🚨 Warning: This story contains spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of “House of the Dragon.”
The children are not doing well in “The House of the Dragon”.
The 2022 season 1 finale episode ended with the death of a child. Today’s season 2 premiere of the HBO series — a prequel to “Game of Thrones” — concluded with another shocking murder committed in an eye-for-an-eye manner. Or, as Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) puts it, “A son for a son.”
This storyline – nicknamed “Blood and Cheese” in homage to the two assassins who committed the murder – is one of the most brutal in George RR Martin’s “Game of Thrones” books, and was long feared by those who knew him.
More stories about the “House of the Dragon”
“House of the Dragon” is set nearly 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones” and follows a civil war over succession that shaped the landscape HBO viewers knew and loved from the original series.
On one side are the supporters of Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), known as the Blacks, who believe that her father, the late King Viserys, wanted his firstborn to be his successor, as he ‘had ordered when she was a child. On the other, the Greens, those who believe that Viserys’ son with Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney), is the rightful heir.
The murder of Rhaenyra’s second son, Lucerys Velaryon (Elliot Grihault), carried out by Viserys and Alicent’s second son, Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), in the first season finale is widely considered the beginning of the Dance of the Dragons, or Civil War. . It is the culmination of a years-long rivalry that began when Lucerys blinded Aemond in one eye during a fight.
So here’s how one child murder sets the stage for another.
What happens to Jaehaerys Targaryen? Explaining “Blood and Cheese”
In this first episode of season 2, which picks up shortly after Aemond killed Lucerys, the Greens are aware that an attack could be coming. Alicent says she wants Vhagar, the dragon of Aemond, to return home to dissuade Rhaenyra from attacking in retaliation for her son’s death.
Alicent’s instincts are good. Daemon, Rhaenyra’s husband (and uncle – if you know, you know), East initially targeting Aemond. Furthermore, Rhaenyra, after discovering her son’s remains, declares: “I want Aemond Targaryen. »
So how does Aemond end up alive and young Jaehaerys Targaryen brutally murdered?
It begins when Daemon recruits assassins to kill Aemond.
First, a spy named Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), who goes by the name White Worm and is also Daemon’s former lover, connects him with a former butcher turned guard, nicknamed Blood. He then recruits a rat hunter, nicknamed Cheese, who knows the palace tunnels. In exchange, Daemon promises Mysaria a way out of King’s Landing and the Rat Hunter enough money to repay his debts.
Cheese asks Daemon, “What if we don’t find (Aemond)?”
The answer becomes clear when Blood and Cheese enter the Red Keep, and neither knows where to go. find a royal.
They go upstairs where the royal family lives, and as Blood goes from empty room to empty room, he meets a servant girl and pretends to be a rat catcher. Meanwhile, Cheese finds Helaena (Phia Saban), Aegon’s wife (and sister), in a room with her two children.
Their target suddenly shifts from Aemond to Jaehaerys, the eldest son of Aegon and Helaena who is only 6 years old.
As Aegon’s heir, Jaehaerys had attended a Small Council meeting earlier in the episode. Aegon makes the environment decidedly uncomfortable when he almost forces the Master of Coins to let Jaehaerys ride him “like a steed” before Alicent stops him. Jaehaerys is fired. The next time we see the 6-year-old, he is sleeping in his bed, unaware of his fate.
At knifepoint, Blood and Cheese force Helaena to indicate which of her children is the eldest son and heir. She tries to give them a necklace instead but is rejected.
Finally, she points to one of her children. Blood doubts that she is sincerely choosing the heir, but Cheese believes her. They cover the young boy’s mouth to muffle his cries.
As the assassins murder her son, Helaena flees with her other child. The scene may be less bloody than the famous Red Wedding massacre in “Game of Thrones,” but the sound of knives at work is just as horrific.
The episode ends with Helaena in Alicent’s bed, telling her what just happened: “They killed the boy.”
Differences between “Blood and Cheese” in the book and in the series
The “Blood and Cheese” scene in George RR Martin’s 2018 novel “Fire & Blood” has a few details that the series leaves out.
Daemon, like in the series, sets his revenge in motion by hiring Blood and Cheese to do his bidding. But in the book, Helaena and her children are the target from the start. Blood and Cheese waits for Helaena and her three children to appear (in the series she is with two). This means that the children are awake during the event, whereas in the show they are asleep.
Blood and Cheese tell Helaena that they only want one son and ask her to choose. First, she asks them to take her.
“Cheese warned the Queen to make a choice soon, before Blood grew bored and raped his little girl,” Martin writes.
Helaena finally chooses Maelor, her youngest son. The book attempts to provide insight into his decision.
“Perhaps she thought the boy was too young to understand, or perhaps it was because the older boy, Jaehaerys, was King Aegon’s eldest son and heir, next in line to the throne of iron”, we can read in the book.
Cheese then whispers to Maelor, “Do you hear that, little boy? Your mom wants you dead. But he ultimately kills Jaehaerys with a “single blow”.
The book describes Helaena’s lineage after the death of her son. She is incapable of taking care of herself, nor of caring for Maelor, the son she condemned to death. Alicent raises Maelor while Helaena sinks “deeper and deeper into madness.” Meanwhile, the king “got angry and drank and got angry.”
Blood, in the book, is found, tortured and “left to die” after 13 days. The cheese was never found.
Helaena saw this coming with her prophecy
Since the first season, Helaena seems to know that something bad is coming. Like the other Targaryens, Helaena has a prophetic vision.
In the eighth episode of the first season, Helaena fears the “beast under the boards”, which could describe a rat.
It echoes the fear of rats in the season two premiere. “I’m afraid,” she says to Aegon, who replies that the dragons won’t harm him. She is not afraid of dragons, she says, but “of rats”.