All season lengthy on Home of the Dragon, we’ve watched the adults of the Targaryen clan slowly circle into two factions — the Greens, led by Alicent, and what is going to ultimately develop into the Blacks, led by Rhaenyra. We solely simply met their kids correctly within the earlier episode, midway via the season — however on this episode, “Driftmark,” the youthful technology abruptly takes middle stage.
This episode provides us a pivotal second in our build-up to what already seems like an inevitable civil conflict — and one twist involving a fake-out and a shocking destiny for one minor character. But it surely additionally provides us a serious shift from specializing in Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke) to specializing in their kids, those who will inevitably have to hold out the battle they’ve every to date skirted round. “Driftmark” reveals us a court docket that’s develop into so fully entrenched in its personal in-fighting, mistrust, and paranoia {that a} single spark may ignite the powder keg.
As a substitute of a tiny flame, nonetheless, the catalyst is a complete fire-breathing dragon.
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The youngsters aren’t all proper
It will need to have royally sucked to be a child rising up on this court docket. At Driftmark (the seat of Home Velaryon), the place Viserys (Paddy Considine) and his court docket have assembled to mourn the dying of Girl Laena, Rhaenyra’s youngsters have the disorienting expertise of being unable to mourn their very own father and grandfather, who additionally died within the earlier episode — however who Rhaenyra can’t permit them to acknowledge as household. So on high of getting shunned, whispered about, and mocked by everybody else at court docket, their very own mom gaslights them, insisting that they’ll’t go to Harwin Sturdy’s funeral as a result of he isn’t their father.
She and Viserys each appear to imagine that if they only maintain insisting on this apparent lie, they’ll bend actuality to their will. As a substitute, the years of mendacity, all whereas Rhaenyra has had three illegitimate sons who’re clearly not her husband’s bloodline, have set Jace (Leo Hart) and Luke (Harvey Sadler) up for a horrible, vicious awakening to their actual roles at court docket.
They get it when their rival, Alicent’s bullied second son, Aemond (Leo Ashton), tries to regain his dignity as the one prince with out a dragon. Whereas Laena’s daughters are nonetheless in mourning for his or her mom, he sneaks right down to the seaside and bonds with Laena’s dragon Vhagar, one of many oldest, largest, and mightiest dragons within the realm. Whereas Aemond is flying round and having his large coming-of-age second, Laena’s daughters are watching in horror as this upstart steals their birthright. Once they confront him, together with Jace and Luke, issues instantly get bodily. After Aemond calls the boys “Strongs” — after, you realize, their precise father — they learn it because the insult it’s meant to be and assault him, with Luke in the end slashing him with a knife and taking out Aemond’s eye.
Till now, the youngsters of each homes have appeared fully uninvested of their dad and mom’ fights. That’s partly as a result of they’re oblivious youngsters, but additionally partly as a result of till now, their dad and mom’ fights have been carried out primarily via the rumor mill and passive microaggressions.
Viserys, once more attempting to make his distorted halcyon view of his court docket into actuality, has at all times seen the battle between Rhaenyra and Alicent as petty. Even now when it’s spilled over into open battle, he refuses to see the combating as something greater than disruptive squabbling. Luke’s violence is an unlucky accident; Aemond’s sin of brazenly difficult the boys’ parentage is by far the better transgression. After Aemond says he heard the rumor of the boys’ illegitimacy from older brother Aegon, Aegon bluntly confronts his grandfather with the reality: Everybody is aware of Rhaenyra’s youngsters are illegitimate — simply have a look at them.
To this point, each main ceremonial occasion of this present has been disrupted in a roundabout way by an outburst of violence, however that is the primary time the youthful technology has participated, not to mention instigated any of it. Though Aemond appears to be keen to let the hostility go for now, the rivalry this battle has created, between Aemond and Lucerys particularly, will go on to gas open hostility and violence for many years. Whereas the youngsters could not have began the conflict that started with Alicent’s inexperienced costume, they’ll be those to complete it.
It’s in all probability no coincidence that Laena’s daughters, the twins Baela and Rhaena, will ultimately play a serious position in peacekeeping and in binding the dominion again collectively whereas their Targaryen counterparts tear it aside. They’re, in any case, the one set of children who’ve grown up away from Viserys’s court docket. They lack the particular model of indoctrination that has led to at least one faction being the social gathering of actuality distortion and the opposite faction being the social gathering of power-hungry paranoia.
(Essentially the most touching second of the episode, in reality, entails the twins being the one folks within the room who can precisely learn the room. In the midst of a tense and awkward funeral gathering, the twins, rising from their very own grief over the lack of their mom, acknowledge that Jace and Luke are additionally mourning their very own father. Though they’ll’t give them phrases — as a result of nobody is allowed to acknowledge that the boys are in mourning — the twins silently transfer to consolation them. It’s the primary and solely time within the episode that anybody acknowledges that Jace and Luke have a motive to grieve. )
In the meantime, the taking of Aegon’s eye has not solely given the Targaryen kids a motive to take up their dad and mom’ vendettas; it has served to validate all of Alicent’s years of paranoid suspicions in regards to the hurt Rhaenyra and her clan may do to her and her kids.
The paranoid type in Targaryen politics
Other than its ongoing deconstruction of the patriarchy, Home of the Dragon hasn’t actually embraced full-scale political allegory, however on this episode we start to see a top level view of extremism taking maintain of Alicent’s facet of the Crimson Preserve. Alicent has warned her kids for years, as her father has warned her for years, that they received’t be protected if Rhaenyra takes energy, and that the one solution to forestall the encroaching risk to their well-being is to organize for conflict themselves. Alicent has develop into subsumed by this worry, regardless of Rhaenyra repeatedly searching for reconciliation and exhibiting each look of goodwill.
