SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of HBO’s “House of the Dragon.”
After closing season 1 with the quick and shocking death of a child – Rhaenyra Targaryen’s (Emma D’Arcy) son, Lucerys Velaryon – “House of the Dragon” opened its second with a series of choices driven by heartbreak and insidious plans that led to the most gruesome murder of another child: Jaehaerys Targaryen, the grandson of Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke).
Little Jaehaerys, son of King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Queen Helaena (Phia Saban), is killed in his bed by two men nicknamed “Blood and Cheese”, one of them a former member imposing the City Watch and the other the royal rat catcher. The pair sneak into the palace under the commission of Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) to find and kill Aemond Targareyn (Ewan Mitchell) in order to gain the revenge Rhaenyra wants for Aemond’s role in Luke’s death.
Jaehaerys is killed instead when Blood and Cheese cannot find Aemond, and comes across Queen Helaena and her two sleeping twins – a boy and a girl – and demands to know which one is the male, as they believe this will satisfy the “son for a while”. son” of the death demon asked. Helaena shows her son, then flees with her daughter, Jaehaera, to the safety of her mother Alicent’s room. There, she finds Alicent having sex with Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel).
This entire Blood and Cheese death sequence differs in several ways from the heinous act committed in George RR Martin’s book “Fire & Blood,” the book in the “Game of Thrones” universe that tells the fictional story of the Targaryen family and serves as a source. for “House of the Dragon”.
In “Fire & Blood”, Jaehaerys is always killed by Blood and Cheese. But in the book, the “historians” of Westeros say that the men were not explicitly tasked by Daemon Targaryen to kill Aemond as they are in “House of the Dragon”, but were simply ordered to “watch for eye, son.” for a son.
Also in the history book: Rhaenyra does not call for Aemond’s death; Jaehaerys’ murder takes place in Alicent’s room, not Helaena’s, where Blood and Cheese tie Alicent up and use her as bait while waiting for Helaena and the kids to come in and say goodnight. Additionally, rather than pointing the finger at Jaehaerys to show that he is the boy and effectively choosing his death, Helaena chooses her youngest son, Maelor, to die, hoping that Blood and Cheese will spare Jaehaerys. But they kill Jaehaerys anyway.
“One of the challenges of adapting ‘Fire & Blood’ is that there is this intentionally contradictory narrative in the book where there are often these three different perspectives on the story that don’t align. not on top of each other,” “House of the Dragon,” says showrunner Ryan Condal “So it’s our job as adapters to try to find the objective line through that to bring the audience into it. narrative as we see it presented.”
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Starting with the change of asking Rhaenyra for Aemond’s blood, Condal says, “It was as if Rhaenyra, despite her grief, was seeking revenge, but she would choose a target who would have some sort of strategic advantage or military. Of course, if you eliminated Aemond, not only would he be directly punished for his betrayal and murder of Luke, but it would also eliminate the rider of the world’s greatest dragon and immediately create an advantage for his side.
“Rhaenyra lets her rage take over her voice, and I think that’s not something we saw a ton of – certainly with the old Rhaenyra – in Season 1,” D’Arcy says. “She was still trying to referee that fire. And this season, after Luc died, she finally let that thing burn.
Condal says that the elimination of Helaena’s choice between Maelor and Jaehaerys “just doesn’t exist yet in this version of the story”, because time had to be compressed in season 1 in such a way that the children of ‘Helaena and Aegon, as well as Daemon and Rhaenyra’s youngest children are “younger in this part of the story than they were in the original book.”
For Helaena actor Phia Saban, the elimination of the character in this “Blood and Cheese” equation, and the fact that Helaena directly points to Jaehaerys, leading to his death, is “almost more heartbreaking.”
“There’s something about the fact that she can’t escape the fact that she said, ‘Yes, that one,’ and it weighs on her so much,” Saban says. “But I also think she really felt like she had no other choice because I think the stakes are so high – they’re the biggest stakes of her life – and so when he said to her, ‘ You tell me the right one, or I’ll do terrible things to your children,” she believes him. She says, I can’t spoil everything, I have to be completely honest. And I think it’s actually even more heartbreaking that she’s being honest.
Condal decided that the death would take place audibly in the shadows and visually on Helaena’s face, rather than showing the act itself on screen. It was, he said, “a topic of debate” in the writers’ room.
“We knew it would be gruesome and brutal – we didn’t want it to be gratuitous or over-the-top,” says Condal. “The idea of this sequence was to dramatize a robbery that went wrong. We therefore move away from the central story of the world of Daemon, Rhaenyra, Alicent and Aegon, and as a result, we follow these two characters whom we have just met in an alley in Flea Bottom. Daemon gave them a mission to go find Aemond Targaryen, and we follow them, and we follow them, and we don’t cut them off and we don’t go back to the other stories – oh, my God, what’s going on happen?”
The idea, says Condal, is this: “Now we’re suddenly in Helaena’s subjective point of view – we follow these two guys, and then we enter her world and see how this happens to her, and feel her experience through this.”
“Yes, he’s a little child, and it’s awful. But since we don’t really know Jaehaerys as a point-of-view character, it made more sense to experience this terrible event through Helaena’s eyes,” Condal adds. “You instinctively know what’s happening off-screen, but I think it’s the emotional grip of experiencing that through Helaena’s eyes that really calms me, and I’ve seen it 100 times.”
Then there is a significant difference in where the murder takes place: Alicent does not witness the death of her grandchild and is in bed with Criston Cole when he is slaughtered.
“It adds a level of shame and guilt that is unlike anything Alicent has ever experienced before, being indisposed by the head of the Royal Guard who should have been on duty to ensure the castle was locked down.” , Cooke explains. “It’s a theme that runs throughout the season: If they hadn’t gone into this, would this have happened? They hold themselves fully responsible.
While the premiere ends in tragedy and promises darker days to come, it opens with a bit of fan service: “House of the Dragon’s” first look at the North, Jon Snow’s home and of the Stark family, from the original “Game of Thrones.”
“It was an important moment in the book, and who wouldn’t want to see Winterfell again?” » Condal asks rhetorically. “I thought it would be a treat for the fans. We haven’t seen the North since the original series, and that was many, many years ago. But we didn’t want to go there without a reason. »
The specific reason in this case was to introduce the character of Cregan Stark (played by Tom Taylor) and his friendship with Rhaenyra’s eldest son, Jacaerys Velaryon (Harry Collett), just before Jace learns of his brother’s death Luke.
“I try not to do things just because we like to do them,” Condal says. “But this footage is actually the last place where this terrible news has not yet broken, because the North is so far away. We therefore begin with the raven who carries the news of Luke’s death to the north. And we see Jace in that last pure moment where, at least in his mind, his brother is still alive.
Condal notes that this is also meant to show that the world of Westeros is bigger than this warring family in the south.
“It also expands the scope of the world and reminds people that there are more places here than Dragonstone and King’s Landing – and that the North has a major stake in what’s to come,” Condal says. “There is a wall up there, and there is a great power that exists beyond the wall that may not affect the characters in this time period, but will in Daenerys Targaryen and Jon’s timeline Snow.”
Michaela Zee contributed to this story.