In the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E04: 'King of the Narrow Sea'

“What is this place?” asks the princess Rhaenyra as her uncle Daemon leads her deeper into the bowels of a Silk Street brothel. “It’s a place people come,” he says, letting the sentence hang as half a joke for a moment before continuing, “to take what they want.” The chemistry between Smith and Alcock makes the sure to be controversial makeout and foreshortened fuck that follows burn white-hot, and the presence of gay and lesbian lovers in the same space adds a charge that plays on the romantic/sexual longing the show implies exists between Rhaenrya and her childhood playmate turned stepmother Queen Alicent. That Rhaenyra spends much of her evening with her uncle Daemon dressed as a boy, something which seems to delight her deeply, further complicates her night of sexual awakening, as does her aggressive approach to ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), who submits to her advances with leaden, dissociative permisiveness.

While Rhaenyra is discovering herself in her dangerous, unstable uncle’s arms, Alicent is left locked up in the royal apartments where she cares for her babies and tends to the king’s sexual needs, no matter the hour. She looks no happier with her lot in life than does ser Criston, staring vacantly at the ceiling and clawing at her cuticles, her self-destructive tic, as Viserys pumps away at her. There is no relief in the profession of queendom, no room for self-exploration or close relationships. Emily Carey plays her as a young woman on the verge of some profound internal implosion, misused by her father and run ragged by her husband and children. There may be no epic battle scenes in ‘King of the Narrow Sea’, no action more intense than Viserys kicking a still-drunk Daemon in the ribs, but Queen Aemma’s reminder to Rhaenyra that women have battlefields other than war on which to fight continues to resound throughout the series.

The show’s fourth episode is its most confident and engrossing, a character study of profoundly frustrated people locked into a system of obligation and social compulsion slowly forcing them into a holding pattern of mutually assured destruction. The title is more than an idle reference to Daemon’s hard-won moniker. What is the King of the Narrow Sea? An office created half in jest to celebrate a second son’s reckless triumph. What is its kingdom? Sandbars, caves, and two thousand dead men staked out for the tides and the scavengers. It’s the crown to a kingdom that doesn’t exist, a joke spun out of blood and sand which accidentally exposes the much larger cosmic joke that is Westeros itself, a single gigantic tangle of people scrabbling and fighting over who to obey. What does it matter? Nothing, and everything.