SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers from the Season 2 premiere of HBO’s “House of the Dragon.”
After closing Season 1 with the swift and shocking death of a child — Rhaenyra Targaryen’s (Emma D’Arcy) son Lucerys Velaryon — “House of the Dragon” opened its second with a series of grief-driven choices and insidious plans that led to the most gruesome murder of another child: Jaehaerys Targaryen, the grandson of Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke).
The toddler Jaehaerys, the son of King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Queen Helaena (Phia Saban), is killed in his bed by two men nicknamed “Blood and Cheese,” one a hulking former member of the City Watch and the other the royal rat catcher. The pair sneak into the palace under commission from Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) to find and kill Aemond Targareyn (Ewan Mitchell) in order to get the revenge Rhaenyra wants for Aemond’s role in Luke’s death.
Jaehaerys is killed instead when Blood and Cheese cannot find Aemond, and happen upon Queen Helaena and her two sleeping twins — a boy and a girl — and demand to know which one is the male, because they believe that will satisfy the “son for a son” portion of the death Daemon requested. Helaena points to her son, and then runs off with her daugther, Jaehaera, to the safety of her mother Alicent’s room. There, she finds Alicent sleeping with Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel).
This entire Blood and Cheese death sequence differs in multiple ways from the heinous act committed in George R.R. Martin’s book “Fire & Blood,” the “Game of Thrones” universe book that tells the fictional history of the Targaryen family and serves as the source material for “House of the Dragon.”
In “Fire & Blood,” Jaehaerys is still killed by Blood and Cheese. But in the book, the “historians” of Westeros say the men were not explicitly commissioned by Daemon Targaryen to kill Aemond like they are on “House of the Dragon,” but rather just given the orders “an eye for an eye, a son for a son.”
Also in the history book: Rhaenyra does not call for Aemond’s death; the murder of Jaehaerys takes place in Alicent’s bedroom, not in Helaena’s, where Blood and Cheese tie Alicent down and use her as bait waiting for Helaena and the children to come in and say goodnight. Additionally, rather than point at Jaehaerys to show he is the boy and effectively select his death, Helaena picks her youngest son, Maelor, to die, hoping Blood and Cheese will spare Jaehaerys. But they kill Jaehaerys anyway.
“One of the things that’s challenging about adapting ‘Fire & Blood’ is that there is this intentionally conflicting narrative in the book where there are often these three different viewpoints on the history that don’t line up with one another,” “House of the Dragon” showrunner Ryan Condal says. “So it’s our job as adapters to try to find the objective line through this to bring the audience into the narrative as we see it having been laid out.”
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Starting with the change of having Rhaenyra call for Aemond’s blood, Condal says: “It felt like Rhaenyra, despite being in grief, she’s looking for vengeance, but she would choose a target that would have some kind of strategic or military advantage. Of course, if you did take out Aemond, not only would he be punished directly for his betrayal and murder of Luke, but it would eliminate the rider of the biggest dragon in the world, and immediately create an advantage for their side.”
“Rhaenyra lets her rage take hold of her voice, and I think it’s not something that we saw a huge amount of — certainly with the older Rhaenyra — in Season 1,” D’Arcy says. “She was always trying to mediate that fire. And in this season, after Luc’s death, she finally let’s that thing burn.”
Condal says the elimination of Helaena’s choice between Maelor and Jaehaerys “just doesn’t exist in this version of the story yet,” because time had to be compressed in Season 1 in such a way that Helaena and Aegon’s children, as well as Daemon and Rhaenyra’s youngest children, are “younger in this part of the narrative than they were in the original book.”
For Helaena actor Phia Saban, the elimination of the character in this “Blood and Cheese” equation, and the fact Helaena points directly at Jaehaerys, leading to his death, is “almost more heartbreaking.”
“There’s something about the fact that she can’t escape the fact that she said, ‘Yes, that one,’ and that weighs on her so much,” Saban says. “But I also think she really felt that she had no option because I think that the stakes are that high — it’s the highest stakes in her existence — and so when he says to her, ‘You tell me the right one, or I’m gonna do terrible things to your children,’ she believes him. She’s like, I can’t mess this up, I need to be completely honest. And I think it’s actually more heartbreaking that she’s honest.”
Condal decided the death would play out audibly in the shadows and visually on Helaena’s face, rather than show the act itself on screen. It was, he says, “a subject of some debate” in the writers’ room.
“We knew it would be horrifying and brutal — we didn’t want it to be gratuitous or over the top,” Condal says. “The idea of that sequence was to dramatize a heist gone wrong. So we move off the center narrative of Daemon, Rhaenyra, Alicent and Aegon’s world, and suddenly, we’re following these two characters that we’ve just met in an alley in Flea Bottom. Daemon’s given them an assignment to go in and find Aemond Targaryen, and we’re following them, and we’re following them, and we’re not cutting away and we’re not going back to the other narratives — oh, God, what’s going to happen?”
The idea, Condal says, is: “Now suddenly we’re in Helaena’s subjective point of view — we follow these two guys, and then we come into her world and see how it lands on her, and feeling her experience through it.”
“Yes, it’s a little child, and it’s awful. But because we don’t really know Jaehaerys as a point-of-view character, it made more sense to experience that terrible event through Helaena’s eyes,” Condal adds. “You instinctually know what’s happening off screen, but I think it’s the emotional grip of experiencing that through Helaena’s eyes that really gets me still, and I’ve seen it 100 times.”
Then there is the significant difference about where the murder takes place — with Alicent not witnessing the death of her grandchild, and instead being in bed with Criston Cole when he is slaughtered.
“It adds a level of shame and guilt that is different to anything that Alicent has ever experienced before, by being indisposed with the head of the Kingsguard who should have been on duty to make sure that the castle was on lock,” Cooke says. “That’s a theme that plays throughout the season: If they hadn’t embarked on this affair, would this have happened? They hold themselves accountable completely.”
While the premiere ends in tragedy, and promises of darker days to come, it opens with a bit of fan service: “House of the Dragon’s” first look at the North, the home of Jon Snow and the Stark family, from the original “Game of Thrones.”
“That was a big moment in the book, and who doesn’t want to go see Winterfell again?” Condal asks rhetorically. “I thought it would be a great treat for the fans. We haven’t seen the North since the original series, and that was many, many years away. But we didn’t want to go there without a reason.”
The specific reason in this case was to introduce the character Cregan Stark (played by Tom Taylor) and his friendship with Rhaenyra’s eldest son Jacaerys Velaryon (Harry Collett), just before Jace learns of his brother Luc’s death.
“I try not to do things that are simply because we like to,” Condal says. “But that sequence is really the last place where this awful news has not yet rung out, because the North is so far away. So we start with the raven who’s carrying the news of Luc’s death all the way up to the north. And we see Jace in this last pure moment where, in his mind, at least, his brother’s still alive.”
Condal notes it is additionally meant to show the world of Westeros is bigger than this warring family down south.
“It’s also expanding the scope of the world, and reminding people that there are more places here than Dragonstone and King’s Landing — and that the North has a major stake in what’s to come,” Condal says. “There’s a wall up there, and there’s great power that exists beyond the wall that’s going to maybe not affect the characters in this time period, but will in Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow’s timeline.”
Michaela Zee contributed to this story.
