‘House Of The Dragon’ Episode 9 Recap And Review: Treason Most Foul

The king is dead. Long live the king!

In the small hours of the night, a young servant makes his way through the halls and corridors of the Red Keep. Down he goes from the upper floors of the castle to the kitchens below and the servants quarters, where he finds a young woman—handmaiden to the Queen. He whispers in her ear.

She, in turn, makes her way to the chambers of Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) daughter of the Hand, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) now Queen Dowager. King Viserys the Peaceful is dead. The last bastion of peace in the realm has shuffled off this mortal coil. The Stranger has come and taken him away, taken him back to the Mother.

And now all the Seven Kingdoms will weep tears of blood.

King Viserys I (Paddy Considine) died with fevered words on his lips, delirious and rambling—mistaking his young wife for his daughter, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy). His wife mistook his ravings about Aegon the Conqueror and his Dream as a dying wish to have their own son, Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) seated on the Iron Throne in place of his heir apparent, Rhaenyra.

She makes sure to keep her husband’s death a secret and quickly she and her father assemble the Small Council in the wee hours of the night just before daybreak. The assembled lords are greeted with the grim—though long-anticipated—tidings. Viserys is dead.

His dying wish, Alicent tells them, was that Aegon succeed him as king.

Usurpers To The Iron Throne

Well that makes things easier, Ser Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) exclaims. We can put our plans into motion with the King’s blessing.

The Hand agrees, and the Small Council begins to plot accordingly. There are still a couple Gold Cloak commanders loyal to Daemon (Matt Smith) who must be removed.

Alicent is shocked. She had no idea that her father and his cronies had been plotting to place Aegon on the throne without her knowledge. Despite clearly wanting this outcome, she’s still troubled by the secrecy and plotting behind her back. “And what of Rhaenyra?” she asks.

Otto Hightower thinks she must be killed to ensure she makes no claim to the throne, but Alicent is squeamish. Surely her father would not want them murdering the daughter he loved.

But it is master of coin and lord treasurer Lord Lyman Beesbury (Bill Paterson) who puts up the only vocal dissent at the meeting of conspirators. The old lord—who served King Jaeherys before he sat on Viserys’s Small Council—is enraged. Gone is the doddering, senile old man. In his place is an honorable lord furious to learn of what he calls theft and treason.

Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) cuts his speech short. “Sit down!” he commands, grabbing Beesbury by the shoulders and slamming him to his seat, smashing his head down upon the table with a sickening crunch.

Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Ser Harrold Westerling (Graham McTavish) draws his longsword and points it at Ser Criston, furious and shocked at the knight’s murderous actions. The younger knight draws his own blade, defiant.

Alicent, too, seems dismayed. She commands Criston to sheathe his sword before more bloodshed ensues. When Otto attempts to order Ser Westerling to take his knights and soldiers to Dragonstone to arrest Rhaenyra, the old knight removes his white cloak and storms from the room. He’ll have no part in the dishonorable actions of the Hightowers and their cronies.

The first order of business, before they can crown the new king, is finding the prince himself. Aegon is not in his chambers and nor can he be found in the Red Keep.

Otto sends two knights of the Kingsguard to find their new liege: Ser Erryk Cargyll (Elliott Tittensor) and his twin Arryk (Luke Tittensor). As the two search King’s Landing for Aegon, dressed only in brown tunics, Erryk tries to convince his brother that the prince is not fit to be King. He seems dismayed that anyone would put the young man on the throne, such are his vices and shortcomings. (Later, when he is found, Aegon expresses the same misgivings).

Alicent wants Aegon brought to her rather than her father, and sends Ser Criston along with her middle son, Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) to find the prince.

The searchers make their way to fighting pits where children—their teeth filed down to fangs—brawl with one another to cheering crowds; to brothels where Aegon took his younger brother as a boy; all across the city. Aemond is frustrated with his older brother. While he’s spent his days training with sword and lance and reading history books, Aegon has gambled and whored and gotten bastards all across the city. Crison is sympathetic but dutybound.

Eventually, Erryk and Arryk meet a young woman who tells them her master, the White Worm, can take them to the prince—for the right price. They get Otto who meets with Daemon’s old paramour, Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno)—the spymaster known as the White Worm—who demands gold and an end to the child-fights in Flea Bottom. Otto says he’ll look into it and pays her. The twins find the prince hiding in the Great Sept and take him to Otto.

They’re waylaid by Criston and Aemond, however, and while Aemond is certainly tempted to let Aegon disappear so that he can take the throne himself, they ultimately bring him back to his mother.

The Queen And The Dragon

This is a curious episode. Of Team Black we only see one major character: Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best). She is in King’s Landing when the king dies and is confined to her quarters as the conspirators do their dirty business. Alicent pleads with her to bend the knee—what good has ever come from allying herself with Rhaenyra and Daemon but dead children?—but Rhaenys does not. Her husband, Lord Corlys Valeryon (Steve Toussaint) remains grievously wounded from battling in the Stepstones.

No other Team Black player shows up in the episode. It’s our very first without Rhaenyra. Daemon does not make an appearance. None of Rhaenyra’s children are seen. But Rhaenys does her part to not go gently. She’s rescued by Ser Erryk who takes her to the streets of King’s Landing where he hopes to spirit her to safety. “What about my dragon?” she asks, of Meleys, but the knight says they’ll be looking for her at the Dragonpit.

