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[COLUMN] In House of the Dragon's Second Season Premiere, the Smallfolk Have a Big Impact | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-06-17 14:00:17 +0000 UTC
Note: This piece contains spoilers for the second season premiere of House of the Dragon.
In “A Son for Son”, the second season premiere of House of the Dragon, King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) is petitioned by his subjects. Shepherds worry about the requisition of their sheep to feed dragons, while ironmongers admit that they cannot survive on the promise of payment upon fulfilment of the crown’s order. Aegon is not the most wise or strategic of decision-makers, often rushing to appease his subjects rather than make the tough choice.
“Our victory depends on the efforts of the smallfolk,” he assures the assembled crowd. This turns out to be more true than the King might realize. One of the more interesting aspects of the first season of House of Dragon was how insular it felt. Structurally, the season more closely resembled The Crown than Game of Thrones, with each episode built around a specific event in the history of House Targaryen: a royal hunt, a royal wedding, a royal funeral, and so on.
This lent the show a sort of Shakespearean feel, the study of these great figures caught in titanic struggles over the crown. It was a lurid soap opera, grand allegory and a study of power all thrown into a blender. However, there was also a curious (and often deliberate) absence from that first season. Allowing for the character of sex worker Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), the common people – “the smallfolk” – were almost entirely absent from the season.
Game of Thrones was a show about power. Part of that study of power involved contrasting the political jockeying of Westerosi royalty with the day-to-day lives of their subjects. The show often acknowledged that the ruling class enjoyed a very sheltered and comfortable existence compared to the continent’s average inhabitant. Game of Thrones explored this in a number of ways, through Arya Stark’s (Maisie Williams) journeys or the High Sparrow’s (Jonathan Pryce) plotting.
In contrast, House of the Dragon has remained very tightly focused on the members of House Targaryen and the nobility caught in their immediate gravity. This is obvious even looking at the early episodes of the first season, where the mysterious Crabfeeder (Daniel Scott-Smith) waged a brutal and extended war for control of the Stepstones that unfolded almost entirely off-screen, save for the Crabfeeder’s death at the hands of Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith).
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It was a very obvious way to differentiate House of the Dragon from Game of Thrones. After all, despite sharing the same theme music, the two shows should feel different from one another. Indeed, there is a reasonable argument to be made that House of the Dragon could hypothetically have found a way to make its core thematic point about the folly of all this royal scheming and jockeying by emphasizing the absence of common people.
However, “A Son for a Son” suggests that the production team are mindful of the absence of the smallfolk from the first season of House of the Dragon. The episode repeatedly goes out of its way to foreground these often marginalized figures, to undermine and interrogate the notion that these subjects exist as little more than pawns for rulers to move across the board at their whim. “A Son for a Son” suggests that Westerosi royalty depend on commoners far more than they realize.
The show’s first season began with an exposition-filled voiceover from Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), explaining the history of House Targaryen. It was ultimately very romantic and self-serving. It offered a self-mythologizing history of the dynasty, with Rhaenyra concluding that “the only thing that could tear down the House of the Dragon was itself.” It is very self-aggrandizing, and it does not conceive of a world outside House Targaryen.
In contrast, the second season opens with an extended voiceover monologue from somebody outside the House of the Dragon, Lord Cregan Stark (Tom Taylor). However, he is not extolling the virtues of either House Targaryen or House Stark. Instead, he speaks more generally. “Duty is sacrifice,” Stark explains. “It eclipses all things, even blood. All men of honor must pay its price.” It’s an argument that immediately suggests a perspective outside the Red Keep or the Dragonstone.
Lord Cregan Stark is being petitioned by Prince Jacaerys Velaryon (Harry Collett), who is petitioning House Stark to support his mother, Princess Rhaenyra, in the looming battle for the throne. Stark eventually volunteers some older soldiers to the cause, but he makes a broader argument that the realm is best served by keeping the bulk of his forces in the North, supporting the Night’s Watch and protecting Westeros against external threats. Stark genuinely believes in duty, above all else.
