No one’s happy in this house. Everyone’s got big plans, delusions of grandeur, but reality keeps rearing its ugly head.
Situations are breaking down on all fronts. Even with characters who seem to be on the rise, like Ormund Hightower sowing chaos in King’s Landing, you can see the seeds of destruction already taking root.
Tumbleton/King’s Landing
He’s certainly making waves with his goal to outmaneuver the Targaryens with careful strategy — collaborating with green supporters in King’s Landing to systematically kill off the City Watch one gold cloak at a time. Still, he is, as described by his cousin Gwayne, a thin-skinned twat. Here he cites history and lectures Prince Daeron about his intention to outwit the mighty Targaryens as the Dornish once did, only to then have a minor freak out after Daeron (a Targaryen) beats him in a simple game. Either the irony is not lost on Ormund or he just hates losing that much; regardless, he bitterly sulks and upends the game board. He may have the cunning to hatch and execute devious plots, but he doesn’t have the temperament to process failure or defeat.
The same could be said of Daemon, to a lesser degree. He’s still trying to hype himself and his gold cloaks up with his dreams of unlimited glory through dragon supremacy, but the ending reveals that not even his trusty brute force approach is enough to fix this. We go from a few gold cloaks being murdered to their commander and half a dozen more getting whacked and put on display to send Team Black a message.
He may no longer be able to kid himself. Lately, he’s been acting even more naive than Rhaenyra, whose paranoia is beginning to boil over in the face of endless obstacles and setbacks.
The Red Keep/Harrenhal
I like Olivia Cooke as an actor, but Alicent is just not a very compelling character this season. The focus now is on her struggle to protect Helaena (who appears even more wary of her mother than she is of Rhaenyra) and wrest some form of agency from her confrontations with Mysaria the White Worm. The first bit only kind of works because of how well the show has touched on Alicent’s abysmal track record with parenting. The second doesn’t work because it relies on the audience overestimating Alicent’s skill of persuasion while also displaying how thoughtless she can be. Her attempting to escape with Helaena after Mysaria already made it clear that she’s watching her was just stupid.
I wasn't expecting Alicent to use Mysaria’s insecurity over her relationship with Rhaenyra to make her a potential ally later, citing their similar circumstances, but I still found this hard to swallow. Or that she'd try to escape with Helaena again, using a secret passage that turns out to be blocked off and gets them trapped in the dark. Dramatic ending, but I guess it makes sense when you consider the caged rat dilemma she's currently in.
Meanwhile at Harrenhal, Aemond has found himself a new mommy in Alys Rivers. He’s in a bad place, literally and metaphorically, diminished from the stab wound he took as well as feeling lost and powerless now that Vhagar is aimlessly flying around the Riverlands. The place is even more fitting for him than it was for Daemon.
Though she revels in vagueness, it’s fun to see Alys embracing her control of the haunted castle. Yet despite her seeming omniscience, she’s not as untouchable as she appears. She just might have luck on her side. Those bounty hunters after Aemond’s head were about to do her major harm before the one-eyed prince came to her rescue.
We get back-to-back scenes of Aemond and Aegon moaning about how unfairly treated they were as children, and how their mother preferred the other as opposed to them. While neither are entirely wrong for feeling neglected or unloved (they were), it mainly just adds to our impression of both brothers being deeply self-centered manchildren.
Hand/King
Larys Strong finally having enough and letting Aegon know exactly how pathetic and rotten he is may have been the highlight of the episode. Sure, it's hypocritical; Larys is in some ways an even worse person than Aegon. However, he is also a disabled man who slowly rose to his position of power by making huge sacrifices and playing his cards carefully over many years. It's no wonder he'd be disgusted with Aegon's fecklessness.
Of course, just when the tarnished king is about to give up and join Larys on an extended trip across the sea, Tyland Lannister returns alive and well to help plan their next move.
Speaking of giving up, Criston Cole and Gwayne Hightower’s journey in the Riverlands gets even more depressing. After making some progress in harassing and stalling the enemy host, Cole gets jammed up again when Oscar Tully uses his own strategy of sabotage against him. Gwayne’s smart enough to abandon this death march when it becomes clear that the fatalistic Cole has no intention of saving himself or his men.
I feel there is a risk of redundancy in some of these scenes. Gwayne is framed as being shocked by Cole’s fatalism, but Cole has been open about his campaign being doomed for awhile now. As much as I’m enjoying their subplot, Aegon and Larys miserably wandering in the woods is also starting to get repetitive. Alicent is back to scheming herself into corners, despite being a prisoner. And we’re back to Rhaenyra and Daemon bickering over power, destiny and how best to eliminate their enemies.
The plot is still moving forward, but the excitement is starting to wane a bit.
* To deal with the rat infestation, the Red Keep is now overrun with cats. The cats remain all the way to the Game of Thrones era.
* The scene between Ormund and Daeron features them playing cyvasse (this world’s version of chess). I forget if that’s the first appearance of the game in any of the adaptations or not.
