Rhaenyra sends a gift to the common people of King’s Landing. There may be some strings attached.
Season 2, Episode 6
The hug lasts 45 seconds before they kiss. Yes, I counted. In the terms of that episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where Larry hugs Auntie Rae for a little too long, it’s nine “five Mississippi”s. And like any long, drawn-out take on this densely packed show, it stops everything in its tracks.
For three quarters of a minute, we watch empathy, respect, gratitude, warmth, heat, curiosity, desire and, finally, passion all play out in the silent embrace between Queen Rhaenyra and her friend and counselor Mysaria. For the first time in their lives, each of these two very different people has found somebody she sees as an equal, and who sees her as an equal in turn, and the thought quickly goes from comforting to intoxicating. Dragons are flying, men are burning, reigns are teetering, but for as long as that embrace lasts, the world of “House of the Dragon” exists between these two women’s arms.
But this week’s episode of “Dragon” specialized in all kinds of people getting the things they want and need — or trying to, anyway — in all kinds of ways. Rhaenyra and Mysaria’s interrupted clinch was just one example.
In King’s Landing, the acting regent prince, Aemond, is throwing his weight around. He boots his mother from his small council, and rejects Lord Larys Strong for the position of hand in favor of his cunning but loyal grandfather, Otto Hightower. He then sends Ser Criston — the man who knows he tried to murder his brother, King Aegon — off to root Daemon out of the hotly contested Riverlands, with his uncle Ser Gwayne Hightower in tow. The two men look as if they still haven’t washed off all the ash from their previous encounter with a hostile dragon, and this time Aemond is playing coy about when, or even if, he’ll fly out to protect them.
Aemond saves his harshest cruelties for his big brother the king, whom he torments in his sickbed, the threat of murder hanging thick in the air. “I remember nothing,” the barely conscious Aegon repeatedly croaks, clearly scared for his life. Fortunately for Aegon, though, someone else recognizes what’s going on: the Clubfoot, Larys Strong.
In his most emotionally unguarded moment to date, the cagey Master of Whisperers lays bare the pain and humiliation of a lifetime of being looked down upon because of his physical deformity and disability. This, he says with a tear falling from his eye, is the life Aegon now has to look forward to. But it comes with an upside: He will now be underestimated, and he can use that to his advantage.
“Help me,” Aegon whispers. Larys looks down at him. Hard cut to black. The whole scene was raw enough to move me to tears as well. To reference a phrase Alicent uses with Aemond, the indignities of childhood can linger a long, long time.
Elsewhere in King’s Landing, things are looking up for the small folk. Let me say that again: Things are looking up for the small folk. In this franchise, it bears repeating! Mysaria and Rhaenyra’s two-pronged scheme to win the hearts and minds of the capital city’s poor and working class works wonders — first by starting a whispering campaign that the royals are heedlessly feasting inside the walls of their Red Keep, then by launching a flotilla of food across the bay to keep the starving people alive, in rafts bearing Rhaenyra’s red-on-black sigil.
But it also hints at horrors to come. Hugh, the blacksmith who has been trying to keep his sick daughter alive, mugs a guy for his share of the goods. Ulf, the tavern-goer (Tom Bennett), swallows the Blacks’ propaganda so completely that it makes you wonder what else these desperate people will be willing to believe. And poor Queen Helaena once again finds herself at the center of an ugly scene in the streets, as she and her mother, Alicent, are pelted with rotten fish.
On the other side of Blackwater Bay, Lord Corlys officially accepts Rhaenyra’s offer to make him her hand, thus earning the Black Queen the support of the most impressive man in the Seven Kingdoms — and his mighty fleet, to boot. For his part, Corlys names the hardworking sailor Alyn of Hull his new first mate, rewarding the younger man for saving his life in a previous campaign. It’s an honor Alyn accepts only after ordered to do so, though.
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As Alyn scrupulously shaves the white-blond hair that would give him away as the blood of Old Valyria, his younger brother, Addam, expresses disbelief. Alyn, like Addam, is Corlys’s bastard son, but he is the only one Corlys pays attention to. (He is also the only one with white-blond hair.) Why not benefit from the obvious truth? Addam asks.
But an entirely different order of being will soon come looking to enlist Addam, or so it seems. The dragon Sea Smoke, once bonded to the runaway Laenor Velaryon, flees Dragonstone after a nail-bitingly tense, ultimately horrific attempt to unite him with the Queensguard knight Ser Steffon Darklyn. The casting here seems telling: As Ser Steffon, the actor Anthony Flanagan bears no resemblance at all to the thin white dukes of House Targaryen, nor to their darker-skinned but equally high-cheekboned Valyrian kin in House Velaryon. (Even there, young Rhaena is reluctant to hunt down the wild dragon lurking in the Vale, a secret heretofore hidden by Lady Jeyne Arryn.) You want the poor guy to succeed, even though your eyes tell you he’s doomed.
Could it be that Sea Smoke has another rider in mind? With Corlys’s son Laenor halfway across the world, it’s probably not a coincidence that the silvery beast makes a beeline for another son of the great sailor lord, conducting repeated flyovers before finally cornering the fleeing man in a forest — but, notably, never snapping his jaws or firing up his biological bellows. The episode ends with Queen Rhaenyra riding out to meet Sea Smoke and his new rider, whose identity is unknown. But I’d bet all the wealth in Casterly Rock that it’s Addam.
Speaking of Casterly Rock, Lord Jason Lannister (Jefferson Hall, who also plays Jason’s younger twin brother, Tyland) has ridden forth with a great host, a pair of captive lions … and no great desire to actually go fight Daemon and his dragon, Caraxes, without Aemond and Vhagar backing him up, thank you very much. Meanwhile, the Riverlords whom Daemon had hoped to rally to his banner — he has all but given up the pretense of working on Rhaenyra’s behalf — refuse to move unless their aged and ailing Lord Paramount, Grover Tully, gives the go-ahead.
So we come once more to someone getting what they want. Daemon has been plagued by horrible dreams both night and day, to the point where he is ready to flee the cursed castle of Harrenhal for fear he is being poisoned. The most likely candidate, of course, is Alys Rivers, a raven-haired precursor to the Red Woman of “Game of Thrones,” the sorceress Melisandre.
But rather than recoil from the medicine woman and witch, Daemon asks her for advice as guilelessly as we’ve seen him speak to anyone all season long. She tells him cryptically to wait three days before doing anything, cursing him to three more days of psychological torment and traumatic flashbacks.
Then two remarkable breakthroughs happen. The recalcitrant Lord Grover dies, and the new ruler is more amenable to treating with Daemon’s cause. But more important, Daemon finally has a good dream — sad, but good.
He sees himself with his beloved older brother, Viserys, before the body of Viserys’s wife Aemma. The king is devastated, both by his loss and by the knowledge that his own order to conduct a cesarean section caused it. But this time, Daemon isn’t out drinking to the death of the infant Aemma died bringing into the world. He is holding his brother, comforting him, giving him the love and support he needs.
Our last glimpse of Daemon is of him sobbing — not out of joy that the Riverlands may now be his, but because he had done right by his brother at last, if only in a dream. For that brief time, his whole world existed in another’s arms, too.
An earlier version of this recap reversed the names of two characters who are brothers. Alyn of Hull is the one who shaves his white-blond hair and is chosen as first mate, not Addam.
