In the history of Game of Thrones shows, the ninth episodes of each season are typically reserved for big-budget, action-packed set pieces and stunning, treacherous reversals of fortune–Ned Stark’s beheading, the Battle of the Blackwater, the Red Wedding, the Battle of the Bastards. In this penultimate episode of its first season, House of the Dragon subverted those expectations by delivering—explosive ending notwithstanding—a slow-burn episode of growing tensions, two-hander scenes between close allies with fracturing relationships, and a blow-by-blow account of the first twenty-four hours of a coup. We’ll be diving into how this complicated thriller of an episode deviates in both large and small ways from Fire & Blood’s fictional history while still paying homage to its core moments. Spoilers below the break…
Updated Main Titles
The main titles now reflect the death of King Viserys, with his metal dial filling with blood and pouring down into Alicent’s (Olivia Cooke) dial—a golden flame set into a seven-pointed star that crowns the Hightower sigil and is ringed with Hightower green. Oddly enough, we see Alicent’s bloodline take one detour that seems to represent her father (Rhys Ifans), with his Hand of the King symbol of office before it empties into the sigils for her three adult children: Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), represented by his vices in the form of a wine goblet whose stem is a nude, kneeling woman; Helaena (Phia Saban), represented by the spiders she is so fascinated by; and Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), represented by a sapphire. In the novel, rather than wearing an eye-patch, Aemond places a large sapphire into his empty eye socket. Aegon and Helaena’s bloodlines flow together into three separate dials representing their three toddler-aged children: Jaehaerys, Jaehaera, and Maelor. Elsewhere, Daemon’s (Matt Smith) piece now flows together with Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’Arcy). Separate bloodstreams for Rhaenyra’s children with Harwin Strong and Daemon’s children with Laena Velaryon are sidelined for their two children together, Aegon and Viserys.
The Title
“The Green Council” refers to Viserys’ small council just after his death—made up of his hand, Ser Otto Hightower; his widow, Queen Alicent; the Master of Ships, Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall, who also plays Tyland’s profligate twin, Jason); the Master of Laws, Jasper Wylde–called “Ironrod” (Paul Kennedy); Grand Maester Orwyle (Kurt Egyiawan); and Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) who, in Martin’s original texts is already Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.
In Fire & Blood, the Green Council’s calculated, underhanded corruption culminates in the coup which leads to the Targaryen internecine succession crisis called “the Dance of the Dragons.” The show, however, makes the Green Council a far more fractured and complex affair. In his book, Martin portrays Otto and Alicent as being essentially of the same mind about the need to depose Rhaenyra and crown Aegon. Showrunners Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal portray Alicent as trying to walk a middle ground, convinced that Viserys wanted Aegon to be king but shocked and dismayed that her father and other members of the small council have been planning the coup for a long time. Much of the episode that follows is a race against time where Ser Criston and Aemond attempt to find Aegon and bring him into the Queen’s custody, while twin Kingsguard members, Ser Arryk (Luke Titensor) and Ser Erryk Cargyll (Elliot Tittensor), try to deliver him to Otto.
All in all, “The Green Council” as an episode is an exercise in making the audience question whether or not a Green Council, the political faction, really exists. At the outset of this section of Fire & Blood, Alicent, Ser Criston, Otto, and Larys Strong are an established hegemonic block that share the same goals. But here, they are a roiling mass of plots and counterplots as unsavory as Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) touching himself while staring at the Queen’s feet and offering, in short order, to report on her to her father. The show continues to do excellent work in making Alicent Hightower a conflicted and tragic figure caught between her own ambition, her loyalty to the patriarchy, and her too-late realization that she has been carelessly and cruelly misused by the men in her life. She is many things, but she is never merely her father’s catspaw.
Unreliable Narrators: The Green Coup
George R.R. Martin’s 2013 novella, The Princess and the Queen, begins—after a brief preamble about the historical period in general—with the following paragraph, one of the few ported over, wholesale, to Fire & Blood, five years later:
Long simmering, the conflict burst into the open on the third day of third moon of 129 AC, when the ailing, bedridden King Viserys I Targaryen closed his eyes for a nap in the Red Keep of King’s Landing, and died without waking. His body was discovered by a serving man at the hour of the bat, when it was the king’s custom to take a cup of hippocras. The servant ran to inform Queen Alicent, whose apartments were on the floor below the king’s.
This episode begins with precisely that moment, meaning that the series and its central concern really begins in earnest with this entry. The show, however, always interested in complicating Fire & Blood’s birds-eye point of view of history, deviates ever so slightly by having the unnamed serving man (here portrayed by a small boy) go, not to the Queen, but to her lady’s maid Talya (Alexis Raben, who is the wife of showrunner Miguel Sapochnik). This is significant insofar as we previously have been shown that Talya reports to the White Worm, Lady Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), the sex worker-turned-information broker who kidnaps Aegon. By having the extra link in the chain of information, the events of most of the episode are set in motion, as neither the novella nor Blood & Fire touch on Aegon being held captive by Mysaria.
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The Keeper’s Six
The episode is full of little departures from Martin’s original, sometimes clarifying one of the conflicting accounts presented by Archmaester Gyldayn, sometimes combining them, and sometimes sowing more doubt. For example, in The Princess and the Queen, Lyman Beesbury (Bill Paterson—Fleabag’s father on Fleabag!) does die as a result of speaking out against Aegon’s claim, but it is because Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) slits his throat after he delivers his argument. In Fire & Blood, Gyldayn offers two other possibilities: that he was defenestrated by Ser Criston, or else that he was taken to the dungeons where he caught a chill and passed a few weeks later. House of the Dragon chooses to answer the question of exactly how Lord Beesbury meets his end, but makes the motivations behind it far less legible. Here, Criston Cole forces Beesbury back into his chair with such force that Lord Lyman slams his head into his orb of office, cracking his skull. The possibilities that Gyldayn offers painted Beesbury’s death as either deliberate and malicious or else completely accidentally and unanticipated. The show leaves us wondering: did Ser Criston intend to kill him or was it merely an act of carelessness?
