 That's the line! I'm not trying to say like, oh damn it's secretly this tall. I would like to see more scheming and less screaming. Okay, I would like to know why. Like, what convinced him? People are more complicated than that. House of the Dragon, episode seven. This episode felt just so iconic to me, by which I mean it just, I don't, I don't mean to say that it is iconic necessarily, but it felt iconic. And there's a few reasons for this, I think. One of the biggest reasons, so that's what I'm just going to talk about at first. As usual, I have divided my notes into sections, but I just wanted to open my time up. How many trailer lines we got in this episode? And every time one hit, it's kind of like when you watch The Sixth Sense and Haley Joelzman says you can see dead people, you're like, that's the line! So we had three that I clocked. There might be more, so let me know. From Coralus of Alarion we got two, and from Auto Hightower we got one. And these lines didn't just feel iconic because they're from the trailer, but they feel a little bit altogether, all three of them do feel a little bit like the thesis of the show, if there is one. Anyway, so those, if you missed them somehow, those were Coralus of Alarion saying what is this brief mortal life if not the pursuit of a legacy? Coralus of Alarion shortly thereafter says that history does not remember blood, it remembers names. And then we have Auto Hightower speaking to Allison and saying we play an ugly game, you have the determination to win it. Which are three really, really excellent lines. I mean, I can see they were chosen for the trailer because they are so, they have a feeling of being iconic and they are such a good encapsulation of the themes of the show. So anyway, I just enjoyed those moments. I was the Leonardo DiCaprio meme going, that's the line! Okay, so episode seven, it did have a lot going on. As usual, these episodes are quite cramped. There is no dead weight in these episodes. As usual, my notes don't really have hard dividing lines, but I've kind of divided them between sort of like, there's a lot of like sort of group moments in the show, so I've kind of talked about them as a separate section where like this scene I unpack. And they also have separate notes about like specific characters and what kind of goes on with them for the whole episode. That's kind of what I'm doing here. So let's start out by talking about the funeral scene, which the funeral scene kind of felt like an interesting paralleling or an interesting echo of the wedding scene. So in the wedding scene, I talked about how despite my problems with kind of how that scene ends, how brilliant it was, the way that we sort of had Viserys sitting there and kind of oblivious to the turmoil around him, turmoil that is at least in part caused by his either actions or in actions. So here at the funeral, we saw something a little bit similar in that we see a lot of those same characters that were at the wedding, sort of a reunion of that guest list. Obviously some people absent, the Lena, the person they're there to mourn, as well as Harwin obviously, because he died in the previous episode, and Viserys kind of again oblivious to all the tensions around him. During the funeral, we once again just see a lot of efficient storytelling, like there's so many characters and so many dynamics and so many things that happen to happen kind of off screen, just kind of move things along. So we don't waste a lot of time establishing that Otto High Tower is the Hand of the King, we just quickly show the pin and we're like, he's Hand of the King again, don't need any more, they just trust the audience, we got it, we saw the pin, we know what's up. We see an interesting echoing or paralleling, not for something that happened in House of the Dragon but for Game of Thrones. The episode does this quite a few times and it's not super aggressive and overt but it's there in a way that it feels more like history repeating itself kind of feeling. So Otto High Tower is once again Hand of the King and we get this scene where he finds Aegon, who a lot of people have already compared to Joffrey, with, understandably so, drunk and sitting by himself and Otto is very Tywin Lannister about going and kind of manhandling his royal grandson, like the one person that doesn't have to take any shit and like has his own schemes and plans and is more of a force to be reckoned with than this kind of like pathetic royal princeling. Later on in the episode we also kind of, the dynamic between Otto High Tower and Allicent is a little bit similar to Tywin and Cersei, although Otto seems more supportive of Allicent than Tywin is of Cersei. I really enjoyed how during the funeral scene we saw a kind of huge variety of how grief manifests itself kind of all going on at the same time and again they didn't belabor that point or overdo it at all but there was just like so many different kind of reactions to the death of Laina that we got to see there and I just enjoyed again the variety because there's there's a very I feel like bad writing will just say you know death equals sad and insult equals mad you know it's very like one note very very simple but like grief is complex humans are complex not everyone responds to death in the exact same way so seeing how the kids are dealing with seeing how Damon's dealing with it seeing how her parents are dealing with it seeing how Allicent doesn't care I just I thought that was very very well handled it felt like a very rich scene again similar to the wedding where there's just