House of the Dragon - Episode 1x10 - The Black Queen - Review
An uneven but excellent season of television ends on a dark and compelling note.
Hello dear friends and subscribers! Exactly a week ago, House of the Dragon’s first season finale aired. Tonight, in its place, I wanted to share one (probably) final reflection. I was surprised to discover how much fun it is, back in Westeros; I’m not sure what I’ll cover here next, but my Quantum Leap reviews are going strong and I’ll certainly be back for HotD S2.
When I started writing about television again, for the first time in a decade,1 I wasn’t totally sure what I wanted. Was this just a writing exercise, to (re)learn how to engage my non-academic (if still analytic) writing chops? Did I even want people to read my content? Without a clear goal in mind, I updated my very old Blogger, and just started typing. Somehow, along the way, I got a professional opportunity to write about TV, which was kind of a dream come true. It inspired me to start a Substack (and import my old Blogger content), and it’s why I’ve been writing at least one piece weekly.
Over the last 10 weeks, I’ve (re)discovered digital TV communities (especially with Quantum Leap), along with a passion for a kind of writing that (hopefully) eschews the very tired recap-review. My goal isn’t to describe to you what you already watched; it’s to tease apart themes and bring HotD into conversation with broader (pop) cultural trends. I don’t know that I’ve always done that, but I plan to keep trying! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these reviews even half as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Okay! That’s enough self reflection. The Finale! Let’s Discuss!
With King Viserys dead—the one character holding the realm and its time-skipping peacetime narratives together (RIP to the best character; Paddy Considine better win an Emmy)—our focus necessarily shifts to the dreaded question of succession.2 The tragedy of House of the Dragon is that it was always leading us to civil war. Viserys, no matter how hard he tried to maintain peace across the realm and within his family, consistently failed to unite others, instead driving wedges between key players.3
These final two episodes4 explicitly focused on our two warring factions—The Greens and The Blacks—and the choices they desperately tried to make to stop all out war. More specifically, they focused on two (perhaps three) women, the patriarchy, and their shared but ultimately futile attempts to avoid violence. With the (seemingly accidental?) deaths of Lucerys Velaryon and Arrax, the first real blow has been struck. What was once almost an eye for an eye will almost certainly, before all is said and done, end with a son for a son—that, or many dead smallfolk and noble-born heirs.
As I look back over an uneven but ultimately excellent season of television, my reviews seem to have returned again and again to three central thematic threads:
Questions of historicity: What does a confused or conflicting historical record say versus what happened? Whose motivations become clearer or more opaque from such a text to screen adaptation, and where do audience considerations inform the televisual narrative? Whose motivations are prioritized in what kinds of texts?
Childbirth as a woman's battlefield and what it means for HotD to explore, portray, and represent pregnancies, abortions, and the death of a mother. Is it exploitative and unnecessarily gory, or an important conversation to have on TV? Does HotD have anything to say about feminism or patriarchy, any allegories about today’s world, or is it empty spectacle at the expense of female characters?
Time skips: Yay or nay? Do they build tension effectively and create opportunities for character development, or do they provide nothing more than the dreaded bulleted list, unfeelingly leaping from event to event, plot point to plot point? What other modes of storytelling could have been effective here (e.g., flashbacks)?
Questions of Historicity: While neither the Greens nor Blacks are framed as heroes or villains in Fire & Blood, Aegon and Aemond are absolutely framed as complete assholes. And yet, somehow, the show imbued Aemond with more sympathy than I could have imagined, making him one of the more compelling characters. In The Black Queen, Aemond One-Eye becomes Aemond the Kinslayer; however, instead of aiming to kill Luke from the start (as the histories suggest), we see how petty choices based on childhood grudges ultimately lead Vhagar, the world’s oldest dragon, to buck his authority and kill his 14-year-old nephew.5 No matter how much Alicent, Rhaenys, or Rhaenyra may want peace, Aemond has single-handedly dashed that possibility.
Given that no one else was present to witness the dragons fight (in the sky, or in the storm)—though the Baratheons could certainly be forgiven for interpreting Aemond’s intentions as murderous—the story can now spin out from there. Whatever Aemond truly wanted, Luke is dead, and history will not remember his actions kindly. The question now becomes whether Aemond publicly leans into his choice.
I’m excited to see how the show continues to play with ‘history’ next season!6
Childbirth as a woman's battlefield: In the series premiere, Rhaenyra’s mother, Aemma, stated out loud one of the shows central ideas: “Childbirth is a woman’s battlefield.” Of course, she says this immediately before dying horribly in childbirth because of her husband’s choices, which stripped her of agency. This is a strange idea, in a universe where almost all of the female protagonists fly dragons (the single most powerful weapons on a soldier-filled battlefield), but it certainly makes sense in terms of medieval medicine and patriarchal values (i.e., Rhaenyra not being accepted as heir).
Since then, we’ve seen childbirth ‘battlefields’ that have ended just as poorly (as it did for Laena, or Rhaenyra this episode), and some that have ended well (Rhaenyra now has five children). In all of these situations, women’s agency was the central concern. Laena may have died, but she went out on her own terms;7 it is additionally implied that Daemon did not make for her the choice that Viserys made for Aemma. Rhaenyra may have delivered a stillborn child, prematurely, but she wielded her power as Queen to do it alone (which is... good?), later taking on the job of the Silent Sisters herself.
