In the newest House of the Dragon episode on HBO, Alicent makes moves against Rhaenyra Targaryen, dragging Rhaenys, Aegon, and Aemond into the messy process of the Dance of the Dragons.
“Without our dragons, we’re just like everyone else,” a young Rhaenyra told her father, King Viserys (Paddy Considine), in the series premiere of House of the Dragon. For Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best), locked in her apartments in the Red Keep as the Greens fight among themselves to decide the succession, a simple oaken door proves her cousin’s insight trenchant. “The Green Council,” season 1’s penultimate episode, places its focus precisely on the little things on which great events hinge, and it’s a richer hour for it.
The everyday takes on tremendous significance as crisis grips King’s Landing in the wake of Viserys’ death, tiny quirks of logistics becoming matters of life or death in the space of a single night. Who knows how Prince Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) spends his evenings? Who’s outside the door and who’s behind it? Which servant is listening to which conversation? Without Viserys to stabilize all these opposing forces, the slightest imbalance trips a landslide of conflicting plots and counterplots. Even as Alicent (Olivia Cooke) relays Viserys’ delirious last words as proof he wanted his eldest son, Aegon, crowned upon his death, she begins to realize that her husband’s small council has been plotting treason for what seems like years. When bumbling Lord Beesbury (Bill Paterson) rails against his fellow councilors, Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) inadvertently murders him while trying to force him to take his seat.
It’s the little jade marble Beesbury set into his socket at the table that deals the fatal blow, another example of the inescapability of life’s most mundane features. Had it not been there, he might have lived to take the black. Had Ser Arryk (Luke Tittensor) not known of Prince Aegon’s proclivity for watching orphan children with filed teeth and nails fight in grudge matches, he and his twin, Ser Erryk (Elliott Tittensor), might never have run across the Lady Mysaria’s network of spies.
