‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Premiere: Killing in the Name Of

Season 2, Episode 1: ‘A Son for a Son’

King Viserys is dead. Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) is deposed. Aegon Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney), the Second of His Name, sits the Iron Throne. Well, not so much sits as slouches — drunkenly, at that.

With his frat-bro buddies lounging around him, equally in their cups, the newly crowned King of Westeros brags about his baby brother’s loyalty and complains about the flowery nickname bestowed upon him by the heralds, Aegon the Magnanimous. “No one knows what ‘magnanimous’ means,” he complains. A buddy suggests “Aegon the Generous” as an alternative, to general acclaim.

But all around the wastrel king and his inebriated mates, the still-sharp swords of the sprawling Iron Throne bristle with danger. And the men are too busy making merry to notice the pair of child killers skulking across the throne room at that very moment, hiding in plain sight.

This blend of comedy and cruelty, human foibles and inhuman violence, sums up the “House of the Dragon” project pretty neatly.

This season, the very popular prequel to HBO’s world-bestriding fantasy colossus “Game of Thrones” — both shows are based on books set within the imagined world of Westeros by the author and co-creator George R.R. Martin — is shepherded by the sole showrunner, Ryan Condal, who also writes the premiere. (Condal’s former co-showrunner, the director Miguel Sapochnik, departed the show after its first season; Alan Taylor, who like Sapochnik is a “Thrones” alumnus, is behind the camera for this episode.)

The improvements begin right away, with new opening titles that whisk us through the history of the ruling House Targaryen via the sewing of a grand tapestry. This replaces last season’s frankly impenetrable attempt to evoke “Thrones”’s clockwork credits with a stone-and-metal sluice of blood that not even I, a person with a quote from Martin’s novels tattooed on his right forearm, could follow.

With similar disregard for the past, Condal introduces a story line that is a whole-cloth invention of the show: a love affair. Once the secret paramour of Rhaenyra, the sullied Kingsguard knight Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) has since become the most fanatical follower of her friend-turned-rival, the Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), and her usurper son, Aegon. He has apparently been rewarded for this service with a forbidden-love relationship, the few glimpses of which we catch are steamy enough to cause climate change in King’s Landing.

It’s a smart move on Condal’s part: Team Green, the side in the Targaryen civil war led by Alicent and Aegon and named for the signature color of her powerful family, House Hightower, is badly in need of sex appeal. They’ve got the dashing young sociopath Prince Aemond One-Eye (Ewan Mitchell) on their side, to be sure. An anime villain in human form, he spends the episode as a strong voice in support of his callow brother’s call for all-out war. But when your side is fronted by Aegon, a sex criminal, and Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), Aegon’s dour Hand and grandfather (Handfather?), you need all the heat you can get. Cooke and Frankel, two of the better-looking humans you’re likely to see on television this year, provide plenty.

Arrayed against them is Team Black. Led by Queen (or is it Princess?) Rhaenyra Targaryen, they have the legal high ground in that Viserys proclaimed her heir before the entire royal court years earlier. (It was a mix of garbled speech, putting feelings over facts, and plain-old treason that led Alicent and Otto to crown Aegon in Rhaenyra’s stead.) But Viserys never accounted for how Rhaenyra’s crowning would fly in the face of centuries of male primogeniture, including the ruling that gave him the crown over his older female cousin Rhaenys (Eve Best) in the first place.

Rhaenyra’s partner in crime, at least on paper, is her uncle and husband, Daemon (Matt Smith). But ever since word of Aegon’s coronation reached his and Rhaenyra’s island home of Dragonstone, he’s been thirsty for vengeance and violence in a way his queen is not. While she scours the coastline for the remains of her son Lucerys, accidentally slain by Aemond when his colossal dragon Vhagar ran amok in the Season 1 finale, Daemon prepares for war and plots assassinations.

While Rhaenyra and her handsome oldest son and heir, Jacaerys (Harry Collett) — fresh from a visit to his mother’s Northern ally, Lord Cregan Stark (Tom Taylor) — break down and cry over young Luke’s death, Daemon goes biblical. When dumb luck hands him his former lover turned professional spymaster, Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), in chains, Daemon makes a deal. Using her intel sources within the royal palace and his connections within the city police force known as the Gold Cloaks, he will make good on Rhaenyra’s grieving wish and collect Aemond’s head.

