The king is dead! At long last, the king is dead. In House of the Dragon, HBO’s slow-building Game of Thrones prequel, Viserys finally succumbs to the leprotic illness that cost him fingers and toes, half of his face and who knows what more over the course of his reign. Is all of Westeros worse off without him? Absolutely. He may have been a broken, sentimental man, but at least he was a man. It’s a qualification that – when reinforced with a rumbling of dragons – is enough to rest a fictional continent’s whole peace on. But for the sake of House of the Dragon’s dramatic potential, the diminished king’s death couldn’t have arrived soon enough.
In the dying moments of Sunday night’s finale, the series shoves its steely heroine Rhaenyra to her breaking point, thereby ending a season of TV that mostly served as prologue. With her claim to the throne usurped by her sloppy cousin Aegon (a puppet of Rhaenyra’s conniving stepmom-slash-ex-bestie Alicent), she had sent her sons on a mission to shore up support. Her youngest, “four-and-ten-year-old” Luke, never makes it home. His weedy dragon Arrax is no match for that of his evil cyclops cousin Aemond – Vhagar is the LeBron of dragons. It doesn’t matter that it was all an accident; that Aemond lost control of Vhagar; that he only intended to scare Luke and not to kill him. It’s likely, with Aemond’s vicious pride, that no one will ever know the truth.
