House of the Dragon: Episode Six
or, a birth and a death
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What a way to do a time jump where new actors take over old roles!
Rhaenyra’s birthing scene here is intense and, having witnessed two births, pretty realistic. Birth is a sweaty, grunty, physically demanding work. There’s nothing glamorous about it! And so I love the single shot take used here, taking us from the lead up to birth, the birth itself, and then the walk to the queen.
I do think this may be the most realistic births I’ve seen dramatized. In some ways, it almost seems a response to stories in many other shows where women give birth and then carry on with their day like they didn’t just do the most physically taxing act humanly possible. And so when Rhaenyra insists on going in person to see the queen and meet her unreasonable demand, we’re astonished that she can even make it down the hallway, let alone up the steps to the Queen’s chambers.
I also just love how simply they signal the rift between Rhaenyra and Alicent. While I hoped these two would come back together as friends, Alicent demanding to see the child as soon as its born speaks to a cold cruelty in her. That Rhaenyra brings the child herself tells us quite a bit about her as well.
This story about women who have now become mothers really does create a contrast between the two women at the center of this conflict. We see it throughout this first episode.
Alicent seems indifferent to her children, except to the extent that they not shame her. We see this with her single interaction with Aegon. She is cold and angry.
She lives in fear. Fear for him.
In many ways, she has become her father’s daughter. His coldness defined and shaped her life. She ended up queen because of his merciless calculations, sending his teenage daughter to the grieving king. But this is what has happened in the ten years since she wore green to Rhaenyra’s wedding: she has staked a claim on power and has clung to it viciously.
But only out of fear. She has no hunger for power. But she believes now so fully that Rhaenyra will kill her son when she claims the throne, that she cannot view Rhaenyra as anything but a child-murderer in waiting. That Rhaenyra flaunts her power and her sexual indiscretions is only fuel to her pyre of everything she once loved about her friend.
This is how it happens.
Everyone in your real life is kind of annoying. Your parents, your friends, even your spouse. Everyone does a thousand annoying things every day. But you put up with or ignore most of it because you love these people.
When you’re around someone you dislike, though, every minor annoyance becomes the reason you hate them. You may even attach a moral framework to your disgust with this person.
And this is Alicent now with regard to Rhaenyra: she cannot stand the sight of her or her children.
But who has Rhaenyra become? Well, she’s in at least one loving relationship with the about-to-be-murdered Lord Strong, son of the Hand of the King, Commander of the Gold Cloaks. In contrast to Alicent, though, we see her often with her children. And she is warm and loving, affectionate.
We can see how Viserys must have been with her when she was a child. A loving, doting father. It’s all subtle stuff here. Watching this, you may not even take notice of how infrequently Alicent is in a scene with her children or how cold she is when she is with them. Whereas Rhaenyra always has a hand on her boys and spends many scenes with them beside her.
Then there’s Ser Criston Cole, whose broken heart has turned to hate. He has become the kind of bully who takes out his hatred on someone’s children. This goads Lord Strong into shaming himself and implicating Rhaenyra, which ultimately leads to Strong’s death, but I find it a fascinating turn in Ser Criston’s character.
The young man who was willing to give up his life and run away with Rhaenyra is now overseeing her children get beaten up by their older uncles. It is, perhaps, the saddest permutation of disappointed love. He may as well be Snape humiliating the son of the woman he loved and telling himself that it’s for his own good.
Then there’s the other mother in this episode: Laena.
Her death in childbirth was likely a common enough occurrence before the 20th century, but it’s hard to watch. The scene is a mirror of the first episode, when Viserys is given the same choice that Daemon’s given here. Viserys has her cut open to reveal his heir whereas Daemon’s concern for Laena’s life leads to her demanding her dragon to burn her alive.
Two births. Two very different outcomes. The first, almost in defiance of a thousand narratives in books and movies where birth is seen as a simple, beautiful act of creation. The other sort of falling into the otherside of these familiar tropes, where the death of this woman is primarily used as a way to understand the male character, Daemon.
Whatever else this episode was, it was captivating. Rhaenyra trying to make peace but running face first into Alicent’s cold fury. Viserys not seeing what everyone sees. And I don’t just mean his grandson’s parentage, but the vast chasm within Alicent that is filled with hatred and fear.
His court has become divided and he, as always, has played a wait and see game. And he has watched the divide grow and grow.
Perhaps most interesting, Alicent has been fully drawn into the muck and the mire, into the violence and backstabbery of the game of thrones.
Larys Strong pulls Alicent in to the awful mess. But she’s not kicking and screaming. She’s telling herself she didn’t want this, she wouldn’t do this. And maybe she wouldn’t have done it!
But Larys is a cat who drops the dead rat at your feet, expecting praise. When Alicent doesn’t give him this praise, he tells her, basically, that she should because she needed this to happen.
Which she did.
And so now she must stare this in the face. She is a major player in this game of blood and succession. Larys has forced her to confront her choices, to accept that her hands were the ones that killed Larys’ father and brother, because he is her hands. Her desires are his orders.
And so, dear friends, things are about to get bloody, I think.
Some stray observations:
In the Inside the Episode, the writer of this episode, a woman, claims that they didn’t think Laena would go out like that. Meaning, Laena wouldn’t be a weakling who dies in her bed due to childbirth. Which is an astounding way to misunderstand the importance of the opening scene of the episode that she apparently wrote.
Viserys is looking rough. He lost his arm!
Daemon is a bit of a frustrating character here. More a man in waiting than a man doing anything. The death of his wife will surely spur him to some kind of action. We know he has a considerable role to play yet.
Laenor is a delight to have on screen. He’s a good man. But, like Viserys, he’s not really suited for the life that’s fallen upon him.
Larys has positioned himself as a villain with Ser Criston making a true and proper heel turn here. Alicent is shaping up to be the center of Team Bad Guy. Which is not what I would have expected at the start of this series! Quite an interesting development. Hilariously, this is the turn that the Game of Thrones writers bungled so badly in the final season, so it’s funny to see it done so effectively here over the course of just six hours.
One interesting development caused by the black Valyrians is that things that were rumor and insinuation in the book version of this story becomes undeniably real. You can explain away hair color. You can’t explain away skin color.
Daemon is sort of frustrating, I think, because they've chosen odd parts to highlight and really condensed things.
Keeping Rhea Royce, his first wife, in the show keeps it consistent with the books, but it's also a strange decision when time is short and could have been better spent somewhere else. In the books, Rhea just dies: it's a legitimate accident. Daemon is nowhere nearby at the time and completely innocent of any wrongdoing. This works well enough for a historical account--people do just randomly die!--but is somewhat unsatisfying in the context to the show: Rhea would be an off-screen obstacle until the plot needs her not to be one anymore, at which point she spontaneously vanishes. They had Daemon kill her to try to make it seem less arbitrary, I think, and to make him seem more dangerous.
But I think it would have been better just to write Rhea out entirely. "He's already married" is the least important reason nobody wants Daemon near Rhaenyra; Viserys can simply tell Daemon to find a wife and settle down instead of ordering him home to his wife. This could lead more cleanly into Daemon's romance with Laena. That, coupled with keeping a few deleted scenes featuring Laena, would have made it all work more smoothly, I think. Show a Daemon who is trying to come to grips with the idea that he'll never sit the throne, who is trying to settle down but finds that he can't.
I'm becoming conditioned to reading these every week, compliments to the literary chef. They enhance the experience of every episode.