Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO

Not since Oprah gave every member of her studio audience a brand new Pontiac G6 have so many people experienced what it’s like for a fairy godmother to upgrade their hoopties simultaneously. You get a dragon! You get a dragon! EVERY BASTARD GETS A DRAGON! (Or burned alive, of course. Not all blondes are dragonseeds.) Much of this season — and the first season, to be honest — has felt like a protracted build-up that would only pay off when full-on war broke out between Green and Black. But I was wrong. This week’s free dragon giveaway will surely be season two’s apotheosis, an exhilarating pastiche of Jurassic Park and that scene in Congo where the bad gorillas jump into liquid hot magma. It was audacious. It was affecting. It’s a pulpy disaster movie nestled inside a stiff fantasy epic.

What’s more is that the bastard massacre is but one of two stunning dragon showdowns in this week’s episode. We open with Seasmoke and Syrax staring each other down across a desolate beach and howling into the wind. Their riders stand between them, so comparatively small and insignificant they could be mistaken for flecks of dust on my laptop screen. Blackwater Bay’s roiling waves make an ominous backdrop for the shouted confrontation between Rhaenyra and Addam of Hull, her (likely) dead husband’s secret (half) brother. The baffled Queen of the Seven Kingdoms wants to know how this dude she’s never even heard of got that new-new, and Addam does well to act just as baffled. He’s super keen. Ready to pledge fealty. Quick to name-drop the Velaryons. But also baffled. “Do you think you can get him to Dragonstone?” Rhaenyra asks a tad skeptically, like a dad who just handed his teenager the keys to the family Buick.

It’s Mysaria who realizes the connection between Addam and Seasmoke (though not between Addam and Corlys, specifically). If what dragons want is fresh dragonblood, better to comb through the pleasure houses’ VIP lists than waste any more time on ancient scrolls. Mysaria employs the handmaiden Elinda to spread the word around an increasingly restless King’s Landing that the Queen is looking for Targaryen bastards, and Corlys sends a fleet of fishing boats to bring them all back to Dragonstone. There awaits death or glory, which is slightly better than what’s on offer in the blockaded Westerosi capital — namely, death by starvation.

It was Jacaerys who initially advocated that Rhaenyra find new dragon riders for Seasmoke, Vermithor, and Silverwing, so it’s perhaps surprising that he questions his mother’s methods. But Jace, it turns out, was imagining wingmen a bit more and less like himself. He wants high-born Targaryens who don’t need a Berlitz for the Valyrian immersion course just to tell a dragon to “serve.” Targaryens who already know their place in the world and so are less likely to challenge Jace for his. Because Jace, too, is a Targaryen bastard and his unique selling point, at least to his own mind, is his dragon. If every bastard can fly, why can’t any old bastard claim the throne? It doesn’t help, of course, that this recruitment strategy was proposed by mom’s new girlfriend, who, no matter how cool she is or how many times she takes Jace to the mall, will never be able to replace his real dad.

What’s more surprising to me is that Jace isn’t the only one who objects. Addam of Hull bringing Seasmoke to heel without anyone being burned to a crisp in the process is a miracle, but that buffoon Bartimos Celtigar talks about it like a dragon’s been hijacked rather than tamed. Someone please slap that man again. And Baela looks scandalized, too. It’s no wonder Rhaenyra has started ditching small council to hang with Mysaria instead.

Equally confusing is that everyone in King’s Landing is suddenly besties with Larys Strong. Jasper goes to him for advice on whether to inform Aemond of the rumors about the Black’s new dragon count. Later, we learn that the grand maester has upped the intensity of Aegon’s physical therapy at Larys’s recommendation despite his own misgivings. But Larys isn’t a doctor — he’s just a power-hungry foot fetishist with a completely unrelated physical ailment to Aegon’s.

Alicent is at loose ends now that her presence is no longer required at interminable meetings with boring men in which nothing of consequence gets decided, but I have to imagine she also feels some relief. She’s a hot young widow with an empty nest and, suddenly, no work commitments. Rather than waste time idling around the Red Keep trying to make herself useful, she has Ser Rickard take her long-term glamping in the Kingswood, where she can bathe herself clean in freshwater lakes. She’s not even sure she’ll ever go back to the city, she tells Rickard. Cold plunging is how Alicent got her groove back.

Meanwhile, Corlys is finally stepping up as a father to the adult sons he shunned for all their lives. When the Hand of the Queen tells Addam “well done” for riding Seasmoke, it’s the paternal head pat he’s always dreamed of. After years of saying nearly nothing to Alyn, they’re suddenly gossiping about whether or not it’s possible that the boys’ mother had some Targaryen pedigree.