like so much going on both emotionally and politically between everybody who's present there. I did kind of break my heart when Coralus was talking to his grandson and telling him how he's gonna inherit Drift Mark and he says he doesn't want it which I'm not gonna lie I did laugh at first because it just reminded me of Jon Snow saying I don't want it but when he explained that he doesn't want to inherit Drift Mark because if he's inherited it that means everyone's dead that broke my heart. Damon does laugh a bit during the sort of funeral right but you do get the sense that he's not like he doesn't not care at all that Laina's dead it does seem to bother him that like he is grieving at least a little bit I'm not trying to say like oh Damon secretly is tofty I'm not saying that but like you know again people are more complicated than that I think the way he feels about Laina is quite different from how he felt about his first wife I mean he we saw like he did care about her she wasn't nothing to him he care I'm very sad that they cut the scene of him in the previous episode um holding hugging his daughters after Laina dies um so since they cut that scene it would have been nice to see him kind of grieving with his daughters here at the funeral but they maybe they cut that scene as well maybe they did originally have that but nevertheless even though they cut these softer sides of Damon from the show it still does seem like he's bothered that she's dead it doesn't she doesn't mean nothing to him and later when he's talking to Rainier about her too you know like he's not flippant about it he's like you know he's not gonna say that he was in love with her or anything like that because that would not be true but she wasn't nothing to him it was a bit strange to me um maybe you can explain it to me why Coralus Velaryon has such a big problem with Lainor um going out to the sea to grieve his sister that reaction seemed if a bit you know emotional for a man uh in this kind of environment in this setting all right it felt appropriate for a brother to grieve his sister that way i didn't see anything about it that would be scandalous or gossip worthy or that i just didn't get why Coralus was so upset by that that he would say hey go go get him uh to his boyfriend like that seems more like you're creating a war of a scandal with that so i i really didn't understand that scene or like why Coralus was reacting the way he was but yeah it's kind of tragic to see how much of a Viserys still wants a daemon with him and really um obviously daemon's a big part of it but you really just do get the sense that Viserys heart is with his family like his you know his blood relations that he feels sort of parted from nowadays that he's with Allicent and Allicent's kids and like kind of that's the team that he is surrounded by now and it's pretty clear like when he goes up to daemon and is like once again like oh you come back it's fine you're unbanished like it's fine i miss you come back i'll i'll be there for you you have a place by my side like after everything once again he's like i want daemon back and he's he seems quite happy to see daemon again even under such sad circumstances again much much later in the episode and we'll get to that in more detail but i mean when he takes Rainier aside against Allicent and in the funeral scene he calls Allicent Emma so it's just it's pretty clear if it wasn't already all along that Viserys his heart is with his his daughter and his brother and his his Targaryen family not with Allicent or or his kids with Allicent so moving on then to Rainier and Daemon i kind of like that i mean for all that the show does kind of speed through things i did kind of appreciate that they did just kind of like get right to it with Daemon and Rainier because this is inevitable they've been building this for a while no one is under any illusions about how these two feel about each other so that's just kind of like we're like all right we're doing it just kind of cut right to the chase so i appreciated that because you're like yeah i do still think um it would have been nice to see more of Harwen and Laina i do stand by that but that being said that being in my mind still the best case scenario for the show um i do still think that um now that we saw this conversation between Rainier and Daemon where they're each kind of talking about who Laina and Harwen were to them i sort of felt like i don't know if this is going to make sense or i can explain it in a way that makes sense but the basically like what Daemon and Rainier and the story of the show know about Laina and Harwen is what the other tells them about them so Daemon doesn't really like didn't really personally observe or know much about Harwen and similarly Rainier didn't really personally observe or know much about Laina and her relationship with Daemon other than just knowing that it exists so i feel like then the audience similarly only knows about them what they are telling each other and so their experience of these characters is just like Daemon's and Rainier is where Daemon only knows what Rainier has to say about it Rainier only knows what Daemon has to say about it and the audience likewise kind of only knows what they have to say about it i don't know if that makes sense i enjoyed how um again i don't know if i necessarily call this an echoing or anything um but the way that when Rainier is pitching to Daemon the idea of them uniting or their union that she basically puts it in the same terms with the same arguments in the same reasoning that Daemon gave to Viserys when he himself proposed this very thing which Rainier obviously wouldn't know anything about so i just like the way that it kind of shows once again the show has done this many times to once again show us how much of these two are alike that they think the same they act the same their priorities are kind of the same their strategies and and logic and approach to things is the same so Rainier pitches Daemon's own plan to Daemon without knowing that that's what she's doing so i thought that was a clever way of yet again just showing how sort of simpatico they are now it's giving a little bit towards uh to the end of the episode i was about to have a big problem with the idea that Rainier would sign off on the cold blooded murder of Lenore particularly because of how Rainier has been in the show so far which the characters it doesn't matter if like something that they do or say something from the book if like that's not consistent with how the character has been written in a show so far so the Rainier in the show just abruptly doing a 180 and being willing to murder Lenore just so she can be with Daemon would be a little out of left field especially like it would be left out it would be out of left field no matter what but particularly given the conversation that she had just had with Lenore telling him that he's a good and honorable man and that's a that's a rare thing and that you know she doesn't wish he'd be any different than he is like it seemed a very a sort of heartfelt moment between them so to on the heels of that call for his murder was a bit much to swallow and i was like really so i was kind of like my initial reaction then upon seeing that Lenore is alive i was like oh okay yeah actually yeah i was like Rainier wouldn't murder him okay but then immediately after that i was like hang on a second wait so Lenore was he in on it like when they when the guy attacked him like did they stage that together had they talked about that beforehand we're like let's stage a scene where you're trying to kill me and then obviously they did have to murder somebody so they'd have a body for the fire and like you know who who explained this to Lenore and what made him go yes this seems necessary i agree i should fake my own death and it's just it's a hell of a thing for him to do to his parents after they just lost Lena to then fake his own death like i just feel like i would like to see the conversation that convinced Lenore that this was the way to go because that's a lot for him to give up everything he's ever known his title his position his money um his he just said that you know he cares for even though this kids aren't actually like his by blood he does care for the kids he has with Rainier it's just that's a lot to ask of him and for him to be like okay i just okay i would like to know why like what convinced him you know it's too bad that Lenore wasn't the one that Kristen wanted to run away with because it turns out that Lenore would have been totally down but yeah i i did enjoy before we found out i think it was before we found out that Lenore was actually alive um that again Rainier and Damon sort of plotting this whole thing and then speculating that the people will ask questions and there will be rumors and people will assume that they're behind this that people will talk in the way that they're kind of accepting slash intentionally creating barbaric reputations for themselves which are you know more than they apparently deserve that it might be while scandalous it might be useful to have people think you're capable of something so dark that would be an intentional choice on their part to let it look like they did it that being said though if people will speculate that Rainier and Damon are behind it how does um Corliss and the rest of the ballerians feel about that you know they seem to be siding with Rainier in this episode as as you'd expect so i'm moving on then to Rainier and Allicent which is kind of what this whole show is about right at least so far so i've kind of accepted you know the new Allicent is who she is starting from the previous episode so like you know going into this one you know i'm expecting this new version of Allicent which to me still feels like a completely different character from the previous Allicent but whatever we've moved on this is this is who Allicent is now so moving forward that's who we're dealing with and i still think that how much she speaks up against Viserys in public so like a lot of people were saying to me that like that it's totally believable that she could get away with talking back to Viserys and and maybe possibly um i would agree but she does it in public and that's where i really find a problem with it because i feel like it's not just Viserys that would need to let her get away with this like the rest of like people would be like you can't talk to your king like that you know it's just there's just certain things that you just aren't done you know in public like that so the way she talks in front of him to him in front of other people is still a bit much for me to swallow for this sort of time and place that's being depicted and the way she like contradicts him and asks the guards to basically not just that she's getting away with speaking against the king but who's asking other people to listen to her over the king like that is bold very bold we've seen a consistent sort of theme of the way that Allicent is kind of obsessed with Reynira in a way that Reynira is not obsessed with Allicent so like we often see these scenes where Allicent