House of the Dragons: Episode One
or, let's try again
I must admit: I did not begin rereading A Song of Ice and Fire to prepare for this show. To be honest, I didn’t learn even a single thing about this show on purpose before turning it on yesterday. Wasn’t even particularly interested in the show. Assumed it would be bad because most TV is bad.
But all the hullabaloo got me interested. And, really, I love this world. Love this world enough to reread a giant book series and even a bunch of the ancillary novellas and so on. Even that huge history book about the world that came out years and years ago (have not read the one about the Targaryens, though). So I was probably always going to watch this show. Was always going to end up loving it, even if it ended up being bad.
And so I thought I’d do something a bit different here. Or at least something I’ve never done, which is to write about something as it’s coming out. And so I’ll likely be posting weekly essays about this show until the first season is over, or until it’s stops being fun.
Of course, I’m a week behind, so this will remain a week behind because that’s good enough, yeah? I don’t need to be about the conversation as it happens. Just want to talk with all of you about a show that holds a lot of promise.
So buckle up, because I’m going to be spoiling shit.
This trailer sucks, by the way. Why do people do such a bad job at their job?
Also, it’s awesome because of dragons.
I find this first episode fascinating for several reasons, but, most interesting to me: I didn’t know the characters.
This may seem like an odd thing to mention, but I had spent 5,000 pages with the characters of Game of Thrones before the show even started. Even when the show got to unknown territory, I had now also spent 50 additional hours watching them.
It’s a subtle thing, but it makes me understand the difficulty of introducing this world to the uninitiated. Not that there are likely many people here who weren’t die-hard to the end of Game of Thrones. But there were many who had never known Ned Stark until Sean Bean filled him out.
The show makes at least one correct decision early on here, which is to keep the show focused on a small cast in one location. We’re not branching out to the ends of Westeros, but instead are siloed in the Red Keep with a handful of primary characters and a few others who may or may not bloom into importance over time.
In this way, the unfamiliar becomes graspable. We’re attaching names to faces, allegiances to those same faces in a quickly growing web of relationships. We know the Hand of the King, Otto Hightower, and the King’s brother, Damon Targaryen, hate each other. We know Damon takes great pleasure in provoking everyone, but especially Otto.
We also know Viserys, the King, has a built-in tension with his cousin, Rhaenys, and her husband, Corlys, because succession was handed to him instead of her, due to her gender. While Rhaenys is a Targaryen, her husband is also on the Small Council, his family, like the Targaryens, also from old Valyria. Too, Viserys is without an heir, except for Damon, who everyone with authority hates and fears.
So we have a nice web designed to make power dynamics turbulent.
This is good.
Along with that, we watch Rhaenyra, only living child of Viserys, watch as her father and everyone else waits for the birth of a younger brother to become the true heir. Her friendship with Alicent Hightower, and her subsequent attachment to Viserys, sets up another interesting power dynamic.
All great stuff.
Then, in the background, there’s growing tension with the Free Cities and a specific warlord known for feeding his enemies to crabs. Brilliant imagery here.
The show is doing more than this, though. It’s also reminding us that this is the same Westeros we loved from Game of Thrones. And so we get butts and boobs and grotesque violence.
This is what brought the eyes the first time, after all. May as well lean back into what worked.
Along with that, this show is, I think, trying to address a very real criticism of Game of Thrones. That being its treatment of women.
Now, don’t get me wrong, throwing us into a brutal caesarian birth which is presented as a choice to Viserys between his heir and the life of both his heir and his wife, does not exactly feel like a point of correction. If anything, it seems like doubling down on the most brutal versions of violence against women.
That’s not how it feels to the characters, of course, but we’re not the characters. We’re people sitting on couches watching a man throw a woman’s life away in a grotesque fashion in hopes that he’ll achieve his male heir.
Which he does.
But the next scene is the funeral of mother and son.
Like I said: this is the Westeros you once loved.
It wants to hurt you. It will hurt you.
But this all leads us to the inevitable: Damon is dismissed due to his unpleasant behavior directed at the newly dead queen and prince, and Viserys names Rhaenyra his heir.
