This episode is light on dragons, heavy on grown men scapegoating Alicent Hightower for their troubles.
Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO
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The less time Alicent Hightower spends in the company of men, the more she’s blamed for every bad fate that’s ever befallen them.
Down and out on the banks of the Blackwater, Ser Criston Cole waxes elegiac about his last remaining battle: the fight to be memorialized as the greatest warrior in the realm. “They will sing songs of it,” Ser Criston assures himself from behind a grim mask of mud and sweat and melancholy. Lost in the daydream, he further fantasizes that the earworm of his knightly sacrifice will be so overplayed that even his ex-girlfriend, locked up in the Red Keep, won’t avoid it — an awkward embellishment given that Criston is talking to Alicent’s brother.
In Harrenhal, Aemond is plagued by nightmares of his (not) dead brother dragging him to hell. When he wakes from the terrors, he complains that the problem isn’t really his guilty conscience tormenting him over his fratricide. The root problem is Mummy, who obviously preferred Aegon. Alys indulgently cradles Aemond to her bosom, and I swear if we get stuck in these dreary halls decoding the dreams of another adult male blond, I will throw myself into the Gods Eye.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Crownlands, Aegon complains to Larys that actually, if you think about it, the reason he didn’t succeed as Lord of the Seven Kingdoms is parental favoritism. The king loved Aemond best because he was a prodigy swordsman. The queen was devoted to her second son to compensate for him losing an eye — a face only a mother could love. This episode is light on dragons, heavy on grown men scapegoating Alicent Hightower for their troubles.
The irony is that Helaena, whom Alicent did choose to protect above her wicked sons, spends most of the episode rejecting the smothering help of her mother’s love. First, she refuses the carafe of Plan B that Alicent conspires to have the Grand Maester bring. Alicent implores her daughter to think of it as a remedy — abortion is health care — but Heleana insists on keeping her baby, who will surely be killed or abducted by the Black Queen. When Mysaria learns that the tonic has been delivered, Alicent drinks the sickening potion herself to throw the Mistress of Whispers off the scent.
The ruse won’t hold for long, particularly if Helaena keeps napping midday. With the Gold Cloaks distracted by roiling violence, Alicent arranges for mother and daughter to escape the Red Keep dressed as housemaids. An ungrateful Helaena stalls, wanting to know what will happen to Jaehaera. She can’t accept that the girl is safer without her.
It doesn’t matter in the end because Mysaria apprehends the women immediately. Intriguingly, though, she doesn’t report Alicent’s attempted escape — the first meaningful sign of fracture between Lady Misery and Rhaenyra. Perhaps she withholds the intel because Mysaria is seduced by Alicent’s dire depiction of life at court and what it takes to survive: the value of well-kept secrets, the sky-high cost of having nothing to barter. She reminds Mysaria of the cunning worm she used to be before she had Rhaenyra’s ear. The crown makes people dangerous and deceitful, Alicent warns. Hightowers are good allies.
If Mysaria can find them, that is. When the cats brought in to hunt the rats alert Helaena to the existence of a hidden door leading to a secret passage, even she understands it’s her last shot at freedom. In the dead of night, Alicent and Helaena leave their detention suite and follow the cramped tunnel until it reaches a dead end. They’ve also shut the panel at the other side of the passage, which means Alicent and Helaena end the episode trapped between dark, damp castle walls, a fitting metaphor for what it’s like to be a woman in the nested prisons of the Red Keep: caterpillars in an extravagant cage.
They’re not the only ones on Team Green to end the episode worse off. Oscar Tully and Roddy the Ruin complain they can’t cross the river to Tumbleton because Cole’s swift host keeps racing ahead and burning the bridges. (Until someone mentions the Stoney Sept, I assumed they were talking about the Mander, but they’re still north of the Rush — these guys are nowhere near Tumbleton!) Roddy suggests running the Winter Wolves at the Greens in full force, but Oscar is more cunning. He litters the route to the Stoney Sept river crossing with caltrops, which soon force the Greens off their horses and into the punishing forests.
Bushwhacking is slow work, and there are murmurs of desertion among the beleaguered men. As they lumber along, Gwayne and Criston confide in each other. Gwayne misses home and thinks Criston, a character with zero future, could be at home in Oldtown, too. But Criston has no appetite left for servitude, not in the name of dragons or gods or even Hightowers. When Gwayne tries to persuade him to give up harassing the Rivermen and head straight for Ormund, Criston doubles down. He opts for a more direct but even denser route to the river in the hopes he can somehow still overtake Tully. Men drop dead of exhaustion; Gwayne gets a leech. When they reach the Stoney Sept, they find the Rivermen have already crossed, destroying the bridge behind them.
“So we failed,” Gwayne says, again suggesting Tumbleton as a new destination. Gwayne does not understand Ser Criston or the depth of his despondency. That man is going to ford that river, and if he doesn’t succumb to the frigid waters, he’ll march straight in the direction of certain death. This is the war to end all of Criston’s personal wars. He is not interested in a new master in a new city with a new set of orders. As Gwayne abandons him, Criston sells the suicide mission to what’s left of his army as an appeal to honor and the Faith of the Seven. I wonder how his men would respond if they knew the truth: the fuel that powers Ser Criston is pure misogyny.
Alicent’s sons, on the other hand, each end the episode with a glimmer in the eye — their old, maniacal selves returning as their broken bodies heal. Let’s take Aemond first. No one knows where Vhagar’s fled, but the Kinslayer is still holed up at Harrenhal, unsure if he’s Alys’s patient or prisoner. Prisoner seems unlikely given how capably Alys scares away the bounty hunters. Plus she hasn’t turned in Aemond herself, despite the fact that the prize is the one thing she’s always wanted: Harrenhal. Aemond mostly sleeps and complains until the end of the episode, when he gets out of bed just in time to help Alys fight off Ironborn rapists come to kill him. He slays four raiders — men strong enough to free solo the castle’s vast southern wall — all while bleeding from the kidney. He’s baaaaack.
