A bit further back in reviewing House of the Dragon as compared to The Acolyte, partly because I’m just a bigger fan of Star Wars than Game of Thrones, but also because — for as much as the outrage clickbaiters complain about “bad writing” as a code word for “I don’t want to see Those People in my screen and I figure people won’t challenge me on it if I phrase it this way” — I’m simply enjoying Acolyte more. So House gets lumped into the undercard on this post.
Just to get this out of the way…
Acolyte E5
We left off last week with the fellow referred to in subtitles as the Stranger (and whom I’ve been calling Smylo Ren) first engaging several Jedi as they move to try to defend themselves. The Stranger seems unwilling to harm Osha even when he could have trivially killed her, and sent all the Jedi flying with one big telekinetic blast from his left hand.
This episode opens up with Osha recovering from her own telekinetic shove at the Stranger’s hands to find him in a lightsaber fight with all the Jedi at once. It’s not often that you see Jedi being portrayed as the random mooks in a Groo the Wanderer comic, but it’s going about that well for them. He’s mowing them down left and right, using the trees as cover to avoid letting them get easy shots at him and opportunistically picking them apart.
He pauses just long enough when he finally spots Mae. By this time, the only Jedi left much are Yord, Jecki, and the heretofore-unseen Sol, who seems to join the fight quite late. Yord is lightly wounded trying to get in the way, and Sol orders him to take Osha back to the shop. Jecki realizes in professed outrage that Mae took Kelnacca’s lightsaber, and disarms her in an effort to arrest her while Sol engages with the Stranger.
Sol tries to get into a bit of an argument with him, asking what kind of master hides his face from his pupil. The Stranger responds, “You tell me.” Implying strongly that Sol has been keeping secrets from Osha.
Jecki manages to get handcuffs onto Mae, who seems strangely unable to use the Force to get them back off, or respond in kind when Jecki uses various basic Force pushes to fight her unarmed. It’s a struggle, but Jecki ultimately wins, and then proceeds to use Kelnacca’s saber in a desperate effort to assist Sol against the Stranger.
Dramatically, she gets killed, but she manages to cut the Stranger’s helmet off. To absolutely no one’s serious surprise, it’s Sith Jason Mendoza Qimir. Sol asks him what he is, and he answers “I have no name. But the Jedi like you would call me… Sith.”
That hysterical shrieking sound you just heard was all the haters graduating from “Ki Adi Mundi can’t possibly be alive in this time!” to “Mundi can’t possibly have been so wrong in saying the Sith have been extinct for a millennium that he wouldn’t know this guy existed!” in their excuses du jour for hating the show in advance.
Darth Not-Jason, the Noneth of His Name, however, overtly observes when Sol asks why he would expose himself that the Jedi won’t allow people like him to exist, so he has to kill everyone who discovers him before they can report back. He even goes so far as to incredulously ask Mae, “You really didn’t know it was me?” that feels like a bit of a nod to the audience that they were making this really blipping obvious the whole time, a la “wow, such a shock that Palpatine was Sidious!” He even taunts Sol for attacking him while his back was turned.
Then Sol and Darth Not-Jason fight. Sol is generally getting the upper hand in direct fighting, especially when it goes to bare hand fighting, but Not-Jason still holds his own by cheating and threatening to harm Mae and Osha at opportune times to force Sol to fight on his terms. (Cue Will Turner and Jack Sparrow exchange, “This is ridiculous! I’d kill you in a fair fight!” “Not much motivation to fight fair, now, is it?”) Also amidst the fight, NotJason hints to Osha that she shouldn’t trust Sol, to which Sol defensively answers to her, “His mind is twisted by darkness.”
“I’ve accepted my darkness. What have you done with yours?”
That visibly leaves Sol taken aback. That… is not good for any “Sol is the wise and innocent master” theories.
The fight goes on for most of the rest of the episode, with Darth NotJason cutting Mae loose from her handcuffs along the way, and everyone getting separated (with help from Osha cleverly sticking her mini droid with a light onto Jason’s back, leading to him getting carried off for a while by umbramoths), at which point Mae and Osha meet without anyone with sabers nearby and first fight and then hug it out (with some clever camera compositing so that Amandla Stenberg’s face onlt shows up on the screen once at a time) and then fight some more. Now Mae remembers how to Force push, and knocks Osha out. She then cuts her hair shorter and swipes Osha’s outer clothes in order to impersonate her to accompany Sol when he chooses to leave.