is the one watching Reynira and Reynira will notice and look back but she wasn't watching Allicent she doesn't give like she doesn't care what Allicent is doing she's like whatever like and i don't i don't mean to say that you know Reynira is so dumb that she wouldn't realize that Allicent is a threat but you know she's she's concentrated on her own plans her own schemes her own efforts her own life and then Allicent is sometimes a problem but she's not like so obsessed with Allicent the way that Allicent is clearly obsessed with Reynira and is constantly worried about what Reynira is saying and doing and where she's where she's going and what's happening with her so i think they've done a good job of sort of like demonstrating that in many scenes in subtle ways and then obviously in confrontations we see that sort of bubble up to the surface the way that Allicent is so preoccupied with Reynira and Reynira is like i gotta get over it and that said Reynira does seem to think better of Allicent than Allicent thinks of Reynira Allicent is ready to assume the worst at all times about Reynira by contrast when Damon is talking to Reynira about the fire in Harrenhal and Reynira says she doesn't think Allicent is capable of cold blooded murder like that that she doesn't think Allicent would be the one that did it now i do think that scene would have been a little more interesting if as i've suggested in my previous video about the previous episode as i said in the book there is speculation about who caused the fire in Harrenhal it's not a certainty in the book and that Larry Strong is one of the candidates one of the options but the Damon Targaryen is also one of the several options if they had kept that ambiguity alive this little chat on the beach between Damon and Reynira about what happened in Harrenhal would have been just a little bit more interesting if we the audience had some reason to think that Damon might possibly have done it himself so how was he going to say to this but i feel like ultimately their goal with this episode or one of the many goals of this episode is to just show how much Damon and Reynira are kind of on the same page which would undermine that a bit granted okay i definitely got the feeling that you know Allicent again she thinks the worst of Reynira all the time but you also get the sense that it's only at the end of this episode that Allicent realizes that she's been dealing with the sort of meat version of Reynira thus far and it's only at the end of this episode when Reynira is with Damon that she's kind of like come into her own in terms of sort of confidence about her position at which point Allicent is like oh shit she was dealing with the nice let's make peace Reynira this whole time and Reynira has reached her limit and Reynira has Damon now so it definitely felt like Allicent's like thought that this you know she was dealing with the worst version of Reynira this whole time but you didn't know how bad it could get if that makes sense and i'm saying that like Reynira was evil at the end of the episode or anything but it was a a bolder Reynira than Reynira that Allicent has dealt with up to this point so it's sort of like oh you thought it was bad before well i'll show you how bad it can be uh the kids in this episode were fantastic i think they did a great job um in a very short amount of time in the previous episode setting up who each of them is their individual personalities and what the tensions are i mean obviously the tensions between the kids are sort of picked up by osmosis from their parents but they themselves have their own rivalries that have developed just on their own based on their own personalities so i think they did a good job setting that up so that in this episode it feels just as fraught as what's going on with the parents it was a little weird to me that it seems that they unless i missed it let me know if i did um but i think they betrothed Aegon and Helena off-screen because last time we checked Reynira was suggesting that Helena be betrothed to her son and now we heard Aegon talking about the fact that he's betrothed to Helena so again maybe i missed it but i don't think they ever showed us a scene establishing that that had been decided so that just felt kind of strange like wait since when like yeah like the kids again the tensions between the kids the actors playing the kids are doing a great job and so i feel like it's really really earned that moment after uh Aamond takes the dragon and he runs into his uh i was going to say cousins but they're his well let's not thank too much about the family lines anyway when he runs into the other kids and we have that intense altercation where he loses an eye i feel like they did a that that moment did come out of nowhere it felt very earned and the tensions between the kids felt like fraught like it felt highly charged and honestly that was much more believable to me than Kristen beating Joffrey to a pulp which did seem to come out of nowhere this scene between the kids felt very earned and and was very well done then we get the big confrontation with the parents and again i think the visual storytelling here was as usual fantastic the way that we sort of visually saw the battle lines being drawn about who's standing on which side of the room the way that Viserys is kind of standing in the middle of it all but there's kind of no one on his side he's kind of an island of indecision and obliviousness while the sides are being chosen around him we've sort of continued here this trend um it's not like a a cut and