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None of their children look like Laenor, and everyone but the king suspects their real father is Ser Harwin — and it is. Alicent (Olivia Cooke) is furious that Rhaenyra flaunts her children all around the Red Keep, and she and her closest ally, Ser Criston, simmer with rage. While training the boys in the yard, Criston is quick to defend Alicent's sons, Aegon (Ty Tennant) and Aemond (Leo Ashton), and Ser Harwin defends Jacaerys (Leo Hart) and Lucerys (Harvey Sadler) a little too strongly, putting everyone in danger. His father, Lord Lyonel Strong (Gavin Spokes), tries to resign as Hand because of his son's disgrace, but Viserys won't let him. Lyonel decides to bring Harwin back to Harrenhal, and he has an emotional goodbye with Rhaenyra and the kids. Rhaenyra also tries to get Alicent to agree to marry Jace to her daughter Helaena (Evie Allen), but she refuses.
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They do (in a punishing, ear-splitting sequence) and Viserys soon finds himself standing over the blood-soaked corpse of his wife, holding a baby that will be dead in just a few short hours. This is good news for Viserys, who needs a male heir of his own. He's confident the baby will be a boy — he's had prophetic dreams about it, he claims — but Aemma has concerns about her "miserable pregnancy." Across the last decade, she's lost five babies — two to miscarriages, two to stillbirths, and one to an early death.
Reasons to Watch House of the Dragon on HBO and HBO Max (and 3 Reasons To Skip It)
This isn’t necessarily different from what made Game of Thrones — or any TV show, really — good at its best, but it does serve as a meaningful reframing of the show and its relationship to the audience. It cannot be stressed enough how much of House of the Dragon’s coming plot is just out there. Look up, for example, the name of a dragon, and odds are you will find out something about the Targaryen family that will likely have to be addressed in a future season or episode of the show. True to the maximalist tendencies of “Thrones” storytelling, the strategy seems to be that if you’re going to make a soap, you might as well make it as operatic as possible.
Some House of the Dragon Scenes Are Quite Gory
Episode two picks up six months later, and Rhaenyra and Viserys are still grieving the loss of Aemma. Daemon is illegally occupying Dragonstone with his City Watch, though no one is trying to oust him. Rhaenyra is not settling well into her role as heir — and her father isn't really helping her — but she chooses Ser Crison to join the Kingsguard even though he doesn't have the noble background of the other knights vying for the role. Later in the episode, Daemon steals a dragon egg, claiming he will give it to his unborn child with Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno). Ser Otto journeys out to get it back, and Rhaenyra secretly follows on Syrax and successfully convinces her uncle to turn it over.
Season 1, Episode 6: ‘The Princess and the Queen’
Well, you might recall that Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr) had a couple of interactions with young Rhaenyra, encountering her during her night on the town with Daemon and later hauling her out of the wedding brawl. Apparently somewhere along the way sparks flew and then kept flying, at least three more times. As such, a voiceover at the beginning of the premiere helps us get our bearings. Covering an era of tenuous peace with ferocious -- albeit abbreviated -- focus, House of the Dragon is an impressive prequel that exemplifies the court intrigue that distinguished its predecessor. Stream all of HBO, plus hit series, movies, reality, and more. Raise your own personalized virtual dragon in a new augmented reality app available for download in the Apple and Google Play app stores on your mobile device.
Featuring an ensemble cast, the show portrays the events leading up to the beginning of the decline of House Targaryen, a devastating war of succession known as the "Dance of the Dragons". Season 1 begins approximately 200 years before the War of the Five Kings, and 100 years after Aegon's Conquest united the Seven Kingdoms. House Targaryen has reigned as the rulers of Westeros for five generations, and the number of dragons they possess has increased to more than ever before. The story begins a few years later when old King Jaehaerys passes away and King Viserys I ascends the Iron Throne. Outwardly, the realm has enjoyed a golden age of peace and prosperity for seventy years, and the Targaryen dynasty is at the height of its power.
