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The first season finale of House of the Dragon is called ‘The Black Queen’ after the new Queen of the Blacks — meaning Rhaenyra and her faction. The episode was a knowing follow-up to the last ‘Green’ episode but it was also a very knowing mirror of the first episode. That episode ends with a shot of Rhaenyra getting knees bent to as the heir to the Iron Thrones, but this one ends with a shot of her in a sort of violent, saddened fury — both looking straight at us.
Similarly, there’s another scene of Daemon and Otto facing off, with Rhaenyra interrupting each time — and amusingly, both times countering Daemon’s desire to kill Otto and perhaps die himself. Yet we see the touching moment of Rhaenyra seeing the torn page from back in the season start when she and Alicent sat outside reading and pleasantly hanging out.
Daemon’s lust for the war is a big driver, the main power struggle between the married couple and their very complicated backstory. He sees things as classically ‘strong’ about taking revenge against the Hightowers and is more than willing to go to war about it — he is furious about their many slights throughout his life, including a vague thought that maybe they killed his brother too.
Yet Rhaenyra far prefers a peaceful realm, reminded of the prophecy of the Song of Ice and Fire from her father — the thing that drove his entire realm and most of his decisions. But critically the decisions to keep the realm together to save the future — so naturally Rhaenyra sees things that way too, and Daemon, furious and feeling misunderstood and trapped, chokes out his beloved wife. Quite a sinister turn for him, although emotions are running high — but it’s hard to imagine he’ll face much punishment for it after the events of the end of the episode.
The start of the episode had an inverse of the first episode of the season in a different way — Rhaenyra gives birth to a premature stillborn, while her mother died to theoretically save her baby. It’s one of those very difficult scenes to watch — I don’t know that I really feel that it’s needed to show things in such a grotesque way, a decision of ‘realism’ that feels ultimately unnecessary. We know what’s happening without having to see the specifics.
One of the little changes from the book is that the child is meant to look monstrous — they thankfully minimized that while hinting at the horror by showing Rhaenyra seeing visions of a dragon’s mouth during her delivery. That change worked pretty well for me. The other big one is that in the book Aemond more specifically tried to kill Lucerys instead of it going out of hand — but it’s hard to argue that Aemond wasn’t trying to severely hurt his cousin-nephew, so the main change is that the difference is confirming what Viserys said in the season start. Dragons can’t really be controlled at all.
HBO
The entire dragon versus dragon fight was wonderfully realized, with a lot of great shots to show the massive size difference between the two beasts. Really quite a cool thing when we see Vhagar fly overhead dwarfing the smaller dragon and rider. I also thought they did a cool job of Aemond’s new sapphire eye — gives him a feeling of our old wight walker pals from Game of Thrones.
I was glad the episode explicitly showed Corlys recovered and supporting his wife — it would’ve been quite frustrating if they had left that a mystery, especially considering the significant part he’s meant to play. Daemon openly asks about why Rhaenys didn’t simply kill the Greens, and she says it’s not her war … yet. But it sure is her war now.
The show also gave us a big old tease with the mentions of a younger Cregan Stark who has yet to be shown on screen (let alone even cast, I assume). A good hint for really cool things in the future with that character (perhaps one of my favorite story arcs in the ‘Dance of Dragons’ tale).
I really liked this season overall — it didn’t have the narrative cohesion of the first season of Game of Thrones, but that one benefited from being a clear adaptation of a single book as opposed to a longer set of chapters from ‘Fire and Blood’ that are simply part of a longer story. I feel like the show does have a great sense of how the characters talk and interact, even if I didn’t agree with every choice.
Mainly I think the show would’ve been ever better with another two or three episodes, just enough to fill in some of the blanks of those time jumps and clear up some missing moments, like connecting with Leana better or seeing the aftermath of Criston Cole and Alicent when she stops his suicide attempt. But I think it was a very self-assured, well-handled first season and a great refreshing feeling from a lot of the sour notes of the end of Season 8, which I didn’t hate but I had issues with. Sadly we won’t see Season 2 until 2024, but I feel reasonably confident they’ll handle the next season even better.
All episodes of House of the Dragon are streaming on HBO Max.
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