HBO’s famous show house of dragon takes sharp cuts and brings a huge time jump with episode 6. The episode opens with Rhaenyra pushing to deliver her third son. It’s a vivid, horrible scene, with squelching, shouting, and sweating. Rhaenyra doesn’t want to give Alicent the “pleasure” of Laenor carrying the baby, and Alicent cattily conveys to Laenor that maybe he’ll one day get a kid that peeks like him – all of Rhaenyra’s boys are dark-haired. In other development, Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) protects Alicent’s room: his responsibility is clear with the gruesome heartbreak of last week’s episode.
Rhaenyra’s sudden determination to flee the story by heading to Dragonstone is again limped by the quick pace. It’s a movement that doesn’t create much sense anyway, because, as Lenor reminds her, going gives Alicent free reign over antagonizing the sickly and aging King Viserys against his daughter. It all senses very much like chess pieces being placed on the board for the next phase of the show sooner than an organic narrative. Still, there is some resonance in this set. Rhaenyra, peeking somber, remarks that she “should have gone years ago,” bringing to reason the princess tauntingly encouraging Daemon last episode (but 10 years ago in the show) to accept her to Dragonstone and wed her. In a flash, we see a decade’s price of regret.
It’s an hour of TV that, more than most House of the Dragon episodes thus far, indeed deals with Game of Thrones’ sprawl for a more attentive study of entropy and how royal self-preservation is at odds with domestic bonds. And it examines this in a rather subtle way, as its core competitions are all identical, just soured with time until, presumably, everyone will be mired in a war they have no hope of agreement. Even the most direct of arguments have a boundary to them when there are dragons there, creeping under everyone’s paws.