In the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E09: The Green Council

As Alicent and her father Otto debate whether to usurp the iron throne or else to usurp it and have Rhaenyra and her family killed, I kept thinking of the recurring joke in Arrested Development that George Sr. had committed light treason. His son Michael reminds him there’s no such thing, a smack on the wrist Alicent could use as she balks at the idea of killing her oldest friend. Whatever Otto says, a palace coup is not a game, and orchestrating one without the ruthlessness to see it through is an invitation to bloody, protracted warfare between rival powers. As the episode’s conclusion makes plain, it’s not just the Targaryens and their noble allies who’ll pay the price for their reluctance to take harsh measures against each other right out of the gate. Ask the commoners herded into the Dragonpit to witness Aegon II’s coronation and then crushed underfoot by Rhaenys’s dragon, Meleys (Helaena’s “beast beneath the boards” for those following her prophecies), how they feel about the princess’s unwillingness to burn her family alive, or Alicent’s earlier squeamishness at the idea of killing Rhaenys.

‘The Green Council’ is House of the Dragon at its most focused and confident. Director Claire Kilner and writer Sara Hess keep things bottled up in the powder keg of King’s Landing immediately after King Viserys’s death, taking the show from sweeping fantasy spectacle to intimate white-knuckle thriller without a hitch. We open on a desolate shot of the Iron Throne standing empty before scurrying into the bowels of the castle after a nameless page who informs one of the queen’s handmaidens of the king’s passing. The rest of the episode is a masterfully tense back and forth as Otto and Alicent race to discover the whereabouts of Prince Aegon, the dissolute creep they’re trying to force onto the throne against his will, the various parties chasing him alternately fretting over and ignoring his atrocious behavior and vices. It’s a coup sustained primarily by its own brute momentum, a movement standing for and born out of nothing but wounded pride and avarice.

On a personal level it’s the bleakest episode of the season, a tour of the wasteland of the lives of the Greens. Beesbury’s murder at the hands of the increasingly hysterical and thuggish Criston Cole, the further fraying of Otto’s and Alicent’s relationship, Alicent’s dissociative affect as she allows Larys Strong to masturbate to the sight of her naked feet — who exactly, besides Larys, is having a good time here? The resentful Aemond wants the throne his brother lives in terror of being shoved onto, Aegon would rather spend his time fathering bastards and abandoning them to slavery in fighting pits, twin brothers Arryk and Erryk find themselves at odds over the succession, and in the end a vicious little rapist winds up discovering a taste for the crown as a captive crowd cheers him on — before they get pulverized by a dragon. “A true queen thinks of the cost to her subjects,” Alicent parrots earlier in the episode, but what good is that if it doesn’t change her actions? For no reason and no gain, the war is finally here.