The battle between Aemond and the Velaryon (Sturdy) youngsters appears to quickly jolt her out of the cloud of suspicion she’s created. After she grabs a knife and tries to take one in all Luke’s eyes in retaliation for her son’s, impulsively slashing Rhaenyra’s arm within the course of, the king rebukes her so strongly that she’s chastened. Finally, she appears to be reconsidering all her life selections.
However simply when she’s doubting whether or not a flip towards violence is basically the trail she needs, her father steps in. After Lyonel Sturdy’s dying, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans, my gleefully deadpan love) has been restored as hand of the king, and he appears to have resumed his plotting and power-hungry scheming precisely the place he left off. As a substitute of chastising her for nearly stabbing one of many king’s grandkids throughout a funeral in entrance of a whole bunch of outstanding courtiers, he appears positively delighted, and tells her that that is precisely the sort of mettle she wants to point out if she’s going to be able to battle within the coming conflict. There’s by no means been a second when Otto hasn’t anticipated a conflict; he’s at all times trying forward in direction of the violence he’s satisfied is inevitable, just like the Westerosi equal of a conspiracy zealot erecting a bunker.
Lest we predict he’s simply power-hungry and paranoid, nonetheless, he brings it again round to what’s, at the very least ostensibly, the fabric level: Due to the battle, everybody at court docket now is aware of what sort of lady Rhaenyra actually is — an adulterer. Recall, too, Alicent’s actual dismay when she realized Rhaenyra had lied to her about shedding her virginity. The Hightowers as a unit have realized to justify their obsession with self-preservation — which essentially is about preserving energy — by fixating on what they see as Rhaenyra’s immorality.
One thing the present hasn’t addressed however which I discover extremely fascinating is that the Hightowers appear to have an extended historical past of being fixated on each energy and morality. That’s, within the books, the Hightowers have lengthy had a strict ethical code which they’ve wielded as their major weapon within the recreation of thrones. The clan is thought for being deeply spiritual, and so they’ve inexorably interwoven their fortunes with the nation’s dominant faith, the Religion of the Seven.
The reign of King Aenys (three kings earlier than this one on the Targaryen household tree) and later his merciless successor King Maegor noticed a decade-long riot led by a sect of utmost spiritual leaders, an armed power referred to as the Religion Militant. In idea, the Religion Militant Rebellion occurred as a result of the spiritual leaders of Westeros determined Maegor was an immoral polygamist from an immoral household of incestuous perverts. (Please take pleasure in this transient second in Westerosi historical past when incest was a cultural taboo.)
However the ethical outrage was actually only a cowl. The actual motive was that the Excessive Septon, the chief of the Religion Militant, was offended that Maegor married his niece however then forged her apart and remarried another person. The Excessive Septon was a member of Home Hightower; like Otto, he too had steered the king’s marriage as a means of consolidating energy and papering over a dispute about succession. And, like Otto, when issues didn’t go his means, he fell again on accusing the offending social gathering of immorality. In each circumstances the immoral offender occurs to be standing instantly in the way in which of a Hightower’s path to energy. (Maegor and Rhaenyra parallel one another as properly, however thankfully that’s in all probability not on the syllabus till season two.)
We all know that Otto’s insistence on taking the ethical excessive floor is all only a decoy as a result of he doesn’t bat a watch at his personal ethical quandaries, together with pimping out his teenage daughter to the king or letting his daughter marry her youngsters to — sigh — one another. Morality to the Hightowers is simply a masks for his or her actual objective of achieving and sustaining energy. However due to the aesthetic cowl that their spiritual views present, they’re adept at discovering methods to border Rhaenyra as their religious enemy in addition to an existential risk. It’s not clear if she even realizes what a distorted model of her they’ve created by this level: To them she appears to be free, immoral, impure, corrupt, and hungry for energy.
This all issues significantly to the sort of faction the Greens will develop into, as a result of if you happen to’ll recall, Alicent’s supporters aren’t simply standing behind her son Aegon’s declare to the throne for his sake or her sake. They’re additionally resisting the entire concept of a girl being certified to assert the Iron Throne. So, once more, the extra the Hightowers can efficiently unfold the concept Rhaenyra is spiritually unfit, the extra they serve themselves.
That sadly implies that Rhaenyra’s fateful choice on the finish of the episode, which she makes as a way to strengthen her personal ties to the throne, is destined to backfire. The plan permits Rhaenyra to do away with her husband, Laenor Velaryon (John Macmillan), and wed her uncle Daemon (Matt Smith), in order that she will be able to consolidate their facet of Home Targaryen and mix their assets. It’s not totally clear whether or not they intend to straight-up homicide Laenor or simply assist him pretend his dying and abscond to the Free Cities together with his boyfriend, which he in the end does. Both means, she and Daemon work out a plot which does outcome within the homicide of a anonymous expendable guard, and which permits everybody to assume Rhaenyra murdered Laenor.
Rhaenyra’s objective — other than attending to bonk her uncle — is to intimidate everybody along with her energy and ruthlessness. However with the accusations that Rhaenyra is immoral, the Hightowers have already laid the foundations to undermine no matter beneficial properties she’s created from this transaction. And on condition that in gaining Daemon she’s alienating the whole thing of Home Velaryon, Rhaenyra received’t have issues straightforward from right here on in.
True, she’s obtained two newly woke up youngsters on her facet. However Alicent’s youngsters are waking up, too.
And due to Aemond, as Otto factors out, as they barrel headlong into the made-up soon-to-be-real conflict they created totally in their very own minds, they’ve obtained a serious benefit: One huge-ass dragon.