Spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 2, Episode 4 below.
After watching the first three episodes of the second installment of House of the Dragon, Ryan Condal’s staggeringly epic Game of Thrones prequel, I was halfway through writing a rave review. Following a Season 1 conclusion that left my jaw on the floor (surely nothing could beat the sight of Elliot Grihault’s Prince Lucerys being mauled by Vhagar, as ridden by his uncle, Ewan Mitchell’s silver-haired, one-eyed Prince Aemond), the early episodes were promising, providing moments which echoed, if never quite matched, that heart-stopping sequence: there were brutal shocks, much visual spectacle, and a thrilling sense of ambiguity. After all, when Vhagar swallows Lucerys in a single gulp, what we see on Aemond’s face isn’t triumph, but shock.
Yes, the fearsome second son sometimes has the quality of a moustache-twirling pantomime villain, but he’s also the bullied, beleaguered young boy we met in the second half of Season 1, someone who was written off long ago and consequently feels he has nothing to lose. He’s also the fragile young man who sits, naked and in the fetal position, in the lap of a brothel worker in the second season’s second episode, “Rhaenyra the Cruel,” seeking comfort and telling her: “I do regret that business with Luke. I lost my temper that day. I am sorry for it. They used to tease me, you know. Because I was different.”
In that moment, and largely thanks to Mitchell’s transfixing performance, you understand exactly who Aemond is—the prickly exterior he needs to display to the world in order to inspire terror, at least, if he can’t gain respect, and the wounded child who cowers beneath it all. It’s a side of him we glimpse once again in Episode 3, “The Burning Mill,” when his brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) discovers him in the same pleasure house and drunkenly mocks him. Aemond, in turn, storms off defiantly. It’s obvious that he knows his brother doesn’t possess the qualities of a successful ruler, particularly in wartime, and understands that he himself would make a far more prudent choice. You can practically see the gears shifting in his brain.
Still, that, at least for me, didn’t fully explain what happens next. In Episode 4, “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” Aemond and Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) press ahead with a battle plan against the King’s wishes, and the former goads his brother in his fluent High Valyrian while Aegon struggles to respond. So far, so effective—it’s in Aemond’s character to make such veiled threats, to demonstrate his power over the council and force the monarch to agree with him. But then, in the episode’s explosive final sequence, all of that work—and Aemond’s painstaking character development, established over multiple seasons—unravels.
Consumed by his own sense of powerlessness, Aegon heads to the battlefield on the back of his dragon—and Aemond, who is lying in wait to aid Criston, sees him flying overhead to meet Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best). But, he doesn’t immediately rush to his brother’s aid. Instead, he lets Rhaenys’s dragon brutally wound the king before flying to their side. “Thank the gods,” says Aegon, believing help has come, but his brother looks him straight in the eye and—instead of, say, ordering Vhagar to maul Rhaenys’s dragon—tells her to breathe fire on Aegon.
His charred body crashes to earth, and it’s only then that Aemond turns his fury fully on Rhaenys and ensures her demise. In the episode’s closing moments, a devastated Criston enters the forest to see Aemond approaching his brother’s body with his sword drawn, looking as if he’s about to finish him off. But then, hearing Criston, he sheaths his sword and, asked where Aegon is, points nonchalantly to his blackened figure. It’s not clear whether or not he’s still alive.
Upon first viewing the episode, I was flummoxed. It’s understandable that Aemond would want to depose his brother somehow and rule in his stead, but why would such a fiercely intelligent and astute political operator attack Aegon so brazenly, out in the open, in the skies above a battlefield populated by countless soldiers, from where the likes of Criston and their other allies might see him? Why would he make his apathy—and possible further bloodlust—for his severely injured brother so apparent to Criston, who seems genuinely heartbroken by this turn of events? Can he risk alienating his most valuable general, someone with a proven track record of leading and winning battles?
And would Aemond really seek to destroy Aegon completely? The figurehead who, according to the Greens’ propaganda, was handpicked to rule by his father over his former heir, Rhaenyra? Wouldn’t their claim to the throne be significantly weakened by this? Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep him around, albeit in a weakened state? And if his brother is not, in fact, dead, wouldn’t he simply tell the world that Aemond wounded him with intent, and thus fragment the family even further? Why risk the potential retribution? Why, I wondered, would George R. R. Martin have written it this way?
Except, of course, he didn’t. In Fire & Blood, his 2018 tome which provides the basis for House of the Dragon, Aegon and Aemond fly out to attack Rhaenys together, though—spoiler alert—Aegon suffers serious burns and several broken bones from the encounter. Confined to bed, with his mind clouded by milk of the poppy, he was then forced to make way for Aemond to govern in his place. It’s important to add that this text provides a subjective history of Westeros as told from the perspective of an often unreliable narrator, the fictional historian Archmaester Gyldayn. As a result, what we saw play out on screen could have been what really happened, though I struggle to square that with what we already know of Aemond.
Given the history, it seems likely that Aegon will be maimed rather than dead come Episode 5, but was this illogical twist really the best way to arrive at this outcome? Couldn’t Aemond have let Rhaenys and her dragon finish Aegon off before arriving at their side? Or couldn’t he have somehow injured him and made it look—to Aegon and to the world—like he’d been aiming for Rhaenys? (While Aegon and his dragon fell down to the forest in flames, it looked like Rhaenys escaped that particular encounter entirely unscathed.) And instead of walking to Aegon with a drawn sword, couldn’t he have at least appeared more somber or feigned some concern when faced with his brother’s burned figure as Criston watches on in sorrow, to ensure he keeps the knight on side?
Some fans will argue that the seeds of Aemond’s resentment against Aegon were planted long ago, and that this moment, erratic and impulsive though it was, is a natural culmination of events. I agree with the former point, but I maintain that someone as calculated as Aemond would have found a cleaner, more politically adept and less chaotic way to achieve these exact ends. What plays out in “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” and the deliberate choice to deviate from Martin’s source material, feels like something designed to shock rather than a plot point which coheres with everything we’ve seen already.
While it’s not quite a full-blown Daenerys Targaryen-style character assassination, it is a moment that gives me pause, one which makes me worry about the direction of the rest of the season. To that end, I have a message for Condal: Let David Benioff and Dan Weiss’s mistakes from the final season of Game of Thrones—their tendency to rush through character arcs, the convenient erasure of certain plot points, the prioritizing of fan servicing set pieces (Cleganebowl, I’m looking at you) over the more intricate storytelling of earlier seasons—serve as a crucial warning. Yes, we all want jaw-dropping dragon battles—and, from a purely visual standpoint, there was so much to enjoy in this one—but they work best when we feel like we fully understand the characters spearheading them, as we did in Aemond’s encounter with Lucerys last season. Without that, House of the Dragon is in danger of falling into the same trap that Thrones eventually fell into.
