'House of the Dragon' is running out of likable characters

(NOTE: Spoilers ahead for season two of “House of the Dragon” through episode four. Does not contain any book spoilers from “Fire & Blood.”)

Once upon a time in the mid-1990s, my father sat down to watch Quentin Tarantino’s seminal 1994 film, “Pulp Fiction.” He has never been a huge fan of R-rated movies to begin with, but he had a very specific issue with this movie.

His simple, two-sentence review: “These are all bad people. There’s nobody to root for.”

I’m slowly reaching that point with HBO’s “Game of Thrones” spin-off series, “House of the Dragon.”

The show is chronicling “The Dance of the Dragons,” an internal war over royal succession among members of the ruling family in Westeros, the Targaryens. And after nearly three years and one-and-a-half seasons the two sides in the war, the Greens and the Blacks, are finally dancing.

This episode gave us the Battle of Rook’s Rest where our new Hand of the King, the dumb, impulsive Ser Criston Cole (Fabian Frankel), succeeds initially by tricking the Blacks into sending out their largest dragon to stop an attack on an ally’s castle.

Meanwhile, Cole is keeping an ace up his sleeve — the Greens have the biggest dragon of them all, Vhagar, hiding on the sidelines waiting to swoop in and take Rhaenys out.

In Westeros, the Targaryen dragons are the equivalent of nuclear weapons, and everyone on both sides of the conflict has been understandably hesitant to use them.

That finally changed with Sunday’s episode, “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” which gave us a triple-dragon mid-air battle that took out one dragon and its rider, and may have taken out the King of Westeros.

Rest in peace to one of the only decent characters on this show — Princess Rhaenys Velaryon (Eve Best) and her mighty red dragon Meleys gave us one of the best moments of the first season, when they crashed King Aegon II’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) coronation. Rhaenys seemed to have the most level head among all of the Targaryens. She even seemed to recognize that she was quite possibly flying to her death by going to Rook’s Rest, and was willing to do it anyway.

Unfortunately, her death leaves very few people to cheer on. Most everyone else is a complete jerk. To wit:

• Queen Dowager Alicent (Olivia Cooke) had a little bit of sympathy from me after being sidelined on the Westerosi Small Council by Cole, King Aegon and his brother, Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell). But she squandered that goodwill this week by brutally smacking down Aegon in the least motherly way possible by confirming Aegon’s fears that he is not respected as a king.

“You simply need to do what is required of you: Nothing,” she tells her son. That’s pretty cold, Mom.

• King Aegon’s response is to get drunk and fly his dragon Sunfyre to Rook’s Rest, in a desperate bid to command respect and show that he can get things done. He can’t. He’s immediately outmatched by Rhaenys and Meleys.

• Aemond sees Aegon and takes yet another step toward darkness by attacking both Rhaenys and his brother with a blast of fire that does far more damage to the king than to Rhaenys.

• Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) is busy wandering around Harrenhal hallucinating, being condescending (a.k.a. his usual self) with Grover Tully’s grandson and probably getting ready to try and cheat on Queen Rhaenyra with the newly introduced Alys Rivers, a strange woman who may or may not be giving Daemon the dreams and visions he is experiencing.

• Speaking of Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), she may be the only person left worth rooting for. I have a feeling that she and Rhaenys’ widower Corlys Velaryon will take their grief and turn it into a powerful friendship.

This is a tough tightrope to walk for showrunner Ryan Condal. Most of the remaining pieces on the chess board are wildly unlikable characters.

I’ve got a little sympathy for King Aegon. Sure, he was drunk on his own kingly power for a few episodes, but he was literally smacked back down to earth in this episode. We are not explicitly shown whether he survived the fall. It sounds as though he did, but perhaps just barely.

And make no mistake; that was Aemond’s goal. He may not have expected his brother to fly into battle, but he damn sure took advantage of it, waiting to enter the fray and then conveniently crippling his brother’s dragon under the guise of attacking Rhaenys.

Aemond wants to be king real bad, it seems. He shamed his brother at the Small Council by showing off his command of the High Valyrian language, a little payback for last week’s brothel embarrassment. And while the show left it a little ambiguous this week, it seemed that Cole arrived just in time to prevent Aemond from finishing Aegon off at the end of the episode.

So where do we go from here? Rhaenyra and the Blacks just lost their most powerful weapon. They have more dragons than the Greens, but none of them can hope to contend with Vhagar. They need more firepower and they desperately need Daemon to succeed in raising an army.

The Greens, meanwhile, appear to have a king who is going to be sidelined for quite some time. That paves the way for Cole to have his Tywin Lannister glow-up and take charge as Hand of the King.

Of course, Cole is no Tywin Lannister. He’s a dumb brute without any of Tywin’s cunning and forward thinking. He and his bro Aemond will be running things for the time being, and that’s bad news for everyone.

As Rhaenys put it in episode three, “Hotter blood has prevailed, I think.”

And thanks to all of these extremely unlikable people in power, that hot blood will set Westeros aflame in pretty short order. See the episode five preview below: