In the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E10: The Black Queen

“We don’t choose our destiny,” Rhaenyra tells her middle child, Lucerys, as he panics at the thought of assuming his grandfather the Sea Snake’s mantle. “It chooses us.” It’s a noble-sounding way of saying that the world doesn’t give a shit what you want from it: what’s going to happen is going to happen. ‘The Black Queen’ is one long walk along the knife’s edge between the thrashing chaos of war and the frustrating compromises and sacrifices of peace as Rhaenyra weighs swearing fealty to her half-brother and usurper in order to preserve the realm. Emma D’Arcy brings a poised but visibly fraying poignancy to the doomed proceedings, playing on the fine line between wisdom and naivete as Rhaenyra slowly realizes she’s the only noble in Westeros who gives half a shit about its people and stability. By the time Daemon assaults her out of misdirected grief over his brother’s death and jealousy over Viserys’s trust in Rhaenyra, the sense of loneliness hanging over the newly-crowned queen is almost palpable.

While Alicent is absent from the episode, its most potent emotional beat occurs when Otto hands Rhaenyra the folded and carefully preserved page the queen once tore from a history book as a teasing gift for her childhood friend. D’Arcy’s expression as Rhaenyra stares at this artifact from another life is crushingly vulnerable, the tides of confusion and violence that have emanated from the rift between the two women collapsing for an instant back into the simplicity of their childhood infatuation. Director Greg Yaitanesmakes excellent work of long close-ups during the episode’s long conversation sequences, trusting his actors to deliver nuance and complexity. He’s rewarded in spades, from Rhys Ifans’ almost imperceptibly rattled cool to Elliot Grihault’s dumbstruck confusion and fear when confronted by his sadistic uncle Aemond. Ewan Mitchell is a delight as a jackass twentysomething masquerading as a full-bore anime supervillain, his terror at his own misjudged prank as affecting as his bullying is repulsive.

In the end what tips the realm into war isn’t scheming or personal vendettas or a broken childhood friendship. At least, not any of those things alone. It’s bad luck and short-sighted cruelty, an older boy’s urge to cow and terrify a younger one gone horribly wrong in the space of a heartbeat. Listening to Luke and Aemond scream at their dragons as the frenzied animals turn on one another evokes the memory of Aegon’s fighting pit, children clawing and biting for the amusement of a baying crowd. All the men urging Rhaenyra to set Westeros ablaze will get their war, but as we know from watching the remains of Arrax and Lucerys plunge into the sea, just because you’re only playing at war doesn’t mean that it’s a game. In a perverse way, Luke’s wish is granted. He’ll never have be Lord of the Tides, now. He’ll never be anything at all.