But I’ll draw another parallel: the Hightower murders compare to those of the Sons of the Harpy from A Dance With Dragons—and, more distressingly, season five of Game of Thrones.
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