Not even a little surprisingly, Jason manages to cut up enough giant moths to get free, and finds Osha unconscious and Mae and Sol gone. Left unclear is whether he realizes that it’s Osha and not Mae lying there, but much less unclear is that Mae has at least successfully managed to switch places with her sister and Sol doesn’t realize it. The audience can tell that it’s Mae and not Osha just from the body language — Stenberg’s acting gets credit here — but at least Sol can’t tell. Something tells me Osha’s not going to be able to fool Jason any longer here than she could in his apothecary shop in E2.
So… a lot to unpack here.
First, Sol’s moral armor is looking less and less shiny by the moment. The way he reacts to Not-Jason accusing him of trying to stab him in the back and questioning what he’s done with his darkness is clearly the response of a guy who’s carrying some old guilt. That, plus the promise to explain whatever really happened at the coven, doesn’t leave him looking much better than Torbin’s suicidal plea for forgiveness from Mae in the second episode.
The fact that Qimir gets Osha here has very interesting implications. It might shed some light on who he is, and why he taunts Sol under the mask, “Don’t you remember me?” and Sol acknowledging familiarity. It’s possible this is just a toss off reference to the apothecary shop, but it’s also possible he knows more about the history of all this than Sol would like to admit. He clearly knows whatever really happened at the coven. Most likely, that’s from Mae… but maybe not.
Given Mae’s desire to leave the Sith and the fact that Osha has yet to really discover the truth, it also leaves an open question of what Osha’s reaction is going to be when Qimir inevitably discovers her and tells her what really happened, and who the eventual title character of this show really is. We’ve been led to assume it’s always Mae… but there’s a very real chance that Osha’s reaction to all this swings this the other way. Sometimes the most fanatical converts are the new ones.
Now, about the whole “the Sith have been extinct for a millennium” line…
There’s a lot of reasons why Mundi might have uttered that line in light of this series. Perhaps he never learns that Jason has identified himself as a Sith. Perhaps he doesn’t believe him. Perhaps he’s part of the corruption, and actively participates in a continuing cover up of the potential threat, as Vernestra exhibited a willingness to do earlier in the series. If that is the case, then Mundi is not only an unreliable narrator, he’s actually lying. Much as Sol almost certainly is about whatever happened at the coven.
That said, if we’re giving George Lucas a pass for “Darth Vader betrayed and murdered your father” from a main mentor character in the original Star Wars that started it all, then it’s more than a little misplaced to act like it’s some grand heresy to have a background character with about ten lines in the entire prequel trilogy whose whole role is “misguided and arrogant Jedi master sitting on a chair right up until he gets gunned down in Order 66” turn out to be (gasp) wrong or lying. The whole point of the prequels is to illustrate how blind and actively wrong the Jedi Order had become, for Pete’s sake.
So I’m going to let this play out. I really, really doubt that Dave Filoni and the other “keepers of the Holocron” were unaware of that line. They’re going to have an explanation for why yet another old Jedi should probably not be trusted at face value. We’re literally getting another, obvious example of it with every Jedi who was at the coven. Why are we figuring Mundi was telling the truth and that any deviation from it is some sort of retcon?
I’m still here for it.
House of the Dragon S2E1&2
So… two episodes to look over here.
In the first episode, we find that Rhaenyra is grieving over Lucerys, and this is moving her to revenge. She came up to the last episodes of season 1 bring the only voice of reason and wisdom keeping the realm from war. Otto and Alicent had usurped the Iron Throne in favor of Aegon II — and, amusingly, Aemond even admits as much in this episode. And yet, even though Rhaenyra has every right to be outraged and to demand that the lords of the realm honor the oaths her father had them swear, she is still questioning whether it was worth a civil war to secure it. If Aemond hadn’t swiped Vhagar from the grave of Daemon’s previous wife, this wouldn’t even be much of a contest. The Greens would have no real ability to hold the Iron Throne by force any more than they had the moral right to it.
But Lucerys’ death at the hands of a mildly out of control Vhagar has changed all that. Even Alicent reluctantly utters a prayer to the gods for his soul alongside her late husband and mother. Daemon is trying, and failing, to run Team Black while Rhaenyra is searching for the physical remains or other evidence proving her son is dead. Rhaenys empathizes with Rhaenyra and contemptuously shrugs off Daemon’s efforts at acting as Rhaenyra’s second when he tries to order her to go back out with him once she’s just completed a patrol run of the blockade of King’s Landing, and Daemon lacks the charisma or ability to reason to convince her to much do what he wants.
