In the Flesh: House of the Dragon s2e06 'Smallfolk'

The hottest televised kiss since The Americans segued from emergency dental surgery into sucking face, a cast of characters opening up with exquisite vulnerability as their world falls apart around them, the dragon Seasmoke bathing ser Steffon Darklyn (Anthony Flanagan) in torrents of flame at the knight’s moment of triumph, a riot in King’s Landing as the smallfolk from whom the episode takes its name start to realize they’re footing the bill for the crown’s demented civil war — ‘Smallfolk’ is playing all the hits, and doing it with a confidence and consistency its predecessor series, wrestling with an exponentially greater storytelling challenge, never quite found. Written by Eileen Shim and directed by series newcomer Andrij Parekh, ‘Smallfolk’ devotes more of its running time to Westeros’s commoners than any episode before it. As we follow brutal blacksmith Hugh Hammer (Kieran Bew) through his contorted thought process and shameful greed in the midst of the city’s famine and see the lowborn healer Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) quietly shift the tide of history we begin to get a sense not just that these people suffer most when Westeros goes to war, but that they have real agency in its fortunes. 

Nowhere is the double bind of being a capable, competent nobody more apparent than in the unexpected but spine-tinglingly hot kiss between Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and her mistress of whisperers, Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno). Rhaenyra opens up about her insecurities, her desire for the security and power of manhood, her frustration at her helplessness. Mysaria says all the right things, impassioned and apparently genuine, and Rhaenyra embraces her. There’s an almost animal quality to the way the queen feels out the moment, sucking and sniffing at Mysaria’s throat, and while the spymaster gives every indication of being into it, there’s still a sense not totally separate from the predatory tension of Seasmoke tracking down Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty) of something very, very dangerous turning its attention to a helpless lesser. Maybe you’ll ride the dragon, sure, or maybe you’ll wind up like ser Steffon, your last screams drowned out by the sound of your own flesh cooking alive in a halo of shimmering liquid fire.

Daemon’s (Matt Smith) inward journey takes an especially poignant turn as he confronts his shortcomings in a painfully boyish series of dreams about his brother, Viserys (Paddy Considine). His nightmare in which he finds himself trapped in the throne room with the grieving king on the day he, Daemon, failed him by slipping away when his brother needed him most, reveals that on some level the prince already understands what Alys says to him later: the throne is a burden to endure, not a prize to win. Daemon’s imagined reconciliation with Viserys in which he goes to the king’s side and embraces him in his grief is genuinely crushing to see, a child’s fantasy of having done right. Is that enough of an insight to prevent the realm from slipping further into madness? Like Alicent (Olivia Cooke) nervously joking that perhaps her elder sons’ cruelty has as much to do with her parenting as her absence has with her youngest, Daeron’s, kindness and nobility, it may be clutching at confession long after it can do any good. The arrow’s already in motion. The dragon’s already awake.