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The latest episode of House of the Dragon is called ‘Driftmark’ which is where the entire episode takes place — a bottle episode on a castle on an island. We start off in a fairly short time jump from the last episode, with the only clear changes that Otto Hightower is now the Hand of the King again and that Larys Strong is the new Lord of Harrenhal. But otherwise the entire episode is basically just a follow-up to Laena’s funeral at sea, with one questionable cinematography decision throughout a decent amount of the episode.
For a lot of the outdoor night scenes, it is often hard to easily see what’s happening in the episode, which feels shades of the issues with that episode in the last season of Game of Thrones that had a similar issue. However the surprise ending of that episode was quite frustrating, while the surprise ending of this episode was delightful and a truly good twist on the source material (which I don’t think is really contradicted by it).
This episode we start getting a little more stuff from the various kids, which is great, because they were a bit of a cipher last episode. Aegon the eldest is chasing after chicks and getting drunk, but defends his family when interrogated by Viserys. Awkward Aemond actually manages to claim the enormous Vhagar as rider in a cool sequence of him at first totally out of control and eventually delighting in riding the dragon across the moon in the sky. The episode does a great job at showing how huge the dragon is against everything else.
No wonder he (who’s felt picked on for so long) decides to do the same abuse to the younger children, a classic sad bullying cycle. The older Jace is interesting this episode partially because of his fight with Aemond, but also because he wants to mourn the dead Strongs — even though Rhaenyra correctly tells him that it’d be a bad look. His younger brother also has a great, sad little moment when Corlys talks to him about inheriting Driftmark and the kid correctly says that it would only happen if everyone’s dead so he doesn’t want it.
We still only get a little from Daemon and Laena’s daughters, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see them furious at the slight against their mother, right after the funeral as well. But that fight is the big thing to get the whole family involved, more or less, even if Daemon is mainly in the corner smirking while dramatically leaning against the wall. Aemond intelligently says that losing an eye is worth getting a dragon, and we hear Otto later agree with this sentiment.
Switching a dragon’s allegiance from one family to another is a huge deal considering how much a dragon can sway things — and Vhagar is the oldest and largest dragon alive. The entire building up of tension was really excellent in that big discussion scene, with a lot of very significant stares — and Alicent is the first to snap, trying to raise a blade towards a child.
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Rhaenyra is able to goad her into striking first — the first blood literally spilled — there’s also a great shot with the Princess seeing the blade shining against the fire in the background. It’s unclear exactly where the Velaryons will ally themselves too, but since Aemond did fight with their girls, it doesn’t seem likely they’d like them much.
For the Queen, Otto is now proudly supporting his daughter for getting how ugly the game must be, and she realizes the terrible truth of herself and offers a potential idea for working with Larys Strong in the future. For his part Larys is smiling happily a lot this episode — quite a change of pace for the dude, I guess he’s simply an awful person.
The episode really teased us with the last moments of Laenor’s death, which is mentioned in the source material as happening — there’s no idea that he faked it, so it’s a great twist especially for book readers. But I think it doesn’t contradict the source at all. At first they seemed to show Rhaenyra as even worse by planning Laenor’s death, now the ‘set him free’ is actually a nice thing.
We even got some answers to open questions — that Laenor and Rhaenyra did try to have kids, they simply couldn’t. So it begins to make a bit more sense why the Princess would be so foolish with Ser Harwin. The next episode serves as the final time jump for the actors, with the kids jumping up to new actors — definitely should be interesting to see how they work.
But so far Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke are really great in their roles, with Olivia in particular good at silent, horrified reactions. The difficulty of seeing much of the shots aside, the episode had a lot of great looking moments, and a superb building of tension that somehow let up in the final moments. It makes me feel a bit better about the time jump, even if I think they still couldn’ve managed two more episodes before the last one.
New episodes of House of the Dragon premiere Sundays on HBO, streaming on HBO Max.
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