Eventually Rhaenyra finds a washed ashore wing of her son’s dragon and the cloak he was wearing when he died. She weeps. She takes her son Jacaerys’ report on his successful efforts to bring the Starks aboard (albeit with a levy of older warriors, as the Starks refuse to jeopardize their duty to watch over the Wall), and both of them collapse in tears.
The Greens are feeling the sting of Rhaenyra’s blockade, and the Crownland’s farmers are feeling the pain of giving up 10% of their herds to feed the dragons. Alicent is feeling the sting of Ser Criston’s dragon…. erm, well, if you catch my meaning. She says they shouldn’t, but of course they keep doing it anyway. Larys Strong has been quietly purging castle staff he thinks might be disloyal to the usurped crown, and he’s starting to get the knives out for Otto, going so far as to put ideas in Aegon’s head that Otto has been Hand to too many Kings and is getting to used to being the real power behind the Iron a throne. This, after Otto had to talk Aegon out of replacing the dragon feeding nerds by the first shepherd who came along with a hardship petition. Aegon is also feeling the pain of never having been taught how to rule by his father — which to a more reasonable king might be a big clue he was never intended to be the heir. So he overcompensates by having his own young son Jaehaerys sit in on small council meetings at the age of four, in which the poor kid is woefully out of place. Halaena, the young queen and budding Cassandra, comments to her brother-husband that she’s not worried about the dragons, she’s worried about the rats.
Hold that last thought.
When Rhaenyra finally comes back to her council, everyone is reporting what’s going on to her. She silently takes it all in, and then utters only four words, her only line of the episode: “I want Aemond Targaryen.”
Daemon takes this as finally getting the green light, and so he puts on a criming cloak (you know, the cowled things people always wear in this series when they’re up to no good in sketchy places) and finds a couple of rat catchers he has reason to believe don’t hold the Greens in high regard. He tells them that Rhaenyra wants a son for a son, and offers them coin to find Aemond in the Red Keep and kill him. They ask what they should do if they can’t find him. The scene cuts away without letting us know if he gives an answer.
This leads to an infamous passage from the books known as, I’m told, the “Blood and Cheese” affair. Cheese is the main rat catcher, Blood is a former city watchman who is Daemon’s disgruntled contact, who’s been demoted to rat catcher himself. They make their way through the dark recesses of the Red Keep, until Cheese admits he hasn’t ever been up into the royals’ area before Blood threatens him into continuing.
They come upon Halaena and her two children. They either are confused that one of these two is the prince they’re looking for, or perhaps they’re acting on offscreen instructions to improvise if they can’t find their primary target. Jaehaerys is the heir (the young child Aegon brought to his small council meeting), and they demand that Helaena identify him. She reluctantly complies, wanting her daughter to survive more than her son. They behead of him off screen, and we see only her reaction, which is to go wide eyed in horror amidst a bunch of nasty crunching sounds, before she runs off with her daughter. She comes in on the scandalous side of Alicent riding Criston into the bedsheets, and doesn’t even seem to care. Alicent realizes something is seriously wrong, and she says only, “They killed the boy,” before we go to credits.
Thus, Rhaenyra ostensibly evens the score, and Daemon surrenders the moral high ground of Team Black in one spectacularly cruel stroke. It’s quite possible that she never really regains her relative sanity after Lucerys’ death from here, which would explain why she is far from fondly remembered in the history books by the time of the original Game of Thrones.
As shock value goes, it’s not quite the Red Wedding. To be honest, this episode plodded on a bit as everyone overcontemplated the ramifications of the coming civil war and schemed over their own positions in their respective council rooms while a blockade gradually squeezed the Greens and the lords of the realm seemed unwilling to take up their cause, other than the Lannisters and Baratheons. I’m reading that the Blood and Cheese matter was the most cruel thing done by either side in the Dance of Dragons, and while it was plenty nasty, the show runners are not actually willing to directly show a small child die on screen. Bran Stark’s fall was as close as they have ever been willing to come before this.
But it’s still a clear moral compromise, and it’s not clear that Daemon didn’t sign off on it happening if they couldn’t find Aemond. (In the books, it’s apparent that he was perfectly fine with it and may have deliberately ordered it done.)
So that takes us to the second episode. This episode is all about realizations of horror by various relatively intelligent powers that be that they’re surrounded by bloodthirsty fools.
