In the Flesh: Fire and Blood S1E05: 'We Light the Way'

A man’s face beaten to bloody pudding. Friendships in tatters, the king collapsing in a faint, new alliances no sooner struck than bent to the breaking point. It’s a hell of a way to start a marriage. ‘We Light the Way’, the halfway point in House of the Dragon’s first season, starts off peaceably enough, with King Viserys healing the breach between his own house and that of Lord Corlys Velaryon as Corlys’s son Laenor and his betrothed, Rhaenyra, hold a candid oceanside conversation about their respective taste in men. It looks for a moment as though things might actually work out, if not happily, then at least survivably, with the whole team pulling in harness for a change. It’s the kind of breath of fresh air that makes a good story into a great one. You propose an interesting direction, build it out plausibly, and then just as the audience begins to settle into it and enjoy its new players and dynamics, you bring the hammer down in a way that seems obvious only in retrospect, an unavoidable consequence of past actions we’ve all agreed to forget about in favor of the future. Here that hammer is the spurned ser Criston Cole, and the brittle iron he breaks to splinters is Laenor’s lover, Joffrey Lonmouth, who approached him in hopes of securing a mutually beneficial social alliance.

The courtly dance preceding ser Criston’s outburst is an exercise in agonizing tension, prescribed steps contracting and expanding the dancers like the chambers of some gargantuan organ. Looks flicker back and forth. Queen Alicent, feeling betrayed by her best friend and made a liar in the bargain, looks at her uncle. Lord Corlys and his wife the Princess Rhaenys look with concern on their son’s too-public displays of affection for Joffrey. Rhaenyra looks at her groom, at her uncle, at her father, at the dozens of people pulling her in different directions. Lord Lyonel Strong watches the King’s accelerating infirmity as Viserys tears at his dinner like John Noble’s Denethor in The Return of the King. Bones snapping. Gristle crunching between his teeth. When Daemon steps onto the floor to seize Rhaenyra by the throat as she dares him to cut his way through the Kingsguard and spirit her away to Dragonstone it feels like a climax in and of itself, but when the real horror starts we can’t even see it. The dance becomes a mob. The floor between the banquet tables heaves and seethes with screaming revelers, bodies knocked over and trampled, men and women thrown together. The machine is too vast, too complex, for the cause of its illness to be readily diagnosed by those nominally leading it.

All the care House of the Dragon has lavished on fleshing out the relationships between its characters pays off beautifully in the wake of the wedding’s horrors. Laenor’s screams as he clings to Joffrey’s body have barely ceased to echo by the time a septon weds he and Rhaenyra in the still-bloody feast hall, a quiet end to what was meant as a week of feasting and tourney games. Bride and groom are both in tears as they say their vows. Director Clare Kilner makes a feast of the aftermath, with a rat scurrying out melodramatically to lap up Joffrey’s blood as the king collapses in a dead faint in the background. Her eye elevates the show’s already considerable aesthetic flair, and her repeated isolation of Queen Alicent against striking backdrops creates an underlying feeling of deep loneliness and abandonment which underscore the simple emotional roots of these apparently complex interpersonal problems. ‘We Light the Way’ is a staggering episode of television, as personal as it is devastating, and it proves for the second week in a row that House of the Dragon can take viewers’ breath away with both fantasy spectacle and intimate drama.