In Fire & Blood, Rhaena’s first dragon died just hours after it hatched and she spent years hoping for the successful birth of a new dragon. That’s the place we find her here — keeping her egg toasty warm and hoping it will produce. Alicent is horrified, though now that Lyonel Strong is dead, she’ll get what she wants — her father might stage a return to King’s Landing and perhaps step back into his role as King’s Hand. Rhaenyra is departing for Dragonstone as a measure to keep her family safe, Daemon may be sailing across the Narrow Seas, and hopefully — hopefully — this narrative can open up even more and take up the room it needs and deserves. But the biggest loser this week was Daemon’s eternal rival, Otto, the Hand who finally overplayed himself.
The mere fact of his flight bolstered his claim to the throne, but how much did Balerion’s death then emasculate him? We were first introduced to Rhaenyra proclaiming her love of dragonflight, but she’s barely mentioned it since. Worse, there have been few scenes of riders simply visiting their dragons, or talking to each other about how those relationships work. Wouldn’t some dragon chat have made sense as a way for obvious dragon geek Daemon and self-professed enthusiastic flier Rhaenyra to bond? We need to care as much about dragon deaths as we do about the humans for the coming war to hit as hard as it should, rather than simply having them lurk expensively in the background. House of the Dragon received a straight-to-series order in October 2019, with casting beginning in July 2020 and principal photography starting in April 2021 in the United Kingdom.
The result of all of the above and more was a stirring, often moving season finale that included many of the show’s signature elements as it set up the conflict, known in George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood” book as the Dance of the Dragons. There was thrilling dragon action, another brutal birth scene, another profane face-off between Daemon and Otto, another mature discussion between Rhaenys and the Sea Snake, this story’s most functional couple (the Sea Snake’s adventuring aside). When Game of Thrones was at its peak in Season 7, it drew more than 10 million regular weekly viewers on HBO. It’s also the most-awarded drama at the Emmys, with 160 nominations and 59 wins. And unfortunately, it featured one of the most contested series finales to ever air on television, with nearly 2 million viewers even signing a petition for a redo.
He may, in fact, be more dedicated to the preservation of the family than either his brother or Rhaenyra, the people directly in line for the throne. Because Westeros still stands two centuries later, when “Game of Thrones” gets going, we know that whatever wars transpire next season and beyond, this realm will not totally collapse. But when Rhaenyra turned around for the last shot of this season, finally the angriest dragon of all, she looked ready to burn it all down. Aemond, a walking grudge, taunted Luc first by land, ordering him to give up the eye Alicent long ago demanded at Laena’s funeral, and then by air.
Could part of Larys’s plan be to create suspicion that the princess or her supporters had him killed to keep him quiet? With Rhaenyra and friends on their way to Dragonstone, she won’t be around to defend herself. This week also saw the emergence of other prominent players, most notably Harwin (also briefly) and Larys.
House of the Dragon: Which Chapters of Fire & Blood Did Season 1 Adapt? - CBR
House of the Dragon: Which Chapters of Fire & Blood Did Season 1 Adapt?.
Posted: Thu, 25 Apr 2024 20:10:00 GMT [source]
When the series begins, King Viserys (Paddy Considine) is a very happy man. He has a wife, Queen Aemma (Sian Brooke), and a daughter, Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock), whom he loves and cherishes. Aemma is pregnant with her next child, and while she's had miscarriages and still-births before, he's feeling sure she's set to give birth to a happy baby boy. Rhaenyra and her best friend, Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey), visit Aemma, attend a tournament in honor of the baby (where they meet the dashing Ser Criston Cole, played by Fabien Frankel, for the first time), and interact with Prince Daemon (Matt Smith). Then there were the more granular problems, specific to the story and its structure. The frequent time jumps and the cast changes they necessitated had a distancing effect because viewers bond with performers, not characters.
Viserys removes Otto as Hand of the King and orders Rhaenyra to marry Ser Laenor Velaryon (Theo Nate). Viserys orders the grand maester to bring Rhaenyra moon tea — a contraceptive — proving he doesn't quite believe her. “I’ve reached the limits of my art,” the obstetrician told Daemon. The fact that he then just let his patient stagger off to commit Dracaryside suggests that those limits are quite profound. I do realize that Laena assessed the situation and sought the dragonrider’s death she foreshadowed earlier, but the mechanics of the scene, with an exhausted, doubled-over Laena somehow outpacing Daemon to the beach, were odd.
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