Later, Otto Hightower sends his daughter to the king’s bedchambers to comfort him in his grief. Which is brutal. To give your daughter’s body away for power. But, again: this is Westeros.
It may never stop hurting.
The knotty web gets knottier and we see the tragedy laid out before us so clearly that we embrace the coming storm, the coming chaos.
This is, after all, the story of a civil war.
More than a civil war, the show is the story of gender and oppression. Women in Westeros are treated abysmally. But maybe one could be queen. However, would that improve the lives of all women? Would it even improve the lives of royal woman? Or would it look more like Elizabethan England?
If you know Martin’s inspirations, the answer won’t surprise you.
I do think the show is deliberately trying to show a different perspective on Westeros. Game of Thrones was full of powerful female characters, but it lost the thread with all of them once they acquired any semblance of power. Here, we’re starting with them much closer to the hand guiding the rudder of empire and I think we’ll see a lot of fascinating dynamics.
More on this as the season goes on, I imagine.
But I want to spend a moment with Viserys.
I love Viserys here. He’s affable and sort of silly. He’s the perfect king for a time of peace. Which it is. Has been for decades. He’s a kind man who cares about his family and his kingdom. He cares about his friends and the harmony of his reign.
I would want him to be my friend, probably. He seems like he’d be a good one!
But we learn, bit by bit, piece by piece, that his reign is one of deterioration. The Targaryens seem vulnerable for the first time since Aegon’s conquest. They’ve gotten fat and weak from peace. There’s no male heir, and the newly named heir, despite having the promise of all the great lords of the Seven Kingdoms, is vulnerable simply because she was born a woman.
The only reason her father became king was because he was not a woman, after all.
Viserys, though, is doing what he believes is right. Viserys loves his tempestuous brother. His brother, so prone to violence and aspiring for so much glory and power. A cold, hard, arrogant man.
The worst kind of potential king, and everyone sees it. But Viserys does not see his brother’s ambition. Believes that he will settle the tension caused by dismissing him by naming Rhaenyra heir. After all, Damon wouldn’t wage war against his own niece, yes?
He loves his friend Otto Hightower, Hand of the King, but doesn’t completely see how he’s attempting to manipulate him.
He believes in the dream of Aegon, but also sees the world as one in decline. Nothing will ever match old Valyria in greatness or beauty, and so it only makes sense that his own kingdom is in decline.
Like Ned Stark, he is a good man trying to do what he believes is right. The biggest difference, of course, is that Ned was a bit of a zealot for honor. Viserys is able to see the reality of his world.
Viserys loves his daughter but knows her claim will be insecure. Knows that his rise to the Iron Throne is what will make her claim forever insecure.
Yet he tries anyway. He makes the entire nobility bow and vow.
But this is Westeros. A yes today doesn’t mean a yes tomorrow.
Oh also: there be dragons. This may be reason enough to watch the show.
Thunderously, they’re throwing dragons at you right away, and they’re beautiful. I love it. Want it to be real. Want this to go on for thirty seasons, but really hope they wrap it up in three, for various quality control reasons.
But, yes, I’m all in. Love this first episode. I will likely love all that’s coming, but I hope you’ll tune into my weekly ramblings about this show.
Until next time.
I have not forgotten about my A Song of Ice and Fire essays, mind. I just don’t like to put a bunch of the same kind of posts in a row, and I’ve been writing a lot about books lately. But maybe I’ll just post the Feast for Crow review tomorrow?
Interesting to read here about your gut reaction to Viserys, which was much more sympathetic than my own. The stooped man playing with his models like a child obsessed with a doll house - it seemed to me to imply contempt - but after watching Episode 2 I think your take is sounder. Viserys is wise - he is measured - he is a king for peaceful times, committed to war as a last resort only.
Like Tennyson's Telemachus, son of Odysseus (Ulysses), of whom the father says:
"This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine."
Television specials are about men that strive with Gods, not administrators, and yet... you are right: Viserys deserves our sympathy and a kind of respect.