Because Aegon is fundamentally pathetic, his comeback can’t reach the heroic heights of his brother’s. At the beginning of this episode, as he chases after another supposed Vhagar sighting, Aegon is so defeated that he allows Larys the Clubfoot — LARYS! — to tear into him, calling him a whinger and a bore and a bad king and a terrible man. All valid observations that would have been punishable by death in season two. Instead, Aegon agrees to give up the bootless pursuit of revenge and sail to Essos, as Larys has been advocating all along.
The new holdup is Tyland Lannister (not RIP, it turns out). He comes back from the dead just in time to offer an alternative suggestion: Lannisport would obviously be a safer place for Aegon to lay low, free from the Braavos heat and the diuretic effects of a dates-based diet. In Rook’s Rest’s crowded city center, Larys and Tyland debate the issue way too loudly. Curious, Janos investigates the discarded bag that Larys usually keeps close and inside finds a crown of Valyrian steel. Janos confronts Aegon, who stabs him to death to keep his identity secret but also because he feels like it. As life drains from Janos’s eyes, Aegon gives a twisted smile. Inside that burnt husk of a king lives a childhood bully. If you add Daeron Hightower, who is now minting money that bears his visage, that brings us to three sons of Alicent who think they should rule Westeros.
The Blacks still have just the one claim going at the moment, but given how rocky a start Rhaenyra’s had since declaring herself queen, it might be wise to consider a backup option. And I suppose she has. Joffrey is finally recalled from the Vale, though Rhaenyra dodges her son, only visiting his room when she can be sure he is fast asleep. Later, Daemon tells her she’s blinded by vengeance, which perhaps explains her reluctance to mother again too. If Joff is here, then Jace is really dead. Grief is an iterative emotion; it finds new ways to hit you and you find new ways to process it — or, in her case, avoid it.
Unfortunately, a spree of cop killing in the capital means there’s no room for human emotion right now. Two Gold Cloaks turn up dead on the streets of Flea Bottom, their bowels and throats gruesomely slashed. Daemon assumes it’s retaliation for Ser Luthor’s violent hunting of the graffiti artists who slandered Rhaenyra’s sons on the city walls in “Tumbleton.” Though the queen orders Daemon to surveil the Riverlands for Vhagar, he insists on staying in town, where the bodies are piling up.
Four Gold Cloaks dead, then six. Daemon finds his wife in the Sept, humbling herself before the gods and the Faith, when she should be taking no shit. Why does Rhaenyra care about her heir’s perceived legitimacy? Her power is derived from her stable of dragons — the scorching breath of a half-dozen beasts. And while we’re at it, why does a woman with a mission to unite the kingdoms against an apocalyptic winter worry about what some disgruntled smallfolk — dudes with enough free time to grind minerals and plants into a paintlike substance — have to say about her sons? Daemon leaves Rhaenyra where he finds her: on her knees before hundreds of devotional candles, fizzing away like gnats in her ear.
Which means it’s up to the king consort to quell the mutinous City Watch, who are enraged by the murders and weeks of withheld wages. With much more brio than Ser Criston musters, Daemon rallies his men back to the guard, imploring them to remember the vows they took to keep the peace. The crown owes them money, yes, but there will be gold to spare when Dorne bends the knee. When the Seven Kingdoms become Twelve Kingdoms. When the Twelve Kingdoms become a new Valyria that bleeds into every corner of the old map. It’s not exactly refined to call upon men’s greed, but what else motivates world domination? Rhaenyra has an instinct to build; her husband thinks only to take. Manifest Daemon.
Finally, there’s a break in the Mysterious Case of the Slain Gold Cloaks. A man arrested on River Row confesses to the killings, which he carried out alone on behalf of the rightful king. He was even paid for his efforts — in shiny gold Daeron dollars. We’re treated to the squelchy scoop of an excised eyeball as Daemon half-blinds the man, then Luthor finishes him off. Daemon brings the ducat to Rhaenyra with a pointed message: This is what happens when you fail to burn down your enemy’s house. It’s astonishing that even in the face of dead comrades, he can still be so smug. A smirk is Daemon’s resting face.
Excessive self-confidence is an advantage when you play the game of thrones. How could a person dare enter the lethal fray without it? But Rhaenyra isn’t the only one struggling to see the whole board this week. The queen is blinded by grief and vengeance; her king is blinded by the immensity of his self-mythologizing. He can’t imagine an enemy he can’t vanquish in an afternoon. That night, Daemon goes to the Red Keep barracks to find it empty of Gold Cloaks. Have they deserted? Could they all be on patrol? He smells the dead before he sees their bodies, arranged behind a long table in a macabre Last Supper. The men’s eyes have been cut, and their intestines have been yanked from their bodies, piled like a buffet, with the words “A Feast for Traitors” painted on a nearby wall.
As Daemon confronts the awful tableau, it’s Ser Criston we hear. He’s name-checking the faces of God as he somberly urges his men into an unwinnable battle. There’s the Maiden, the Warrior, the Smith, and the Crone, who will light their way. The Mother and the Father. And last, the Stranger — the facelessness of death — who Criston promises will provide the rest their bodies crave.
Earlier in the episode, talking to Gwayne, Criston describes himself as at long last “clear-eyed” about the world and his place in it. Regardless of what the songs say, a soldier is doomed from the moment he first dons his armor. If blindness like Daemon’s is required for man to enter a war, then Criston’s quiet stand feels like its opposite. The recovery of sight. The dark understanding that there can be no winners.
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