In the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E07: Driftmark

Like many of the best episodes of The Sopranos, ‘Driftmark’ consists mostly of an extended family sitting around arguing. Moving the entire cast to the titular seat of House Velaryon for the occasion of Laena’s funeral gives it a tightness and coherence lacking from last week’s installment, and with Miguel Sapochnik behind the camera the whole thing looks exquisitely Gothic, balancing iconic imagery from both horror and high fantasy to frame the grand occasion. Before the eulogy isover, though, the knives are out, with Lord Corlys’s brother Vaemond (Wil Johnson) using the speech to imply Rhaenyra’s sons are bastards. The court exists in a state of cold war, and the tension behind every glance and chance exchange shows just how precarious this equilibrium is. As young Helaena (Evie Allen) murmurs her prophecies of cloth dragons and real, perhaps foreshadowing the weaving of new battle flags as she did the loss of her brother Aemond’s (Leo Ashton) eye, the rest of her great house stumbles, shoves, and lurches its way toward an agonizingly preventable war.

It’s interesting to watch the show’s characters try to maneuver within the half-real constraint of Viserys’s rule, held apart from open conflict by his royal authority and ensured to crash together bloodily the moment he dies by his refusal to wield it. Paddy Considine has done incredible work as the ailing monarch, and as the first signs of senility manifest in the aftermath of the funeral when he mistakenly refers to Alicent by his dead wife Aemma’s name it’s hard not to feel for the guy. He’s as much a prisoner of convention and bloodline as the wives he’s well-intentionedly killed and forced himself on or the daughter and grandchildren he imperiled by declaring Rhaenyra his heir without acting decisively to ensure her claim. There’s a strange visual parallel here between his withered, rotting frame and the ancient, wattled bulk of the dragon Vhagar, claimed by Aemond in the dead of night. Both of these hoary old relics symbolize a different age of Targaryen power, but the one that endures is not the amiable but weak-willed peacekeeper but the essence of the house itself, a flesh-eating leviathan with a white-hot furnace in her chest.

As for Aemond, the darkly awe-inspiring scene in which he risks death to mount and bind Vhagar to his will plays with the triumphant nature of such moments in fantasy stories. What real thirteen-year-old boy would be improved by the bestowal of an invulnerable thirty-ton dragon to his sole ownership and control? When he lands the great beast with a crash on the pier of Driftmark, upending braziers and crushing woodwork, it’s not hard to see the line connecting his embittered sullenness to the ugly brawl that unfolds under the castle between him and his royal nephews and cousins. Olivia Cooke’s performance as the brittle, hatefully paranoid Alicent continues to amaze in the aftermath as she breaks down ranting, raving, and swinging a knife at Rhaenyra after Viserys refuses to allow her one of Lucerys’s eyes in recompense. To see what these people have inflicted on one another in peacetime and do nothing to forestall its continuation is the great tragedy of Viserys’s reign, and as the royal family’s children erupt into the bloodshed the queen so clearly feels compelled to seek out, the sense gathers that it’s been too late for quite some time.