Home of the Dragon has all the time been about how the smallest choices can have unexpected penalties, however not often has that theme been as clear because it was within the season 2 premiere. Within the present’s first episode again from break, Daemon Targaryen decides to take issues into his personal palms with a plot that most likely may have used somewhat extra planning (basic Daemon). However whereas the guide’s model of those occasions is fittingly brutal, the present’s method is quieter, extra human, and arguably somewhat extra horrifying.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 2 episode 1.]
Within the guide model of the story, the assassins on the heart of this episode’s motion are named Blood and Cheese. And whereas they don’t get these foolish names within the present, they do get a degree of horror and humanity that the guide doesn’t have time to afford them. The guide variations are boogeymen, terrifying lowlifes who kill a handmaiden and a handful of guards, and appear gleefully merciless in the way in which they slay Prince Jaehaerys — tricking Queen Helaena into first naming her youthful son for dying earlier than killing her firstborn as a substitute.
And whereas these variations of the characters are considerably extra stomach-churning, the present’s method feels rather more applicable thematically. Fairly than the murderous wraiths of the guide, who slip into the queen mom’s chambers, leaving a pile of our bodies behind them, Home of the Dragon’s assassins merely transfer by way of the fortress unnoticed, a pair of employed palms of low standing and low intelligence, functionally invisible to the royalty who personal the halls. Once they attain tough junctures within the fortress’s tunnels, or tough decisions, they panic and bicker and bumble. The Blood and Cheese of the present aren’t gifted killers, they’re simply amoral males despatched to do one thing too disgusting for anybody to have imagined attainable.
Including to all of that is the sense of desperation that the pair’s assembly with Daemon appears to have instilled in them. In accordance with showrunner Ryan Condal, the crew needed the set-piece to play out like a “heist gone incorrect,” and because the scene stretches on, we will really feel their fear set in, making them extra reckless, merciless, and hurried within the course of. Whereas the present cleverly leaves Daemon’s closing phrases a thriller, the pair’s concern over what Daemon will do to them in the event that they fail is palpable.
“We all know who Daemon is; I don’t suppose he essentially immediately ordered the dying of a kid,” Condal mentioned in a roundtable. “However he clearly mentioned, If it’s not Aemond, don’t depart the fortress empty-handed.”
So after they can’t discover their preliminary goal, it is sensible that these two resolve to accept the primary royal son they’ll discover. It’s the type of hurried choice that solely these two brutes may make. And, in a scene that’s each grotesque and humorous, the 2 assassins understand that they’ll’t even inform the 2 youngsters asleep of their beds aside, and should riddle their manner by way of Helaena’s reply. The entire thing is a ridiculous farce from two individuals barely competent sufficient to tug any of this off.
All of this builds into the present’s implausible slippery slope of assumptions. Whereas the viewers could know that Aemond’s slaying of Lucerys Velaryon within the skies over Storm’s Finish was an unintentional consequence of not understanding his personal dragon’s energy, for Daemon, it looks like an act of clear and predetermined aggression. He most likely didn’t count on the assassins to return away with the top of a toddler prince, however he thinks letting two assassins free within the Pink Maintain with less-than-clear orders is nothing greater than a slight escalation.
These are the type of spiraling, misinformed choices that Home of the Dragon builds its stunning, flawed, and deeply human historical past out of. Positive, the present is elevated to the heights of fantasy, however it’s nonetheless essentially a narrative of damaged, livid, and defective characters making rash choices after which coping with the implications — these penalties simply usually occur to contain dragons and conflict.
All of that is true to Martin’s imaginative and prescient, after all. It’s the identical type of storytelling he employs continually in A Tune of Ice and Fireplace, however whereas the unique Sport of Thrones sequence regularly needed to lower down on the humanness of its story just by advantage of its huge scale, it’s continually thrilling to see how successfully Home of the Dragon goes the other way, increasing on Martin’s written historical past in Fireplace & Blood and turning these quasi-mythical historic figures into flesh-and-blood individuals and unimaginable characters, as much as and together with the lowlife assassins who don’t even want their foolish little names.