Similarly, Gyldayn’s two sources both agree that Prince Aegon was found with a mistress on the night of his father’s death, but the pious Septon Eustace proclaims it was the well-cared-for daughter of a wealthy merchant while the salacious court fool, Mushroom, insists it was an underage girl who performed obscene acts upon him while he watched two feral children fight for his pleasure. The show excises the bit about the mistress but turns the most horrifying part of Mushroom’s oft-embellished text into a reality where there is an entire feral-child fighting ring in the depths of Flea Bottom. The show, again, errs on the side of uncomfortable moral ambiguity: Aegon did not command the children to fight for his pleasure (as Mushroom insists) but he is a regular patron of King’s Landing’s most horrifying bloodsport and, perhaps, has even left a bastard child behind as a future competitor.
Perhaps the most dynamic change in the events of this episode, however, is the escape of Rhaenys Velaryon (Eve Best), whose dramatic showdown with the Greens from dragonback is wholly an invention of the show. The Queen That Never Was is safe on Driftmark during the Green Council’s coup in Fire & Blood, which means that there is nothing in the text about her secret escape, her presence at the coronation, or Meleys bursting from the bowels of the Dragonpit. Keeping her in King’s Landing gives us both that spectacular ending and her conversation with Alicent in which Rhaenys translates the subtext of Alicent’s tragic loyalty to the patriarchy into text. The show has been quite adept at altering its source material in order to better serve its characters—we will see if that trend continues through the end of this season and beyond.
Odds and Ends
Ser Harrold Westerling
The meeting of the Green Council also features the baring of steel between Lord Commander Harrold Westerling (Graham McTavish) and Ser Criston Cole. By this time in Fire & Blood, Ser Harrold has long since passed of old age, giving Ser Criston carte blanche as Lord Commander. I have no idea what the show has planned for Ser Harrold—but surely they would not have cast the venerable McTavish if they didn’t plan on having him do something memorable before he makes his exit.
Little Vignettes Amidst the Coup
In Fire & Blood, twin Kingsguard knights, Ser Arryk and Ser Erryk Cargyll, are already separated, with the former serving on the Kingsguard in King’s Landing and the latter serving the heir apparent, Rhaenyra, on Dragonstone. The show uses the episode as an opportunity to show their growing distance, with Erryk trying to convince his brother that Aegon is unfit to rule before eventually giving up on trying to sway him, instead attempting to spirit Rhaenys out of King’s Landing.
The episode also gives us a few scenes of internal struggle with Allun Caswell (Paul Hickey) who is a footnote in the novel as one of the first Lords, loyal to Rhaenyra, to be killed by the Green Council. Here he becomes a small point of audience identification for how the minor nobility of King’s Landing try to navigate the ever-shifting political landscape.
Familiar Leitmotifs
There has been plenty of criticism over the choice to reuse Ramin Djawadi’s iconic theme from Game of Thrones, which now serves, unaltered, as the opening music for House of the Dragon. I will say that I would have preferred some sort of thematic riff on that particular track, but otherwise the show has not lacked for impressive attention to musical detail. Two weeks ago, Aemond’s first flight on Vhagar contained a bit of Daenerys’ leitmotif, right at the moment that the rider gets the hang of flying. Tonight, as Aegon entered the Dragonpit for his coronation, the heralds played a riff on their fanfare trumpets that referenced the theme reserved for the King’s procession in the original Game of Thrones and can be heard, most prominently in “The King’s Arrival” and “The Throne is Mine.” Those little auditory details work wonderfully to create a continuity between the shows that bring the larger world to life.
***
“The Green Council” continues the upward trajectory of great episodes at the tail end of this inaugural season. By giving the uniformly excellent cast plenty of time to engage in quiet, portentous moments and conversations, the show is lending a necessary weight and complexity to the thin characterization that Martin’s source material—with its historical distance and a narrator plagued by a desire for objectivity—demands. It also proves that it can give us the grand spectacle that the early seasons of Game of Thrones attempted but did not quite have the budget to fully capture. Rhaenys, astride Meleys, the Red Queen, facing down the Green Council before choosing to spare them is as iconic an image as any we’ve seen in either show, and feels like it may be the first of many more.
But what did you think? Were you drawn in by the series of two-person scenes, reflecting on the nature of family and power? Are you eagerly anticipating the finale next week? Book readers, though I encourage you not to spoil anything, are you as excited as I am by the trailer for next week’s episode and the events that seem to be taking place in it? Let me know in the comments below!
Tyler Dean is a professor of Victorian Gothic Literature. He holds a doctorate from the University of California Irvine and teaches at a handful of Southern California colleges. He is the author of “Distended Youth: Arrested Development in the Victorian Novel” and his article “Exhuming M. Paul: Carmen Maria Machado and Creating Space for Pedagogical Discomfort” appears in the most recent issue of Victorian Studies. He is one half of the Lincoln & Welles podcast available on iTunes or through your favorite podcatcher. His fantastical bestiary can be found on Facebook at @presumptivebestiary.