It begins in King’s Landing, with Aegon raging over the death of his son, yet somehow being more upset with the way that this reflects on himself than the actual welfare of the poor child himself, or even the emotional toll on his wife. The entire moral compass of every character in this episode is measurable by their empathy for Helaena here:
- Otto despicably proposes to use her as a prop to gain sympathy from the people by having her paraded on a wagon behind her son’s body while a cryer walks in front of her yelling “behold the works of Rhaenyra Targaryen!” This might be the most cynically malevolent moment in the GOTverse since Tywin signing off on the Red Wedding.
- Alicent clearly seems a bit upset about it, but ultimately goes along with it and insists that Helaena do so too in the name of “duty.”
- Aegon never spares a thought of her. When they pass each other in the hallway after the funeral procession is over, he doesn’t even slow down to comfort her. She’s left just watching him walk by.
- Rhaenyra, when she learns what’s happened, is visibly distraught to the point of voice cracking that this happened, and overtly invokes Helaena’s name as someone whom she would never put in the position of losing a son as she lost her own, much less a child.
The first “horrified realization” moment is in the scene where we see Rhaenyra’s reaction. She’s horrified, and surprised that anyone would assume she had anything to do with it. Then she’s incredulous when even her own council seems highly doubtful that she didn’t have anything to do with it.
Both of the two women in the room figure it out as soon as they look at Daemon sitting silently with a half amused expression on his face. Rhaenys spots it first. All she does is seethe silently in immediate recognition that he was responsible. She hates him a little more for doing it, but she knows she can’t accost the king consort for it in a council meeting.
Rhaenyra takes a little longer, because she’s too busy trying to fend off the council’s suspicions and questions of her about it. Then she sits down next to him at the head of the table and glances at him, half in silent sideeye plea for support.
And then that turns into the first of the two big horrified realizations. She gives him that initial glance, then turns to look at him with an unmistakeable, “oh, you didn’t… but of course you did” expression.
She clears the council chamber and demands a fuller explanation in private. He acknowledges sending the assassins, but insists his instructions were clear to kill Aemond. She deduces that there must have been a fallback instruction if they couldn’t find him. He denies giving any sort of permission to kill a child. She bluntly says she doesn’t believe him, and points out that he’s weakened her claim to the throne, her ability to raise armies, even her standing with her own council. He accuses her of being too much like her father, reluctant to shed blood to do what must be done. She screams that she can’t trust him, that she suspects he’s using her to further a desire to be close to power that was passed over him when she was named heir.
In all fairness, neither of their criticisms are entirely invalid. He is likely marrying into Rhaenyra to reclaim proximity to her father’s throne. She is perhaps not quite ruthless enough, quite the opposite of her distant descendant Danaerys leaving a trail of crucified corpses in her wake even when she wasn’t openly foreshadowing her eventual destruction of King’s Landing by threatening to burn cities down every time she was thwarted.
Her quiet pressure campaign on Aegon II is generally working — we see from the shots inside King’s Landing that the blockade of the city is squeezing the place badly, and that Aegon’s claim is not being universally supported outside the Red Keep’s walls, even if the Blood and Cheese affair will indeed hurt her ability to continue her efforts to use soft power to push Aegon from the throne with a minimum of bloodshed. But she is her father’s daughter in one way: she is simply not the semi-ruthless Machiavellian figure that Otto Hightower is, and a ruling queen sometimes needs to be prepared to get her hands a little dirty. Soft power is often underrated by warmongers, but it is not always enough. That said, there’s some wisdom in Rhaenyra’s approach, but sometimes a ruler needs stick to go with the carrot. Certainly the whole mess she’s in could’ve potentially been avoided if either her father or Rhaenys had been a little more willing to be ruthless at the right moments.
Blood gets interrogated during the funeral procession. Larys Strong lays out his torture implements, and evidently his reputation precedes him, because Blood volunteers that he was hired by Daemon Targaryen before Larys even picks up the first real implement. He says he was contracted to kill Aemond, and even gives up the payment terms given to “us”. Larys’ only question from there is “who is ‘us’?” Blood says it was a rat catcher, but he doesn’t know a real name. Blood then fearfully asks if he’ll hurt him once Larys is quickly , and Larys says no, but he cannot vouch for the King. Aegon then walks in with a mace and starts in on batting practice on the fellow’s head.
Not too long after, there is much wailing in the streets, revealing that Aegon has hung all the rat catchers. We are shown someone asking an apparent mother of one of them, “what’d they do?” No one is even sure.
