In the Flesh: House of the Dragon s2e01 'A Son for a Son'

You see a lot of overplayed hands in season premieres. Screaming, fighting, bombast, none of which are bad TV on their own, of course, but deployed in the absence of supporting context solely to ratchet up the drama and make sure people tune in again next week. Not here. Series co-creator Ryan Condal’s script is full of subtle characterization, surprising turns, and throat-tightening suspense. It’s television with a great deal of trust in its audience. When dowager queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) takes her father, king’s hand Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), aside and lays out a case for supporting her during the meetings of the king’s small council rather than undercutting her to score points with Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), Otto’s response is a reasonable, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” There’s no explosion of emotions, no attempt to gin up a conflict where, fundamentally, there isn’t one, just two adults with stressful jobs and a complicated relationship hashing out a personal issue. Condal knows what he has with his stable of actors, and he’s trusting his audience to see it, too. 

The sets and costumes, by and large a clear step up from Game of Thrones in the show’s first season, are once again a dazzling highlight. We spend a lot of ‘A Son for a Son’ wending our way slowly through the Red Keep, learning who lives where and how this room connects to that one. Classic costume drama fare executed with a restrained expertise reminiscent of The Sopranos, which spent years playing with the tension between its characters’ violent impulses and their loftier ideas about themselves. Fortunately for North Caldwell, New Jersey, though, the various factions of the Soprano family didn’t have dragons to unleash on each other. Already by the episode’s end we’re sitting at two children senselessly slaughtered and a realm gearing up for war as much at the instigation of bloodthirsty psychos like prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and king-consort Daemon (Matt Smith) as because at this point it really, truly is inevitable. The moment for quick solutions and bold action has come and gone, and while queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and her half-brother Aegon’s respective factions were prudent/fearful enough to weather it without any major upsets, the easy sailing is over now.

Daemon’s ill-conceived bid for vengeance is the episode’s set piece, and the tension of it is masterful from start to finish. Cutthroats for hire Blood (Sam C. Wilson) and Cheese (Mark Stobbart) make an immediate impression, and by the time they’re inside the Red Keep and it becomes apparent they don’t know half what they’d need to in order to stand a chance at knifing Aemond, the sense of doom only thickens. Both actors step up heroically to the challenge of selling these repellent men with only minutes of screen time, and their fear and confusion as they wander the Red Keep makes the knowledge of what they’re there to do even more suffocatingly awful. Somehow, when we finally come to the thing itself, it’s even worse than all that dread could make it feel. The sound of Blood sawing through tendons and gristle to sever prince Jahaerys’s little head as his mother, queen Helaena (Phia Saban), looks on in an ecstasy of terror feels like something out of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And just like that, we’re back.