It Got Real on ? House of the Dragon

After each episode of House of the Dragon, Slate writers will gather to answer a crucial question: Who is the worst person in Westeros? This week: senior editor Sam Adams and pop critic Jack Hamilton answer the call.

Sam Adams: Hi there, Jack. Things are really heating up in Westeros this week, after three episodes in which House of the Dragon has been moving at a pace that might generously be called glacial. I realize HBO is trying to stretch one section of a single book into a series that lasts as long as Game of Thrones, but it does feel like we’ve been spinning our wheels a bit as we wait for the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons to get fully underway. But as you can gather from the title of this week’s episode, “A Dance of Dragons,” shit is—so to speak—about to get real.

In last week’s episode, Alicent learned that she’d misinterpreted her late husband’s dying words, and what she took to be a last-minute decision to hand his throne to his wastrel son instead of his far more qualified daughter was actually a reference to a family legend. (This is why it’s a bad idea to have too many people in your family named Aegon.) But she opted to keep that news to herself and let the burgeoning conflict between the Greens and the Blacks continue to escalate. This week, she reaffirms that decision. She seems to reconsider for a moment, asking the Grand Maester who attended Viserys as he died if her husband might really have changed his mind in his dying hours. But he is noncommittal, and when Larys Strong starts sniffing around and casting doubt on the succession, Alicent doubles down. Sure, she knows, “the war will be fought, and many will die.” But, she tells Larys, “the significance of Viserys’ intentions died with him.” In other words, there’s no backing down. Rhaneyra tells her clan that they have to trust that “the queen seeks the same end as all of us: an end to this conflict.” But whether she’s protecting her son or just likes how hot Ser Criston looks in his battle armor, she’s now fully behind the march to war. Does that make her the worst?

Jack Hamilton: Hey, Sam! Great to be back on Dragonstone with you, with our feet up on that crazy-ass table. I previously hadn’t much minded the pacing of this season so far, but good gods, the first part of this episode was boring to an extreme that actually felt somewhat deliberate, as it put the audience in the impetuous “get to the action!!!” mindset of the impetuous King Aegon II. And then, woo boy, does the action ever come—but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I do think that Alicent deserves strong consideration for the worst person in Westeros this week. As you note, she’s increasingly aware that the Greens are going to war on a lie, and yet, rather than trying to reverse that trajectory, she seems to be actively looking for excuses to avoid any responsibility or even agency in what’s about to happen. Alicent’s an interesting character in this show, because she’s obviously very smart and very ambitious, and yet for a variety of reasons she always needs to defer (or perhaps deflect) those smarts and ambitions onto the men in her life, whether it’s her father or her aforementioned wastrel son. But I think she’s now at a point where she’s strategically using that deference to get out of taking action for what she’s learned, because, I think, at the end of the day, she doesn’t want to stop the war—she wants to be the shadow ruler of Westeros, which is really what she’s been angling for ever since Viserys tapped out last season.

So Alicent’s certainly in the running, but allow me to submit another strong nominee: Aemond, everyone’s favorite one-eyed younger brother. This was quite a week for Aemond, who seems to relish his chance to dress down his brother in High Valyrian in front of the Small Council. (Even if it’s unclear how much Aegon understood, he seems to have gotten the general gist.) And then, in the episode’s closing scenes, it looks like he’s about to just straight-up finish his brother off after Aegon’s disastrous tussle with Rhaenys and Meleys, before Criston Cole catches him in the act. (Did you know that dragons apparently explode when they hit the ground? I did not.) And on one hand, I get it! Aemond has long resented his mess of an older brother, and justifiably so: By every standard other than birth order, Aemond is light-years more qualified to be king than Aegon, who basically screws up everything he touches, right up to Aemond and Cole’s planned sneak attack at Rook’s Rest. I’m not totally sure Aemond would be a better king than Aegon, given his temperament and facility with violence, but he’d definitely be a more competent one. But man, trying to kill your own brother? Even if, from everything we’ve seen of his current condition, it might be an act of euthanasia? Pretty bad stuff! Is Aemond this week’s worst, and moreover, what did you think of this season’s first real dragon battle?