This idea of “duty” comes back later in the episode. “A Son for a Son” takes place in a lull in the conflict, as both sides prepare for battle in the aftermath of the death of Princess Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) at the hands of Aegon’s brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell). Dragons and ships patrol the skies, but they also rest while awaiting conflict. As Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) advises Daemon, this is the opportunity to “gorge and rest.”
Rhaenys’ husband, Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), prepares his fleet for battle. His crew scrapes the barnacles off the hull. He takes the opportunity to talk with Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim), who serves on his ship. Corlys recalls the time that he was thrown overboard during the war against the Crabfeeder. “They tell me that you’re the one who pulled my body out of the sea,” Corlys states. “It was only my duty,” Alyn responds. Nevertheless, Coryls replies, “I am indebted to you, Alyn.”
“A Son for a Son” captures the sense in which, as House Targaryen marches to war, it is no longer as insulated from the smallfolk as it might have been a few years earlier. Royalty can scheme and plot amongst itself, but warfare requires armies and subjects. Indeed, “A Son for a Son” suggests that these subjects hold much greater influence over the lives of kings and queens, princesses and lords, than those royal leaders would like to admit.
This becomes very apparent at the climax of the episode. While Rhaenyra remains immobilized by grief, unwilling to commit to warfare even after the loss of her son, Daemon decides that it is time for action. Daemon vows that Rhaenyra will have revenge on her old friend, Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke). He will murder Aemond to balance the scales for Lucerys. It’s Daemon’s vow of “a son for a son” that gives the episode its title.
With Mysaria’s assistance, Daemon smuggles himself into King’s Landing and concocts a plan. He hires Blood (Sam C. Wilson), a former member of the city watch, to sneak into the Red Keep and commit the grizzly act. Blood enlists the assistance of a ratcatcher named Cheese (Mark Stobbart), who knows the layout and the workings of the palace. The two men are to murder Aemond and return with his head as proof.
Blood and Cheese are literally anonymous. They are nobodies. They belong to no noble house. Their names are never revealed in the pages of Fire and Blood, the book that inspired House of the Dragon. Indeed, this understanding is baked into the plan itself. Cheese is able to sneak Blood into the Red Keep because nobody in the castle looks twice at the servants. They are beneath notice. Ironically, Blood and Cheese will ultimately radically alter the course of Westerosi history.
Blood and Cheese are unable to find Aemond. Instead, they find their way to the royal bedchamber, where Aegon’s wife, Queen Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban), tends to their children, Jaehaerys and Maelor. Unwilling to return to Daemon empty-handed, and taking his pledge of “a son for a son” rather literally, the pair make the decision to murder one of the Targaryen heirs. Blood brutally dismembers Jaehaerys, in one of the show’s most visceral and unsettling sequences.
It's worth acknowledging that the show has made an interesting adaptational choice in the murder of Jaehaerys Targaryen. In the source material, Daemon specifically and explicitly hired Blood and Cheese to murder Aegon’s children rather than Aemond. In the show, the death of Jaehaerys is the result of a tragic misunderstanding: a choice made by Blood in the heat of the moment based upon his interpretation of Daemon’s instructions.
There is, perhaps, a cynical motive for this change. Similar to the first season’s revisions to the nature of the relationship between Daemon and Rhaenyra, this choice allows the audience to retain some measure of sympathy for Daemon Targaryen. Of course, Daemon still sets in motion the chain of events that lead to Jaeherys’ death, but he has some plausible deniability. “A Son for a Son” makes Daemon appear reckless rather than truly monstrous. It softens him significantly.
At the same time, just like Alyn’s rescue of Corlys, this change also underscores that idea that Aegon was more correct than he realized when he stated that the realm’s royalty depended on the common people. Jaeherys’ death seems certain to escalate the conflict between the two factions within House Targaryen, but it wasn’t an action that derived directly from the choice of any member of the family. Instead, it was a decision made in a state of panicked confusion by a person whose name is forgotten to history.
In its second season, House of the Dragon suggests the fate of great houses is often set in motion by smallfolk.
