‘House Of The Dragon’ offers up one of its best episodes yet in ‘Driftmark.’
“History does not remember blood. It remembers names.” ~ Ser Corlys Velaryon
The seventh episode of House Of The Dragon has a little bit of everything:
I have to say, in many ways this episode really elevated the show to all new heights for me. This was a hauntingly beautiful episode, from the dragon-riding to the love-making to the many shots of Driftmark at dusk, sea and sand and spray. The same color as grief.
In Driftmark, several very important events take place. We open to a funeral. King Viserys (Paddy Considine) and Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) have traveled to Driftmark along with the King’s new Hand, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) who has his old job back now that Lyonel Strong is dead. As the king says to Daemon (Matt Smith) the years have a way of mending old divisions.
Coryls Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) and his wife Rhaenys (Eve Best) are in mourning, as are Daemon’s daughters and Laena’s uncle, who performs the service. At one point he says something about how Velaryon blood is old and must remain pure, at which point Daemon giggles—a deeply inappropriate response at his late wife’s funeral, but nobody pays him much mind. Nobody is surprised by Daemon’s antics anymore. Laena’s body is encased in a stone coffin which they push into the sea. Targaryen’s are burned; Velaryons are entombed in saltwater.
Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) stares at Alicent as everyone mills about after the ceremony.
The funeral ends and everyone makes their way to bed or elsewhere. Young Aegon is drunk and is scolded and sent to bed by his irritable grandfather, the Hand. The younger children head to bed. Laenor (John MacMillan) is so distraught over his sister’s passing that he wanders out into the ocean. His father angrily tells his lover to go fetch him back.
Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) goes on a walk across the beach with her uncle. She’s not happy with him. “You abandoned me,” she tells him, asking him to imagine what her life has been like all these years since he’s been gone. “I spared you,” he tells her. She was just a child back then.
Well she’s not a child anymore and she let’s him know as much, her hand on his chest, their lips touching. Soon the two have made their way into the ribcage of an ancient shipwreck, slowly peeling one another’s clothes off.
Of the children, only one has avoided bedtime. Aemond hears the sound of wings high above and goes searching. As we learned last week, he still has no dragon of his own and this fact has made him the subject of mockery and bullying from his brother and Rhaenyra’s children.
He follows the sounds out into the dunes and finally comes upon the slumbering behemoth: Vhagar, Laena’s old dragon, but much more than that. Vhagar was Visenya’s dragon, one of the three that Aegon the Conqueror used to subdue the Seven Kingdoms well over 100 years ago. Vhagar is massive and ancient and perhaps more deadly than any dragon alive. Only Belarion the Black Dread was bigger, and by now Vhagar has grown nearly as large.
Aemond approaches the sleep dragon and reaches his hand up to the rope ladder hanging down from its massive frame.
