House of the Dragon: S2 E7
It all comes down to dragons as Queen Rhaenyra looks to leverage her gambit: the prospect of lowborn dragonriders against the military might of the Hightowers.
For last week’s episode review, click here.
Really, it just comes down to dragons.
It’s been no secret throughout this second season of Max’s “House of the Dragon” that Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) has zero chance of a military victory in the civil war for the throne of the Seven Kingdoms. She has no standing army to speak of, and her husband/confidant/self-dealing uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) has spent most of the season trying to stake his own claim to power by uniting the fractious Riverlands clans into a fighting force.
What Rhaenyra has is dragons, specifically three mighty lizards with no dragonriders: Seasmoke, Silverwing and Vermithor — the last being perhaps the only creature in Westeros who can possibly challenge Vhagar. That’s the mount of the dastardly Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), now ruling as regent of the enemy faction after nearly killing his brother, King Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and effectively banishing his mother, Queen Dowager Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke).
As we saw in episode 6, Rhaenyra’s gambit was to search for other nobles with Targaryen blood who could possibly be accepted as riders by the dragons. It didn’t work out so well for the captain of her Queensguard, Ser Steffan Darklyn, now just smoldering ashes.
But it appears the dragons aren’t so picky about the marital status of Targaryen parentage, so long as their offspring have blood in their veins and a stout heart. Addam Hull (Clinton Liberty), a lowly shipwright in the Velaryon navy, was chosen by Seasmoke to be its rider in the finale of episode 6. Though it throws her prissy noble advisors into a snit, Rhaenyra accepts Addam into her service — and begins looking for other baseborn Targaryen throughout the realm.
“Let us raise an army of bastards,” she declares.
Thus, minor characters we’d been having check-ins with throughout the season are now ready to come to the fore, including blacksmith Hugh Hammer (Kieran Bew) and drunken oaf Ulf White (Tom Bennett), until recently starving residents of King’s Landing under the thumb of the Hightowers.
Whether or not the dragons deign to accept these and other smallfolk as their riders or turn them into sooty smears, I’ll leave you to discover.
Up north, Daemon finally starts to get some traction — after several meandering outings in the last few episodes — in the Riverlands. Young Oscar Tully (Archie Barnes) ascends to the rank of Lord Paramount after the death of his grandsire, and Daemon quickly moves to put the green lad under his thumb and unite the quarreling lesser bannermen. But Lord Oscar proves to be made of sterner stuff than he’d supposed.
Overall, this episode moves along a lot quicker than last week’s, which could easily have seen 10 or 12 minutes pared from its running time. At 63 minutes, episode 7 boasts few slow bits and is quite engaging, despite again having a paucity of action.
Hey, every outing can’t be wall-to-wall dragonfire and eviscerations.
Curiously, there’s no follow-up on the budding romance between Rhaenyra and her new confidante, spy mistress Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), that marked last week’s episode. They’re back to being chaste conspirators once again. Frankly I’m glad, because their hinted coupling seemed like a cheap and easy throw-in for fans perhaps disappointed by this show’s lack of copious “sexposition” compared to its predecessor, “Game of Thrones.”
There is also a hint of brewing animosity between Rhaenyra and her heir, Prince Jacaerys (Harry Collett), over her embrace of lowborn Targaryen offspring. He knows about the years of gossip about his own progeny — his dark hair a dead giveaway among the silver-coiffed Targaryens. So guessing perhaps a few steps ahead of his mother, he realizes that one of these bastard dragonriders could prove to be a threat to his own claim to the throne, when the time comes.
I’m enjoying the hell out of this season of “House of the Dragon,” a huge improvement upon the promising but often slow season 1. Even the few dull stretches here and there can’t veil the intrigue of the great game of chess these warring nobles are playing. Next week’s season finale can’t arrive soon enough.