Allow me to vent a moment. Have you ever realized that the reason the Netflix show you’re watching feels vaguely “off” is because you’ve accidentally toggled over to .75x playback speed? That’s the sensation I get any time House of the Dragon shifts over to the Harrenhal theater of this war. This episode only spent about nine minutes in the Riverlands and yet they lasted an eternity. Did someone tell Matt Smith he needed to stall for time? Why does it take so long for him to complete the ordinary human action of moving his gaze from one object to another?

And why did the pipsqueak Oscar Tully, who finally comes to pledge his bannermen for the Blacks, make such a long moralizing speech about Daemon’s war crimes if he wasn’t going to do anything meaningful about it? Because forcing the king consort to execute Willem Blackwood might have played well with the lords of the Riverlands, but it costs Daemon nothing. He only needed the Blackwoods because the Tullys weren’t raising an army for him fast enough. Now that Oscar has joined his men up, Willem was superfluous anyway.

How many times is Daemon going to have the same haunted conversation with his dead brother about his not-so-latent desire to take the Iron Throne for himself? You know that mystifying three seconds — or was it three years? — in which Daemon stares down a dark corridor at what maybe is a ram or a mountain goat? None of us will ever get those three seconds back. (Venting complete!)

Until the bastards come ashore on Dragonstone, episode seven — the penultimate episode of season two — was an okay hour of TV. But the last 20 minutes are a self-contained summer blockbuster, a dizzy CGI masterpiece filled with tragedy and unintentional humor.

Surprisingly, it takes cajoling from his drinking buddies to convince Ulf White to set sail and test the theory of his parentage that he’s been using to score free drinks all his life. Dear HBO, please let the next Game of Thrones series be Ulf the Dragonlord! — a buddy sitcom about these guys navigating the challenges of midlife with their signature bonhomie.

Ulf’s joined at Rhaenyra’s talent search by blacksmith Hugh, whose business accounts with the Red Keep remain unfulfilled and whose ailing daughter was unceremoniously killed off in a throwaway line this week. Kat begs him to stay and spare her widowhood, and given that their kid can’t have been dead more than a month, a better husband would probably listen. But, according to his mother, Hugh’s a first cousin to Daemon and Viserys. Dragonblood doesn’t run much thicker than that.

Now, I hate to Monday-morning-quarterback our girl, but Rhaenyra makes a few highly questionable choices in hosting the inaugural Dragonseed Olympics. For example, I don’t think it was wise to start with Vermithor — the fiercest dragon in Westeros — when Silverwing is also in need of a rider. And given that we know Vermithor likes to incinerate whatever displeases him, it wasn’t exactly sensible to corral all of the contestants so close together like a pile of blonde kindling.

And yet! We could not have had the glory of the massacre of the bastards without this lack of forethought. Vermithor rejects the first person to approach him, lighting up a dozen other hopefuls in the process. It’s complete fucking mayhem as the whole gaggle of blondes reconsiders the decisions that brought them to this point. For five minutes, Vermithor dishes out premature cremation and makes snacks of the men and women who moments earlier dared think they could ride him. The only audible dialogue is, “Help me!” In some shots, the dragon resembles the T-Rex of Jurassic Park munching on the toilet lawyer.

Meanwhile, Hugh’s heroics to save a young girl who perhaps reminds him of his own dead daughter called to mind Jeff Goldblum running around with the flare to save John Hammond’s grandkids, admittedly with much better results. The blacksmith stands his ground and screams into the dragon’s face and it’s dragonbond at first sight. Hugh’s your daddy now, Vermy.

And in all this chaos, Ulf escapes Vermithor’s fire only to be thrown into the pit where he’s approached by Silverwing. At first, the vibe is very “I’m playing with my food,” but then the she-dragon bows down to him. And because Ulf the Dragonlord! is gloriously idiotic, he takes a joyride to King’s Landing, buzzing the Red Keep for good measure.

A lot of innocent blondes had to die for Rhaenyra to raise her “army of bastards,” but I suppose many of them were likely to die in the war to come anyway. And though the dragonkeepers quit en masse when they realized Rhaenyra wanted to put lowborn butts in the saddles, they’ll surely be back soon. There’s just not a lot of work out there for dragonkeepers. Several times throughout the episode, Rhaenyra justifies the havoc she’s causing by way of the war she’ll avoid. But it’s hard to believe that the Greens will see the blossoming dragon count and suddenly start negotiating for peace. The amassing of powerful weapons of war is itself an act of aggression.

The episode’s final image is Rhaenyra, who’s hardly blinked or uttered a word since opening the Hunger Games, flanked by dragons, Silverwing perched on the castle turrets in the distance. She’s standing on the craggy land of Dragonstone and staring out defiantly in the direction of King’s Landing, of the Iron Throne, of the brothers who have usurped her. She’s got three new dragons already, plus her stepdaughter is still running around the Eyrie stalking a wild dragon. It’s not the face of a woman who seeks peace for the greater good.

It’s the face of a woman who will relish her enemies’ complete surrender.