In the Flesh: House of the Dragon s2e05 'Regent'

Emma. Laena. Queen Alyssa. The dead of House Targaryen crowd in close around prince Daemon, goading and tormenting him, embodying his lusts and insecurities. In his waking dream he takes his brother’s wife to bed as she murmurs that it was he who should have worn the crown. In the midst of lovemaking she becomes his mother, who died when he was very young, and whispers that he is her favorite son. Like so many of House of the Dragon’s men, Daemon’s psyche is circumscribed largely by his relationships with the women in his life, a succession of female figures he both needs and resents, desires and defies. In the grip of ghosts, psychoactive herbs, Alys Rivers’ sorcery, or some combination thereof, these people fold in upon themselves until the whole Targaryen complex, the incest, the madness, the carnage and desire for power, becomes a world of its own, overlaying the shabby reality of Harrenhal. Director Clare Kilner stages the interplay between the two worlds of dreaming and waking with disorienting half-transitions. Daemon wakes at table with his bannermen but finds himself still naked and slick with sweat, only to look down and discover not his naked mother but a bowl of soup. 

In the wake of last week’s cataclysmic episode, ‘Regent’ is largely concerned with moving pieces around the board to set up future events. It wisely leans into the Gothic tone set by the arrival in King’s Landing of the maimed and comatose king Aegon II, who a stricken Queen Alicent clearly sees as her invalid husband’s ghost come back to haunt her, and by Daemon’s dreams and delusions. That sense of creeping unease hangs over everything, from ser Criston Cole’s ill-advised parading of the dragon Meleys’ head through the streets of the capital to Queen Helaena’s dire question to her brother, the newly minted regent Prince Aemond as he contemplates the Iron Throne. “Was it worth the price?” There is a creeping dread to it all, a peeling back of subtext to show a family full of emotionally maimed egomaniacs trying to crawl back into the womb and conquer the world at the same time. 

Victories decay into defeat in real time throughout the episode, the Green win at Rook’s Rest souring the people against them and exchanging an incompetent king for a psychopathic one, prince Daemon’s Blackwood bannermen sacking and burning the lands of their ancestral foes the Brackens so brutally that the entire Riverlands now threatens to boil over. Everywhere the cost of war rears its head, more terrible than any dragon, and the people of Westeros begin to understand what’s been turned loose. Watching blacksmith Hugh Hammer try to spirit his sick daughter out of King’s Landing only to have the gates slammed in his face by the city watch is a nightmarish premonition of what’s coming, of the helplessness of the smallfolk, their inability to step out of the path of disaster. As Alys Rivers puts it, yet again it’s the women and children and working men who’ll have to pay the price of princely ambition. Long live the king.