In the Flesh: House of the Dragon s2e08 'The Queen Who Ever Was'

The melancholy in lord Corlys’s (Steve Toussaint) voice as he tells Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) the name of his rechristened flagship is the first of the season finale’s reminders of all the death that has already come about as a result of this protracted family squabble. And yet by renaming his ship The Queen Who Never Was, in homage to his departed wife the princess Rhaenys (Eve Best), Corlys shows something beyond melancholy, an almost fatalistic commitment to a war whose only possible outcomes are various degrees of doom. He’s sailing to war aboard a massive replica of his beloved wife’s coffin, and with his bastard son, Alyn (Abubakar Salim), serving grudgingly at his right hand. A monument to all his losses crewed by his greatest mistake. Alyn’s blistering response to Corlys’s blustering request for peace and fellowship between them is an episode highlight, Salim’s preternaturally handsome features luminous with controlled rage as he tears down every polite pretension between them and calls Corlys on the carpet for coming to him only now, when his noble children are spent. 

Everywhere, now that Rhaenyra’s dragonseeds have claimed their place as riders, the show’s characters ponder their place in Westeros’s class system and its many heavy legacies. Can Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and her daughter Helaena (Phia Saban) really just walk away from regnal life? “I was happier before I became queen,” Helaena muses sadly to her mother. It’s the kind of crushingly obvious thing only someone like the queen could say and mean without a hint of irony. It’s not an idle belief, either. Helaena’s horror at the suggestion she ride her dragon, Dreamfyre, into battle at her brother Aemond’s side is as strong a stance against the accelerating pace of wanton bloodshed as any character has yet taken. Saban, who since her debut on the show has consistently been one of its most compelling performers, sells something deeper and more complicated than the innocence of a neurodivergent woman with no taste for bloodshed. There’s wisdom to Helaena, and steel beneath the goosedown. When she stares Aemond down after he threatens to kill her, you understand why he’s afraid and on the verge of tears under her ferocious stare.

After the first season’s colossal downer of an ending, with Lucerys and his dragon Vermax eaten alive by Vhagar, a contemplative place-setter of a finale feels like a smart choice for the show’s second outing. You can see the seams opening up in moments like Ulf’s (Tom Bennett) loutish behavior at the royal table, or Lord Tyland Lannister’s (Jefferson Hall) successful forging of an alliance with the Triarchy and their brash, swaggering admiral Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorne), in ser Criston Cole’s (Fabien Frankel) quiet acceptance of his own probable death in the fighting to come, but if the die is cast, it hasn’t yet completed its roll. How much more will be lost before the end? How many monuments to the dead will be raised by those unable to turn from the path of bloodshed even as they mourn its cost and the devastation of their lives and personhood? What does aristocracy mean in a world of dragonfire and slaughter? What is the virtue of loyalty? Is surrender and exile a choice of conscience, or of cowardice, or of both? It all remains to be seen.