House of the Dragon 2×01 “A Son for A Son” kicks off Season 2 with an episode that feels like it is about grief, but that only seems to truly allow space for Rhaenyra to actually feel pain, no one else. The rest, we must extrapolate. Only the Queen gets to rage. Only she gets to really break down.
The hour, which gives us more of some characters we barely got to really know in Season 1, still only really manages to give us a glimpse of who these people are before it delivers the second big blow of the war: Blood and Cheese. Because, though we don’t get the book line, Daemon’s revenge is indeed swift. A son for a son. And not that there was any going back before, but now, well, not we’re really in it.
So let us talk about House of the Dragon 2×01 “A Son for A Son,” and how it sets up the season to come.
The Show Undercuts Its Emotional Moments
The biggest issue with House of the Dragon 2×01 “A Son for A Son” is that the show undercuts what should be the most emotional moments of the episode. We don’t get to see Jace’s immediate reaction to the news of his brother’s death. Instead, the camera focuses on Cregan, a character we’ve known for 0.2 seconds. We don’t get to see anything of what Daemon feels outside of anger at Rhaenyra being gone – because Daemon is only useful to the show when he’s angry – and we barely get to sit with Corlys’ grief, either. Lucerys Velaryon is gone, and the only one who can grieve him is his mother.
And Rhaenyra does grieve him, in a wonderful performance by Emma D’Arcy, who pulls off the devastation, the rage, and the utter helplessness of loss in every second they have on screen. But the fact that, outside of a beautiful moment during the makeshift funeral, and the scene where Jace returns and hugs his mother no one else really gets to grieve Lucerys, ends up leaving Rhaenyra’s grief seeming out of place. And it also makes the phrase that gives the episode a title mean very little. “A Son for a Son”? Why? It doesn’t even seem like Daemon cares. Sure, he’s mad, but this is Daemon Targaryen. He’s always mad at the Greens.
To add insult to injury, Team Black spends most of the episode barely grieving Lucerys, but Alicent has a poignant moment of doing …just that. It doesn’t feel out of place per se, because Alicent has always cared enough for Rhaenyra that this is something she might do, but on an episode where people who spent actual time with Lucerys don’t get to grieve on screen and Alicent does, it rankles all the same.
Gets Rid of the Most Brutal Part of Blood & Cheese
Without the choice that makes this scene so horrible in the book, Blood and Cheese is just another murder – albeit a horrible one because it involves a young child. Lucerys was older, but he was also a child. So this is another way where the show works against itself because a moment that should have had a great emotional impact ends up being just another blow in the war. We don’t know Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen enough to mourn him, so the way to get us was clearly through his parents, and especially his mother.
House the Dragon drops the ball there too, however. In Fire & Blood, Aegon II and Helaena have three kids, and Blood and Cheese give her a choice between her two boys. She picks Maelor, her youngest kid — which is when they proceed to kill Jaehaerys, not without informing Maelor that her mother picked him to die. Here, Helaena merely points out who the boy is, and then they kill him. Much less brutal, and entirely anticlimactic. Where is the drama? Why is this show so interested in sanitizing everything?
And Wastes Too Much Time on Stuff That Adds Nothing to the Plot
Then there’s the fact that the episode drags at times because the show spends way too long with stuff that adds nothing to the plot. Okay, I guess it needed to be established that Alicent and Cole were sleeping together. Why, I don’t know, since I doubt the show is going to pull the thread of suspicion regarding Cole, but I guess that needed to be established. Did we need to see it multiple times? We already care very little about Cole, and a romance and/or sexual relationship with Alicent is unlikely to make me care more about him, so what is the point?
The same goes for other scenes that are meant to set up characterization, but that instead seem to go on for far too long without really adding anything to the plot, like the Small Council scene, or Aegon in the throne room. House of the Dragon 2×01 might be called “A Son for A Son,” but we don’t spend nearly enough time with Team Black to understand why the episode is called that, much less what could lead to such a declaration from Daemon. Instead, like way too much in this episode, the show expects us to just fill in the blanks.
Daemon Isn’t Allowed Grief, Just Revenge
Perhaps the character who suffers the most from the show’s insistence on ambiguity is Matt Smith’s Daemon Targaryen. What is Daemon? Who really is he? Season 1 never truly committed one way or another, and Season 2 seems determined to play the same game. Is Daemon chaos incarnate? A man who only ever cared for the throne? Or, a man who cared more about his brother – and later his niece, and by extension their family, than anything else?
Is he a man who turns to violence when he cannot find ways to express his feelings? Or is he just a man who likes violence? Sure, fans can decide on one of these interpretations, but this isn’t a choose-your-own-adventure story. At some point, the show must choose a canon interpretation. It would be good if they did so soon.
The longer they take, the more the show suffers for it.
Things I think I think:
- I am as excited about the possibility of Cregan as the rest of them, but was it really necessary to start at Winterfell when Cregan cannot possibly be an important character yet? I’ve read the book, I know this.
- Aegon’s moment of self-awareness at the whole “Aegon the Magnanimous” thing was kinda funny.
- I don’t have to like Otto to know he’s effective – and that by undermining him, Larys is making Aegon weaker.
- Harry Collet and Emma D’Arcy do the absolute most with the only scene we get where someone other than Rhaenyra is allowed to grieve Lucerys in a real way, and is it a wonder that the scene ends up being one of the best in the episode?
- THE DOG! THE DOG!
- Cutting away from Daemon’s request in case they don’t find Aemond is a mistake. House of the Dragon continues to try to give us “the benefit of the doubt” when it comes to Daemon, as if we couldn’t possibly enjoy him as a character if he did morally questionable things, and that feels like the show’s biggest blunder so far. People have rooted for Kylo Ren and Darth Vader. It’s fine if Daemon does bad things. Fans can handle it and still root for Daemon, particularly in a show where there are very few morally upstanding characters. It’s time House of the Dragon stopped trying to whitewash Daemon Targaryen. Just let him be the agent of chaos Matt Smith wants him to be!
- Also, also, this man literally killed his first wife but now we’re supposed to believe he didn’t order this child’s murder because nah Daemon wouldn’t, come oooon. Thing is, we’d support him anyway. Let us be. Let him be.
- The real question: who in the world was supposed to be guarding the room where Helaena and the kids were? Just asking for me, because I could add a few things to the list of reasons to hate Criston Cole.
Agree? Disagree? What did you think of House of the Dragon 2×01 “A Son for A Son”? Share with us in the comments below!
House of the Dragon airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.