* Ormund mints new coinage with Daeron’s image. Jumping the gun much.
* Baela is so depressed over Jace's death and Rhaenyra subsequently shunning her for her involvement, she doesn't seem to pick up on Addam of Hull's flirtiness.
* A dark-haired guy at Rook’s Rest has been watching Aegon and Larys very closely since they arrived. He appears to inform on them to the head bandit, Janos, which ends up getting him shanked by Aegon. That was oddly satisfying.
* I didn’t pick up on it on my first watch, but Aegon now carries a golden dragon scale from Sunfyre. A reminder of all the potential he had and lost.
* I like the contrast between Aegon barely being able to form a sentence in High Valyrian against Rhaenyra and Daemon, who have maybe the longest conversation in High Valyrian we’ve heard so far.
* Prince Joffrey, Rhaenyra’s heir and the last of her sons by Harwin Strong, is brought to King’s Landing but the queen is too afraid to see him. Sad, but understandable. She’s probably scared of getting too close to him after what happened to his older brothers.
Quotes:
Roderick Dustin: “While we continue to suffer this Cole and his band of hangers on, they flit about us like fucking deer flies. Another thing we do not endure in the North.”
Oscar Tully: “Better deer flies than frostbite. But Criston Cole I am past enduring, north or south.”
Alys Rivers: “This castle breathes. She swallows the greedy, the heedless. Her founding stones were watered with the blood of men. And she’s always thirsty.”
Daemon: “You are the Queen of Dragons. Your strength is your legitimacy.”
Ormund Hightower: “Never apologize for victory.”
Aegon II: (attempting High Valyrian) “Hear me, I am… the perfect.”
Larys Strong: “You could have risen to greatness. But instead, you trampled your birthright in the mud. You lazed… reveling in mediocrity, fucking anything in sight and drinking yourself into oblivion with your sycophantic friends. I will tell you the truth. You were a terrible king. But worse than that, you are a terrible man.”
Larys tends to get a captivating, beautifully written monologue every season, and this was no exception.
Rhaenyra: (in High Valyrian) “Something stirs against me, something crouched, something formless. I feel the dread of it. A cold presentiment.”
Alicent: (to Mysaria) “Her attentions may be on you now, that you bathe in the warm light of her gaze, but… will you stake so high a wager on the whims of a dragon rider?”
She just can't help but betray her lingering fixation with Rhaenyra.
Ser Criston Cole: “But I will not let them diminish me now. I will not return spurned, rejected. I am the realm’s greatest warrior. And I will die as such. Clear-eyed. Unbent. Glorious in battle. And not in their service, finally, but in my own. And they will sing songs of it. And Queen Alicent herself will hear them.”
Much like Alicent's language betrays her feelings for Rhaenyra, Cole speaks of defeat like he's being denied by a woman.
Daemon: “We should have burned them when we had the chance.”
Definitely has its moments, but the show is in danger of becoming repetitive again. Three and a half out of five dead bounty hunters.
I get it, but I admire Alicent myself. I've always been driven to anger at TV moms being unable to recognize their monster children for what they are, or "recognizing" them but still being driven to protect/defend them as parents. It's something to be forgiven, since it's still helpless love, but I think there's some really special about a mom actually being able to do what needs to be done with incorrigible children with power. I mean that's truly metal, real royal responsibility, even though part of it's just because she's complicit in the ladder climbing. But even there I feel inclined to gloss it over, since it was all really her dad. Everyone's really big on punishing mothers capable of judgment, so I think I'm now locked into defending her whenever possible. They did something impressive with her there and I hope they're not scared out of it by fan backlash, even if her subplots now are a hot mess.
ReplyDeleteI think the fact that her every action can be excused as the fault of her dad (or some other callous, grasping man) is part of my problem with her and Rhaenyra's characterization. Most of the characters -- even the other women who also suffer from this type of characterization to a lesser degree -- are allowed to be a rich shade of grey, but Alicent and Rhaenyra have spent most of their screen time in a tepid beige spectrum, where no matter what they do we still have to feel bad for them because all the odds were against them... despite being literally the most societally privileged women alive who could have leveraged what power they did possess to strengthen themselves (no one in this world was gonna stand in the way of Rhaenyra learning how to fight with a sword, for instance) instead of tearing into each other for years.
DeleteAnd it's hard for me to respect Alicent's judgement when she only allowed herself to acknowledge her sons' flaws after they became a problem she could no longer control and fettered the power she'd grown comfortable wielding as queen. Before Viserys died, she defended them on principle, casually neglected her younger children to prop up the child she liked the least, and even told Aegon he could bully Aemond as much as he likes as long as it's not in public. The main sadness to Alicent, in my eyes, isn't that she's a victim of the glass ceiling, but that she was raised and molded to be a creature of the royal court. All she knows how to do is play the game, and that informs her brand of "motherhood."