House of the Dragon: Episode Nine
or, hush
Catch up:
I commented on this a few weeks ago and meant to write about it last week but instead I wrote a eulogy for my own dad, and so I’ll put it here, now, where it only sort of belongs.
Two women. Two mothers. They shape this civil war, this splitting of a family in half, where family members wage war against one another over who will sit in the throne that crushed Viserys, their father, their grandfather, their brother, their cousin, their husband.
Rhaenyra doesn’t even appear in this episode, but throughout the show, we often see her positioned near her children. This is a marked contrast over Alicent who rarely appears with her children on screen. When she does, she is never beside them. Even when they’re in the same room as her, she stands across from them, as if in opposition to them, or in judgment of them.
Even here, in this coup to take the kingdom from Rhaenyra, the last person to be told is Aegon, the soon-to-be-crowned king. Partly this is because no one can find Aegon, but the plotting comes first. And even when she did go to Aegon’s room to find him, she doesn’t go as a mother to comfort a son who lost a father—not that Aegon required comfort after Viserys’ death—but as a queen shoving forward an heir.
We see how Alicent is becoming her father. Cold and calculating. We see how she resists this at times, how she hates it, but he is her model for strength and competency. When the small council speaks of their long-held plot to put Aegon on the throne, Alicent is shocked. Not really shocked that the plot exists, but that she was left out of it. That her father did this without her.
It is, perhaps, the final straw that chokes the dragon feasting on broken horses. She does see her father. She sees him for who he is. She has often felt that she is his tool, but she has always hoped and told herself that he does it for her.
She sees, in that moment, that she is not a daughter first and a tool second, but the opposite. And so she takes a stand against him. But here she must become more her father’s daughter rather than less.
After all, they’re the only tools he’s given her.
Plotting. Intrigue.
A race to find her son. One seeking to find him to instruct him to murder his half-sister and nephews. One seeking to find him to instruct him to seek peace within his family.
No one thinks about Aegon, though.
Even in this, Aegon, son and grandson to these two, becomes a tool first, a king second, and a child third.
When Alicent finally does share a scene with Aegon, it’s as crushing as the moment her father sent her to Viserys’ chambers the night after burying his wife and child.
He does not want to be king. Knows he’s unsuited for it. Is desperate to not be given the crown, the throne, and yet he is the tool they must use. Against his will, they make him king. They drag him to the crowning.
For all the distance between him and his parents, for all the ways he sees that they don’t care for him, that they see no hope in him, Alicent is still his mother.
If not her, then who could love him?
Who will love him?
Like a child, he asks her if she loves him.
She deflects.
It is so little.
It is so much.
Too much.
Almost twenty years ago while doing casual drugs in a casual way in a basement with my best friend while our two other friends hid in a room while they tried to ride out a bad trip, a thought struck me and it’s never entirely left me:
What if your parents don’t like you?
No parent would admit to such a thing. But it must happen. Must happen all the time. As children become more themselves and less shadows of you and your spouse, there is the potential that they will become people that you wish they weren’t. Maybe they’re rude or strange or distant. Maybe they’re disappointing or ambitious in ways that frighten you. Maybe you see the way they look at you and find you disappointing.
While they probably understand that their choices had much to do with the way their child became the person they became, it’s easier to think that the influence came from elsewhere. And, in truth, that’s often how it is as well.
It’s both. Our parents and the experiences we’ve had shape who we become.
Is it a guarantee that your mother like the person you became?
The thought rang loudly when I first said it because it seemed to answer itself. After all, you don’t ask someone if they like you unless you already believe that they don’t.
It allowed me to understand my parents more fully. I don’t think they disliked me, necessarily, but I also think their feelings towards me were more complicated than they’d ever admit.
I was the person I was. I have written about that version of me often. Reckless and heartless, broken and flailing.
Perhaps they were more mystified by me than anything else. Their boy. The boy they loved so much. The boy who shared his father’s face and maybe more of his mother’s heart and mind than he’d like to admit. And then there were all the choices I was making and all the other ones I was not making.
Had I asked my mother if she loved me, I don’t think she would have hesitated. But I also stopped telling my parents that I loved them when I was a child.
In this, probably I hurt them in ways that I’ll never completely understand. How many phone calls ended with my mother telling me she loved me and me not returning that simple phrase?
It didn’t feel like a cruelty at the time, but maybe I began to erode the affection they held for me.
They could not take back the love that they gave me. I pushed them to both love and hate me, where perhaps both of us wished we could replace the other, seeing only the ways we lacked. The ways we were broken.
The day after Alicent told Aegon that he is no son of hers, after he raped a serving woman, he asks her if she loves him.
How could she?
Yet how could she deny him this simple phrase?
No one wants to believe that we are who our parents make us. We seem to become them or we stand as an inverted reflection of them. Where they are cruel, we choose to be gentle. Where they are ambitious, we choose obscurity. Where they choose gods and rituals, we choose people and meditation. Either that, or we slide into the grooves the wheels of their life have carved into the earth and we follow along.
For the very little we’ve seen of Aegon so far, it is hard to like him. Hard, even, to sympathize with him. And yet, we see how he has become who he has become. Loveless and hopeless, indifferent to the power invested in his name, his hair.
He seeks oblivion rather than the throne.
But the throne is where they plant him. His mother. His grandfather. So many great Lords of great Houses forcing him into a seat literally made of blades. The blades that slowly bled the life of his father away.
What kind of king will Aegon make?
Well, probably a disastrous one! Assuming he’s even really allowed to rule. And I don’t mean simply that Alicent and Otto will rule through him, but that the civil war is coming. What kind of rule and power does someone have while his kingdom splits in half and eats itself alive?
Not exactly the time where you rethink tax policy, except for in relation to the cost of an army.
The previous episode also shows us one of the tragedies of Alicent. She has often described herself as alone and without allies. She is queen, but she has no inner circle. Even now, in the midst of a coup, her inner circle consists of one knight, a man who killed his father and brother, and her father, who is more of a competing power structure rather than one willing to bolster her own power.
For a moment, after Viserys begged his family to unite hours before he died, Alicent looked to Rhaenyra and hoped for friendship.
Her only friend. Maybe the only one she’d ever had. The one her father turned her against. The one her father now demands be murdered before she raises armies against them.
But Alicent still hopes, uselessly, that Rhaenyra will believe her. That Rhaenyra will maybe—just maybe—choose to stand behind her son. That they will be friends again. Or, if not friends, at least companionable.
Thus and so, we open new wounds and create a bloody path towards tragedy.
So it goes.
On to the finale.
Stray observations:
Rhaenys exploding through the floor was both extremely stupid and extremely awesome. I loved it.
Could have done without Larys masturbating in the most awkward possible way.
Aemond will be the one to watch in the seasons ahead. It is fascinating how they’ve clearly marked him as a mirror of Daemon, but without all the baggage Daemon carries around with him. Daemon’s debauchery is seen reflected in Aegon, but his brilliance with a sword and his casual cruelty exist in the heart of his nephew.
Ser Criston’s rage. If the perspective was shifted slightly, we’d have Achilles.
Graham McTavish seems criminally underutilized. It’s funny to cast such a great actor as someone who essentially stands in the background, occasionally grunting a response. Here, finally, we see a glimpse of how he will enter the narrative.
The twins of the Kingsguard are too much like twins. I’m sure this is how they were in the book, but they could have given them some distinguishing characteristic. Like, have one of them shave his beard so I can know which one is doing which thing.