In the Flesh: House of the Dragon s2e03 'The Burning Mill'

“I forgive you,” says queen Helaena (Phia Saban) to her mother, the dowager queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke). Alicent is stricken by her daughter’s words, her huge, expressive eyes alive with tumultuous emotion. It’s a striking moment in an episode propelled along by sunk-cost willful ignorance, ancient grudges of forgotten origin, and wrongs endlessly relitigated and used as grounds for further evil. Sin begets sin begets sin, as ser Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale) puts it over a memorable dinner with prince (although you’d better call him king to his face) Daemon (Matt Smith). If “where does it end?” doesn’t interest you as a question, the spiral of human misery goes on forever. Just like the pastoral beauty of Burning Mill is transformed in an instant into a stinking, festering wasteland of carnage by the commitment of the Blackwoods and the Brackens to a centuries-old feud, so does the whole of Westeros wait on the edge of a knife as one mind after another abandons thoughts of life and happiness for the self-serving satisfaction of revenge. 

That smash cut from the mill to the aftermath of the battle is a rich little visual contrivance. The smash cut is most often employed in comedies to sell a ridiculous event, often one a character protests and affirms will never come to pass. Our expectations are built up, the scene creates tension through interpersonal conflict, and then we’re catapulted straight to consequences. The battle at Burning Mill is the same, and like a comedic smash cut it represents that same rapid buildup of dramatic momentum followed by an absurd, extreme conclusion. It’s all a sick joke, but there’s nobody left to laugh. Elsewhere, Daemon threatens murder over (incorrect) technicalities of address, looking even pettier and more insecure than usual opposite the practical and soft-spoken ser Simon, while trouble brews between Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carnie) and his brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) over the former’s sexual humiliation of the latter. The idea that someone would cling to something good in his life, would take comfort in it, represents such a threat to the self-hating king that he viciously mocks Aemond for still sleeping with the first prostitute he ever frequented. Aemond barks that one whore is as good as another and strides naked out of the room.

Alicent is similarly pressed to violence by embarrassment when a disguised Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) confronts her in the Great Sept on a mission of peace. Confronted with credible evidence that she has gravely misinterpreted her late husband the king’s deathbed proclamation, she is unable or unwilling to internalize the information. The bump of logic’s rubber meeting fact’s road never comes, replaced instead by vague warnings of doom and the repeated statement that there “was no mistake.” Rhaenyra begs and pleads, calling Alicent’s attention again and again to the tens of thousands who might burn if the realm goes to war against itself, but she’s talking to a brick wall with a personality disorder. War is going to starve and rape and murder its way across Westeros because a tiny handful of people are too embarrassed and angry to back down, too prideful to admit they overreached or bungled important decisions. Like Baela Targaryen (Bethany Antonia) plunging toward the field below on dragonback, the wind roaring through her hair, whether or not there’s time to pull up has gone from a question of skill to one of pure chance. If only the realm had more Helaenas, who for all her social dysfunction is more practical and clearheaded than any of the "sane" characters around her, and fewer Alicents, there might still be a chance.