This is followed by Otto bursting in on Aegon speaking with Criston Cole, demanding to know what they’ve done. Aegon just looks at him in comical confusion. Otto thunders, “the rat catchers!” Aegon has the most hilarious matter of fact, don’t care delivery as he answers, “Oh. I had them hanged.” Otto shrieks furiously that they had everything going their way after the Blood and Cheese affair, and now with such an act they’ve got wives, mothers, and sisters weeping at the gates cursing his name, throwing away all the good will by hanging innocent men, even as Aegon observes that they’ve hung at least one guilty one. (And indeed, Cheese is seen among the dead, with his mangy dog whimpering up at him from the street.)
Aegon growls that he doesn’t care whether all the lords were coming their way, he wants to “spill blood, not ink.” It’s time for action. He then gives his best immediate example: “Ser Criston Cole has acted.”
Otto’s response is the second big moment of horrified realization in this show, and as much as I found myself hating Otto for his cynical manipulation of grief earlier in this show, his response here is hilarious. He slowly turns around to look at Aegon, then Criston, and then just closes his eyes in a look that is part disbelief and part exasperated, “I know I’m not going to like the answer but I have to ask the question.”
Rhys Ifan’s delivery is awesome: “And what. Has Ser Criston Cole… done?”
We’ve seen the scene where Cole set it up, half out of petulant spite to take out his own failure to guard the princeling while he was boffing the Queen dowager, but Aegon helpfully answers that he’s sent Arryk to pose as his twin brother Erryk, who left King’s Landing to be a guard in Rhaenyra’s employ, and seek to assassinate her. Otto incredulously asks, “alone?” Aegon thinks it’s a brilliant plan.
This just sends Otto into a further rage, and finally Aegon’s had enough and orders his grandfather to give the Hand badge to Cole.
There’s a very “Joffrey and Tywin” thing about all this, but there’s also many principal differences. Otto is the more politically Machiavellian of the two, but he also knew better than the scream at his grandson on the throne. The closest parallel here is “the King is tired” scene from the original. Joffrey is puffing about he’s the king in similar petulance to what we would perhaps see from Aegon, but then he starts mouthing off to his grandfather in the process. Everyone at the table, even Joffrey, goes deathly quiet. Unlike with Aegon and Otto, everyone understands that Tywin is the real power here, and Tywin then gives an icy, yet diplomatic response that gives the scene its name, “The King is tired,” and instructs that he be sent to bed with a sedative. Joffrey is left to fecklessly whimper, “I am not tired!” as his mother escorts him away,
Otto is not in this position. Even though it’s his maneuvering that has indeed put Aegon on the throne, no one really understands him as the real power. His temper is also more on his sleeve, and he is less capable than Tywin of keeping his cool when explaining to his own grandson why he’s being an idiot. Everyone is terrified of Tywin, nobody’s afraid of Otto. He’s more bark than bite, too much so for his own good. And it gets him fired.
The two erstwhile rulers are very different, and yet somewhat similar characters. Both of them are their father’s children in one critical way: they’re both weaklings in their own way. Rhaenyra doesn’t even command the respect of her council outside of Rhaenys, and Aegon doesn’t deserve it. However, their ways of compensating for this are very different. Rhaenyra is more than a little indecisive, whereas Aegon tries to cover it up with pandering here and wanton brutality there. It’s possible that Rhaenyra will become more like Aegon in time (and the books indicate that she may well do so), but this isn’t all happening because they’re good at what they do. Perhaps even Rhaenys’ faith in a kindred traveler is misplaced as such. She clearly is ill served by Daemon’s wanton thirst for blood, but Daemon’s criticism that she swings too far the other way is not entirely without merit. She’s very much following in her father’s footsteps by mostly letting things happen rather than acting on them.
Ironically, among Otto’s last words as Hand before he’s fired is that Viserys is dead, and they’re all the poorer for it. There’s perhaps a hint of regret at what he’s engineered, for it he’d simply gotten behind Rhaenyra instead of seeking to advance his own family toward the throne, this whole mess could’ve been avoided. Perhaps Rhaenyra herself was unwise to refuse a marriage alliance with the younger Aegon when she had the chance, to unify the different potential claimants to the throne. Tawdry thought it would’ve been, it’s not much crazier than her marrying her ambitious and bloodthirsty uncle and Aegon marrying his full sister instead of half.
So far I’m still liking Acolyte over House of the Dragon, but they’re both entertaining me greatly. I’ve got a backlog of other stuff to write up that I’ll get to, but these are definitely the two things that are holding my attention right now. That said, it’s also worth noting that there was more to write up here because there’s a lot more tangled webs in here.
Here for it all.
Thanks for reading.
Musings of a Geekzer 