‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Sleep With One Eye Open

Season 2, Episode 2

Not even Rhaenyra Targaryen can believe what she’s seeing.

This woman has flown through the sky on the back of a dragon. She has seen lords kneel at her feet, only to rise against her years later. She has lost a child in her fight for the Iron Throne and recoiled to learn that another was killed in her child’s name. But watching Erryk and Arryk Cargyll (Elliott and Luke Tittensor), two identical twin knights, locked in a battle to the death in her own bedroom, with the outcome to decide whether she lives or dies? You can see it on the face of the actor Emma D’Arcy: Not even in Rhaenyra’s wildest dreams did she see this one coming.

This ability to shock — not in the gross-out sense, although this is often the case as well, but rather in the sense of a sudden, severe surprise — is the greatest strength “House of the Dragon” possesses. Civil wars are often said to be battles of brother against brother; fantasy can make the metaphorical literal. What better way to illustrate the senseless brutality of warfare than by having two men who look and sound exactly alike, who love each other, who say they are one soul in two bodies, perish in a brutal murder-suicide that achieves exactly nothing?

The entire affair is a sordid one, something Ser Arryk never should have been asked by Ser Criston, his lord commander, to carry out. Indeed, Criston did so only as a maladaptive way of venting his sexual frustrations during a moment when his on-again-off-again relationship with Queen Alicent was dialed to off-again. By episode’s end they’re back together and having rough sex — an altogether healthier way of channeling these frustrations, if still an ill-advised coupling overall.

Despite the clandestine nature of their relationship, Alicent and Criston are still faring better romantically than Rhaenyra and Daemon. When the Black Queen learns that the young Prince Jaehaerys was murdered and beheaded in his bed, she is outraged that anyone could think she had anything to do with it. She is even angrier when she finds out that she did have something to do with it, despite herself: It was Daemon who, in a reckless attempt to make good on her request for vengeance against Prince Aemond, claimed another child’s life instead.

You can’t trust someone like that, Rhaenyra determines — accurately. She dismisses him as “pathetic”; he dismisses himself from her company.

Back in King’s Landing, Daemon’s deeds continue to pay gruesome dividends. Both of the men involved in the murder of Jaehaerys are captured and killed, along with a score of innocent men whose only crime was to serve as palace rat catchers alongside one of the assassins. When his grandfather Otto upbraids him for this public-relations blunder, King Aegon — who for all his faults is genuinely devastated by the death of his young son — fires him as the king’s hand and replaces him with Ser Criston — a man of action compared with the scheming but restrained Otto but also the most tightly wound man in Westeros. There are literal dragons who would make better hands.