There's a lot of odd symbolism wrapped up in this. Did Rhaenyra have a stillborn child as a symbol of her giving up childbirth in favour of a dragon-based battlefield? Is the child a symbol of the end of peace? What does it mean for Rhaenyra's agency that she goes it alone, compared to her mother having her agency ripped away? As in the premiere, I’m not 100% sure what the show wants me to take away here.
In general, I think HotD has done a fine job exploring how patriarchal systems hurt everyone. For example, Alicent chooses patriarchy,8 while Rhaenyra fights it but is constantly pushed aside. Criston Cole fought for love, but that love (and his misplaced concerns about purity) have curdled, as he now mostly just performs toxic masculinity. Larys does murderous favours for the Queen, but his price is creepy and sexual.
I’m not sure it has been clear in its messaging, but I am happy to see a show coming anywhere close to these topics; I only hope it grows in sophistication going forward!
Time skips: Yay or Nay? Game of Thrones used flashbacks as a narrative device exactly once (I think, outside of raven time travel visions). I still don’t understand why the House of the Dragon showrunners felt beholden to linearity in this show too.
I can appreciate how the writers needed to get to this moment at the end of S1 (as George RR Martin himself argued, perhaps the show would have been served better by a 13-episode season), but the choice to do so linearly, hurtling ever forward at an almost unseen pace, did not do the show any favours. It almost beggars belief that Rhaenyra did not visit her father in the six years between episodes 7 and 8.
Time jumps are less of an issue in a non-linear narrative (i.e., those that employ time-based narrative devices like flashbacks, flashforwards, or in media res), when short glimpses of other time periods aim to provide thematic depth over plot propulsion.
Imagine the story had started in Episode 6, with an annoying character like Criston Cole just being a monster. BUT THEN, we discover that Rhaenyra cared for him once, or that their sexual trysts involved a certain kind of power dynamic that rendered his resentment no less weird and toxic, but certainly more interesting. By hiding all of these dynamics in linear storytelling, I had kind of forgotten that version of Cole by the time we witnessed him muder Lord Beesbury (RIP, Lord of Honeyholt). What if the claims about Rhaenyra’s children were not clear to us, only for it to be revealed in the episode where Vaemond is killed by Daemon that, actually, he was right!? What if Rhaenyra and Alicent’s childhood friendship is revealed to us after their animosity? Not to mention this would have made it a lot easier to track characters across time shifts if we had seen younger and older versions of characters in connected scenes.
What if, what if, what if. I would have loved a version of this show that told complex stories across time, but I was still largely impressed with what we were given. It was no mean feat to get us to care about so many characters across so many time periods as portrayed by so many actors. And yet, with a few exceptions, they succeeded! I miss adult Laenor and Laena, Ser Harwin Strong, and the ‘child’ actors for Alicent and Rhaenyra. Now that the war of succession has begun in earnest, I don’t anticipate any other major time jumps, meaning that this experimental storytelling device is now over; S2 will be a radically different show. I think I may ultimately miss the jumps.
Have a great week everyone! Don’t forget to sound off on what you’d like me to cover next.
Funnily enough, my last reviews back in 2012 were of the first two episodes of S2 of GoT.
It’s been clear for a while now that Rhaenyra and Alicent would be on opposite sides of the impending civil war, which is fun, since the earliest parts of S1 framed that war as between a Rhaenyra and a Daemon faction. How these last 10 episodes 28 years(!) have changed them.
Admittedly, his final failure, understandably confusing Alicent with Too Many Aegons, was a milk-of-the-poppy-induced deathbed reflection intended for Rhaenyra that was (IMO) purposefully (mis)interpreted to suit Alicent’s own ends. This one’s kind of more on Alicent.
Apologies, I never did find time to write a review of 1x09, The Green Council.
I love the casting, in the sense that I think these actors are all great, but Luke is supposed to 14 while Aemond is supposed to be 16, lest we forget that Aemond is still a (formerly bullied) teen who just happened to tame the largest and most ferocious dragon alive. What did anyone think would happen when children are given weapons of mass destruction.
If I had more time, I would probably explore how the show has explicitly chosen never to really show us what Daemon chooses to do. Besides some early extrajudicial killings and choking Rhaenyra in the finale, almost all of his other terrible choices are left ambiguous. Like, he almost certainly killed his first wife, but the show chose not to show us that. The writers made this ambiguity so explicit that they even deleted scenes that could frame him in a more sympathetic (or at least more complex) light, like in Episode 6 when he DOES NOT hug his daughters after their mother dies (despite promo photos suggesting otherwise).
Not that I think the show did her any favours here - see my review of episode 6.
Episode 9 provided a phenomenal window into her psyche, through the confrontation between Rhaenys and Alicent, where the latter is called out for aspiring to nothing more than life in a gilded cage. Alicent has always argued for duty over agency, and has often been put in this position by men with more power, all while envying Rhaenyra’s privilege.