Adams: Aemond is certainly going to be tough to beat, what with the attempted fratricide and all. But let me throw in a few other contenders. We have been waiting for an all-out dragon fight for a long time—not counting Aemond’s semi-accidental murder of his nephew Lucerys at the end of the first season. And they’re … pretty good, I guess? The digital effects look reasonably good, and HotD brought in a ringer, veteran director Alan Taylor, to make sure the action stayed legible. I think it’s a little tough to make wriggling reptiles curling around each other in midair look like anything other than a squiggly mess, and you don’t really get a sense of what makes one dragonrider more formidable than another. Aemond obviously has the upper hand because he’s riding Vhagar, the Westerosi equivalent of having an H-bomb when everyone else has conventional nukes. But it’s only because Rhaenys makes what seems like an implausibly dumb mistake—flying at full speed over a giant cliff without so much as checking what might be lurking below—that she ends up dead.

I do like the reminder in this episode that, as I wrote about at the beginning of the season, many regular folks are going to end up dead in this pointless war. Ser Criston doesn’t seem especially concerned about that, urging his troops into battle although he knows they’re about to get dragonburnt. But the end of the episode, where he gets knocked unconscious and awakens to find his men literally turned to ash, might start to knock some sense into him. And then there’s Aegon, lying (apparently?) alive but badly injured, after falling prey to a sneak attack from his own brother. It’s almost enough to make you sorry for him.

Still, despite the fact that his brother and his Hand are plotting behind his back, we wouldn’t be in this mess if Aegon hadn’t allowed things to proceed, if he weren’t so angry and easily manipulated. Before he rashly rushes into battle, we seem him idling around King’s Landing, pushing a glass off a table just for the pleasure of watching it shatter, which raises the possibility that thousands and thousands are going to die simply because the boy king is bored. So what of it? Could Aegon be the worst?

Hamilton: Aegon is definitely a solid contender, as he is most weeks, and maybe we should give him some bonus consideration due to the fact that I’m not sure we’re going to see much more of him for a while. (At least I hope we don’t, given the grisly state he seems to be in.) I also noted that our young king appears to be pretty hammered when he makes the decision to suit up and ride into battle, making this the first drunk-dragoning infraction we’ve seen on one of these shows. Just a lot of poor decisionmaking from our guy the Magnanimous. And I’m with you that, visually, our first real dance of dragons (a metaphor that this particular sequence takes rather eye-rollingly literally) was a little bit of a mess. HotD is obviously going to have to rely on dragon-related CGI far more than even Game of Thrones did, and I imagine that figuring out how to get the most out of these battle sequences and other finer points of our big lovable lizards will be something of a learning curve for this show. (I enjoyed this recent piece from Claire McNear over at the Ringer about how we never actually see how anyone gets on or off a dragon, a logistical omission that I’ve noticed as well.)

But getting back to our worst person: I do keep coming back to Alicent, in part because her worstness this week is more subtle but ultimately also so uniquely destructive. Aegon and Aemond are basically straight-up bad people who don’t really seem to care about being anything otherwise—Aegon assuredly more so, but throughout this show we’ve also seen Aemond take out his existential frustrations over being a younger brother on pretty much everyone he comes across. He’s a bully who still seems entirely unrepentant over sending his nephew to a watery grave, which is really what turbocharged this whole conflict in the first place. Alicent, on the other hand, seems to fancy herself a good person, at least in comparison to most of those she comes into contact with, and yet this episode makes it resoundingly clear that she’s made a choice to go forward with this war, and that she’s justified this by convincing herself that the choice was never hers to make. That’s pretty bad! And something tells me that even the state of her firstborn son isn’t about to prompt a course reversal on that front.

Adams: Well, surprise, surprise! I came into this pretty convinced we were going to convict Aemond, who not only tried to roast his own brother alive but seemed pretty ready to run him through if Criston hadn’t stumbled into the woods at just the right moment. And I don’t want to give Psycho Boy a pass just because we expect him to be terrible every week. But I do think there’s something particularly bad about Alicent. She’s not pushing for war out of bloodlust or conviction. In fact, I’m not entirely sure why she’s doing it at all. But while Rhaenyra is suing for peace, Alicent is letting the bellicose men around her run the show, knowing full well how many innocents will lose their lives. She’s not even convinced her side will prevail! She just doesn’t want to exercise the will or take the personal risk that might be involved in admitting she was wrong. It may well be too late to stop a war at this point, but she isn’t even willing to try. There’s nothing worse than that.