House of the Dragon crossed a line, and episode 2 pushes it further

Even for the work of George R.R. Martin, the tragedy du jour that sets season 2 of House of the Dragon in motion is a bracingly terrible moment. The casual beheading of Jaehaerys Targaryen — while off screen in the moment, grimly recalled this week via stitches on a corpse — is depicted as a bridge too far, even for the brutal world of Westeros. The people devoted to preserving the norms of the realm are losing their grip, as the bloody game of eye-for-an-eye has led to this race to the bottom.

It’s early in the game, but House of the Dragon season 2 seems devoted to mapping, in painstaking detail, how a war starts. It’s the Kübler-Ross model but for armed conflict instead of grief. If “A Son for a Son” is denial, this week’s episode is anger. Or more aptly, fury — power is, if nothing else, a force multiplier. As Madam Sylvi (Michelle Bonnard) tells Aemond when he curls up in her arms to express remorse over killing Jace, “When princes lose their temper it is often others who suffer.”

Doubly so, then, for kings: Aegon’s fury over his son’s death has rendered him virtually inert in his position, but that doesn’t mean his small council isn’t ready to use it as kindling for the coming conflict. Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) spins his grandchild’s death into powerful propaganda, sending the infant corpse in a funeral procession through King’s Landing to turn the public further against Rhaenyra, who stooped so low as to murder a child in their bed. “Jaehaerys will do more for us now than a thousand knights in battle,” Otto says of his grim spectacle.

This is, however, the last bit of savvy politicking within the Red Keep. Rage soon rebuilds the power structure in its image. Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), in a decision that is sure to see blowback, orders all of the ratcatchers in King’s Landing killed, and dismisses Otto from his position of Hand, installing Ser Criston Cole — who sent Ser Arryk to assassinate Rhaenyra — instead. It’s a petty act from a boy-king who demands satisfaction and is frustrated by the constraints of the crown. Otto, however, sees something more dire than the loss of his position — to Otto, what the very throne represents is at stake.

Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO

While Otto Hightower is certainly no less self-interested than any other member of the court, he’s one of the few present with stated principles and a sincere belief in them. Aegon was always a poor candidate for the Iron Throne, one intended to be more of a figurehead that would allow the biggest stakeholders in Viserys’ court to retain their little fiefdoms — and most importantly to Otto, secure the Hightowers within King’s Landing. Unfortunately for that crowd, the quiet coup that put him on the throne led to a set of circumstances Aegon is uniquely ill-equipped to handle.

Otto knows he has compromised those principles, and the crown, by conspiring to install Aegon, and is operating under the assumption that the preserving power of norms will paper over Aegon’s fraudulent rule and its damage to the throne’s integrity. He’s mistaken, obviously — we are in the sending assassins and killing infants and hanging innocent exterminators phase of Aegon’s reign; norms are as dead as Jaehaerys.

Principled men fall one by one in order to make way for men who clamor for war. House of the Dragon underscores this with one final small tragedy, as the twins Arryk and Erryk (Elliott Tittensor and Luke Tittensor) confront each other with Rhaenyra’s life in the balance. The brothers’ split along ideological lines was one of the quieter rifts in the show’s first season, made no less devastating by their idealism, and the belief in the nobility of their position in the Kingsguard.

Director Clare Kilner stages the twins’ sad, desperate struggle so that, eventually, it is impossible to tell them apart. Its terrible conclusion, in which one brother emerges victorious only to impale himself on his sword, can be read multiple ways — as one brother unable to live without the other, or as Erryk realizing that he will never fully have Rhaenyra’s trust and therefore will not be able to fulfill his duty, or as some combination of the two. Death, then, is better than a life of suspicion or compromise. There is a metaphor here.

It is a terrible thing to measure one life over another, and yet that’s what the power structure of King’s Landing — what any power structure, really — depends on. Jaehaerys’ funeral procession is a powerful message but it is also built on a fiction: that any other dead child killed in their bed would matter just as much. That is patently untrue. So many more children are now going to die, to avenge the deaths of two.