Failing that, however? He’s not particular. “A son for a son” are the instructions that his hired killers, a brutish cop known to Westeros history as Blood (Sam C. Wilson) and a palace rat-catcher nicknamed Cheese (Mark Stobbart), say they’ve received. When they finally make it past Aegon’s revelers and various other servants and hangers-on, they follow out their paymaster’s instructions to the crimson letter: Aemond is absent from his quarters, so the young son of Aegon and his sister-wife Helaena (Phia Saban) must do.

There’s just one problem: Despite their differing genders, Helaena and Aegon’s twin children are virtually identical, and only the queen herself, held at knife point, can tell them which of her two children to slay and behead in order to provide Prince Daemon with the trophy he desires. In the end, they decide she’s not the type to cover for the heir by wrongly pointing them toward her daughter, and they seize the child she has indicated. The sounds of the boy’s muffled screams and the wet sawing noises as his killers take his head can be heard as Helaena seizes her daughter and flees.

She runs right into the room of her mother, Queen Alicent, in flagrante with her Kingsguard lover, Ser Criston. (Move over, Rhaenyra and Daemon: There’s a new taboo couple in town.) But Helaena, whose mind wanders far afield at the best of times, pays no attention to the crime she’s inadvertently uncovered.

“They killed the boy,” she says. The end.

The A Song of Ice and Fire Cinematic Universe has relied on violence against children since the pilot of “Game of Thrones,” which opens with a juvenile zombie and ends with young Bran Stark getting tossed out a window by the incestuous Lannister twins. But for all its shock value, the act has always been a stand-in for the act of war itself. When grown-ups play the game of thrones, it is the most vulnerable who are at greatest risk.

So it makes thematic as well as dramatic sense for the first two major casualties of the war between the Blacks and the Greens to be children, Lucerys Velaryon on the former side and Jaehaerys Targaryen on the latter. Even as Rhaenyra and Alicent delude themselves into believing they can prevail against one another without further bloodshed, the actions of their own family members prove them wrong, in the most upsetting ways possible.

But it’s precisely their unique blend of wisdom and folly that make the dueling queens such compelling figures to follow. Even as events around her spiral out of control, Alicent deftly convinces her father that whatever his reasoning for doing so, undermining her in front of Aegon and Aemond endangers the realm. When he quite reasonably replied “I hadn’t seen it that way,” I literally cheered. Common sense prevails!

All the while, though, she’s recklessly pursuing sex with Ser Criston, whose, ahem, complicated relationship with that act we’ve already seen bear bitter fruit with Alicent’s rival Rhaenyra. Is this really a person she’d want embroiled in royal affairs, if she were thinking with her head rather than her, let’s say, heart?

For her part, Rhaenyra straddles the line between understandable and irresponsible. As her reluctant backer Princess Rhaenys explains, it’s hard to grieve a child without some physical reminder to provide closure, hence her desperate search for young Luke and his dragon amid the shores of the Stormlands. But Rhaenyra is a bright enough woman to know that powerful vassals like Daemon and Rhaenys’s husband, the mighty admiral Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), are unlikely to sit around waiting for her explicit commands before acting. What Daemon does amid her grief, though ostensibly on her behalf, will likely have ramifications as seismic as the slaying of her own son.

Intriguing side plots have been sprinkled in amid the main action, too. At a Velaryon port, a sailor named Alyn (Abubakar Salim, late of the superb, prematurely canceled Max sci-fi series “Raised by Wolves”) wrestles with the legacy of his master, the legendary Lord Corlys. In King’s Landing, the scheming Lord Larys Strong (Matthew Needham), known as the Clubfoot, exerts his malign influence on both Alicent, with whom he trades information for sexual favors, and her son Aegon, over whom he battles for control with grandpa Otto.

Like “Game of Thrones” before it, “House of the Dragon” can be challenging to the prestige-TV palate. Its emphasis on criminal-political conspiracies, high-octane performances by a suite of talented character actors, and family drama in all its forms can be traced directly back to “The Sopranos.” But its use of high-fantasy spectacle and Grand-Guignol violence add notes that can ring as discordant in some viewers’ ears.

Listened to the right way, however, the sound is magical. Condal and company have constructed a drama of chamber rooms and bedrooms, roiling with sexual energy and gendered experience, occasionally marked by near-psychedelic explosions of high-fantasy supernatural spectacle. As women pray and sob and make love, dragons soar, blades are drawn, and eyes are taken for eyes. It’s Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” via the sword-and-sorcery artist Frank Frazetta. And if it’s what you’re into, it’s magnificent.