As luck would have it, the Greens have other plans. Having found Aegon, they hurry to make the coronation happen before anything can go awry, and before Rhaenyra and her allies hear of the coup. The sooner Aegon is on the Iron Throne, the better. And what better place to crown the Dragon than the Dragonpit itself? The Gold Cloaks drive the city’s denizens up the hill to the giant dome, and Rhaenys—separated from Ser Erryk—is swept away with them.

There, in the vast chamber of the Dragonpit, atop the hill that bears her namesake, Rhaenys sees what the Greens have prepared. Thousands of King’s Landing commoners, merchants and lords have gathered. On a dais at the center of the hall, Alicent and the Hand and other conspirators have gathered. Aemond and Aegon’s sister-wife Helaena (Phia Saban) stand there as well. Soldiers march into the crowd and form a path between the masses.

Prince Aegon strides in, walking beneath their raised swords and coming to the dais, where the Septon anoints him King. The crowd cheers, and Aegon II turns and raises his sword, Blackfyre, and pumps his fist in the air, a grin slowly coming to his face, his eyes turning bright with the sudden realization of power and adoration.

Rhaenys moves swiftly through the crowd and down into the pits below. At his moment of glory, there is a sudden thundering as the ground beneath them bursts open and Meleys comes up from below, scattering the crowd which breaks into chaos and fear. Atop the dragon sits the Queen Who Never Was. She stares down at the young king and his mother and then Meleys opens her mouth and let’s out a shriek.

But Rhaenys does not say the word that could have ended this war in a flash. Out of mercy or uncertainty or simple pity, she does not say “Dracaerys.” She does not burn the Hightowers. She does not burn her cousin’s children. She turns atop her mighty dragon and bursts out of the Dragonpit and flies away to safety. What a great deal of pain and suffering she could have ended had she simply commanded her dragon to burn them all to a crisp then and there.

War is coming to Westeros—one unlike any the Seven Kingdoms have ever seen. Unlike any we have ever seen, for that matter. A Dance of Dragons.

One last thing to mention before we go. Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) has grown increasingly powerful and influential as the years have passed. Like Ser Criston, he has ingratiated himself with the Queen, though as he makes clear in tonight’s episode he will play all sides of any conflict should it further his own mysterious ends.

He says as much to Otto when Otto brings up all the time he’s spent with his daughter lately. And then later, when he’s with Alicent, he reveals what he knows about the White Worm’s spies—including Alicent’s own lady in waiting—and how the Hand makes use of them. He offers to take down this network for her if she pleases.

And all the while, he stares at the Queen’s feet. First, she takes off her slippers and places her feet on the table between them. As he speaks, his eyes rarely leaving her feet, she removes her stockings. When they come to an understanding, she lifts her skirts, showing off her naked feet and calves, and turns away from the indignity of what follows, as he reaches down and begins to pleasure himself.

“I’m sure someday you will repay me,” he said to her, long ago when he killed his own father and brother. It seems the payment has been this, that the Clubfoot, as he is known, has a foot fetish—or at least a thing for royal feet. It’s as disturbing a scene as any in this grim series.

Verdict

War is coming. Up to this point, House Of The Dragon has expertly set the stage of the coming conflict, introducing us not only to the players of the game, but to the myriad fraught relationships, alliances and enmities that have led to the factions we now have arrayed before us.

I won’t waste much time discussing the book, Fire & Blood, the fictional history of the Targaryen’s George R.R. Martin penned, which serves as source material for the series. Suffice to say that the show makes many changes, but the best among these changes is to add more depth not just to the individual characters but to their relationships with one another. Rhaenyra and Alicent have a long, deep, heartbreaking friendship that simply isn’t present in the book, and it makes the show much richer for it. Viserys’s illness and his passion for bringing his family together and ending their petty squabbling brings a gravity and a tragic heroism to his character that, again, is simply not present in the book.

This is how adaptations ought to be made. House Of The Dragon takes the strengths of Martin’s story and enriches them with detail and emotional resonance. Every change that is made is made to enhance Martin’s stories and themes. The wonderful thing about the section of Fire & Blood upon which this story is based is that it draws from several different unreliable sources, so many events in the book are called into question or told in different ways depending on who is doing the telling. The show has an opportunity to tell the “true” version, which is a handy way to explain some of the differences between text and screen.

This episode, for instance, tells the story of Lord Beesbury’s death. In the book, the accounts differ. He is slain by Ser Criston, that is not in doubt, but how he is killed is up for debate. In one version, the Kingsguard throws him from the window to the stones below. In another, he slashes the old man’s throat. In this version, he slams his head to the table, crushing the life out of him.

In the book, Aegon says he has no interest in being king and that he shouldn’t steal his sister’s birthright. Here, he actively tries to escape, and later scoffs at his mother when she tells him it was his father’s dying wish. “He never liked me,” he tells her.

All told, this was another brilliant episode of a show that is growing more brilliant with each passing episode. It lacked the emotional power of last week’s episode, but then we couldn’t hope to reach that two weeks in a row. That was King Viserys’s swansong also, and a very different beast altogether. The calm before the storm in many ways.

The storm is here now. Gathering all around us. I, for one, am filled with both excitement and dread—as well as a bit of sadness that in one week this season will be over and we’ll have to wait however long for Season 2. Hopefully not as long as Rings Of Power, which isn’t slated to return until 2024!

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