So far, the king has refused to acknowledge the reality in front of him: The questionable parentage of Rhaenyra’s children further undermines her claim to the throne. #Medieval battlefields desktop backgrounds seriesThe illegitimacy of the three Velaryon boys - don’t call them “Strongs”! - already looms over their childhoods and turns every conversation between Viserys (Paddy Considine) and his court into a series of entrapments. (To give you an idea of how complicated the Velaryon family bonds are, Laenor insists on naming the newborn Joffrey after his own lost lover, Joffrey Lonmouth - the man who met a horrific end at the hands of Ser Criston Cole in the previous episode, breaking Laenor’s heart in the process.) The boys all bear the name Velaryon despite being very obviously the offspring of Rhaenyra and her brown-haired beau, not Rhaenyra and her husband Laenor. In the other corner are the children of Rhaenyra and her illicit lover, Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr): Jacaerys “Jace” Velaryon (Leo Hart), Lucerys “Luke” Velaryon (Harvey Sadler), and Joffrey Velaryon - whose birth we witness in a grueling opening scene. In a truly hilarious moment, Alicent tries to impress upon Aegon that his half-sister is going to claim the throne, and he mumbles, “So?” leaving her to spell out for him in capital letters the plot of this show. The Targaryen children have grown up in a bubble of privilege that few things have managed to puncture. (We go into more detail on the newly updated Targaryen family tree.) In one corner, you’ve got the children of Alicent and Viserys: Aegon (Ty Tennant), a spoiled but typical teenage boy, his reticent younger sister Helaena (Evie Allen), and their weak but determined younger brother Aemond (Leo Ashton). Like father, like daughter.ĭuring the time we’ve skipped ahead, the major players of the Dance of Dragons (the coming civil war) have arrived on scene. As Alicent, the wide-eyed, petrified Emily Carey, having gained some sentience through last week’s green dress maneuver, transitions seamlessly into the still-wide-eyed but constantly calculating, now permanently paranoid Olivia Cooke. Fresh-faced Milly Alcock, who played a defiant but naive young Rhaenyra, becomes Emma D’Arcy, whose Rhaenyra is hardened and iron-willed but also perpetually exhausted. Accordingly, the show replaces its younger actors with adults. The episode starts with a major skip some 10–15 years into the future and functions as a midpoint reset for the season. Now, as the season makes its biggest time jump yet, we get a harrowing look at two more of those birth scenes - one with an outcome that suggests the show’s family ties are, themselves, acts of violence, and that each point on the dense Targaryen family tree is, in truth, a battle scar. One of those brutal childbirth scenes formed the bloody core of the show’s first episode, with the death of Rhaenyra’s mother casting a long shadow over the Red Keep. The sole exception to this rule involves the type of violence that’s rarely framed as violence: childbirth. We want to get to know you better - and learn what your needs are. The intermittent bursts of shocking violence have so far devastated only peripheral characters, never Rhaenyra or Alicent directly. Many of them, especially in this episode, rotate into position only to be immediately dispatched through disgrace or death. We’ve greeted a steady stream of characters and learned all their secrets, foibles, and motivations as they carefully find their places on the great chess board. We’ve gotten micro versions of the conflicts that will eventually erupt into full-blown civil war between our two main factions. So far, House of the Dragon has played out less like a four-act opera than the overture before the show. Note: This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon, Episode 6, “The Princess and the Queen.” According to the show’s logic, then, Rhaenyra and Alicent are both war veterans. Prior to the debut of House of the Dragon, co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik told the Hollywood Reporter that the season would feature a number of childbirth scenes - all of which the creative team approached like “battles.”īy the time we reach episode six, “The Princess and the Queen,” said princess and said queen have each given birth at least three times.
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