dry trend you feel free to disagree but this is kind of my feeling of how things have progressed with Reynira and Allison on a repeated and recurring and consistent basis where Allison is the one to kind of like strike first and i mean a lot of things by that i don't necessarily mean that she's always attacking Reynira just go with me on this that Allison slash Allison's side is the one to always strike first but Allison and Allison's side is usually the weaker for it or is punished for it or doesn't come out on top despite being the aggressor if that makes sense and again i don't when i say aggressor i don't necessarily mean she's like trying to fight her all the time so my sort of examples of this are initially in in the very beginning of this all um you know the two of them are supposedly friends which is a it's just a departure from the book and that's fine so the first person sort of do something to fracture the friendship is Allison to not Reynira by going behind everyone's back and hanging out with the king and yes her father made her do it but that is neither here nor there and it's certainly not something that Reynira would be aware of so regardless of who pushed who into it it does happen behind Reynira's back and would feel like a betrayal of that friendship and so you know maybe it's not Allison's fault um that it happened that way you know she just kowtowed to her father but nonetheless something like that breaks a friendship you can't go back to being friends like you were before that's it's not not an expectation you can have but so Allison does this so she strikes first but Reynira remains the heir and kind of does whatever she wants and she doesn't there aren't really any consequences for her then turning around and lying again she doesn't really lie to Allison but for her keeping her own secrets from Allison she doesn't really get punished for this there aren't any repercussions for this and with amon who would be you know on Allison's side when he sees the dragon i know he gained a dragon but he did not need to lose an eye to gain a dragon when he confronted his siblings he was the one that sort of struck first in terms of being the aggressor and throwing insults first and so while he was the sort of one to strike first he's the one that lost an eye and then here in the room between the parents Allison draws blood literally draws blood from Reynira with a knife and at the end of that confrontation the series is pretty clearly on Reynira's side if he's on anyone's side he's definitely not signing with Allison so it's consistently kind of it feels like Allison slash her side are reaching and grabbing and striking and trying to do something but it's Reynira and her side that come out on top so to speak so again it's not like a consistent like i hope i was clear about what i meant about those things um so it just seems like a pattern in this relationship and in this dynamic i definitely enjoyed seeing during this confrontation the way that Damon was happy to be a bystander and sort of like sit this one out and watch it unfold and wait till kind of um the victor emerges he's not going to get into the thick of it just to to begin with and not just that he's waiting but he's also seems to be just kind of enjoying the chaos the tensions that he's for once not the cause of so i thought it was a again you know it wasn't a an aggressive handling of that characterization but it felt extremely appropriate that that would that's what Damon would be doing when now you're like yes that's so Damon of him right now so i just feel like they're consistently good at sort of showing characters behaving in ways other than Allison's that are consistent for who they are and their characterization and continues to develop that further Allison to demanding that Kristen take the eye of one of Rainiera's kids um in front of everybody overriding the king's express command and telling Kristen that he's sworn to her not to the king even though i mean everyone is sworn to the king that's just how this works that was a bit much even for Kristen but i mean in general like that scene i was just like i mean i know vissaries less people get away with a lot but i was just kind of shocked at like how kind of no one in the room reacted to this i mean when she attacks Rainiera you know again i just i mean i know again vissaries is kind of you know infamous for his inaction um that he kind of lets people get away with stuff but there's like lots of guards in the room and like you know it just it felt like so is no one gonna do something about this like that was it was a bit ridiculous it was a bit surcy lannister of her to just kind of be unhinged like that in that scene it was a tad much it felt a little bit like the way that surcy becomes completely irrational when it comes to like Tyrion Lannister being around that she wants him dead and she won't trust him and she just like loses it and sees red is kind of how it felt now in between Rainiera and Allison by the end where Rainiera is the Tyrion so to speak so it was it was a little bit much but overall i did think the scene worked and it was very tense and um again battle lines were drawn so overall i did think this was a pretty fantastic episode i have very my issues with it if i have any um are more just sort of like things that are carryovers from the previous episodes again like not a super big fan of Allison's characterization in general but especially as it is inconsistent with the previous depiction of Allison if this is how Allison was going to be all along i don't necessarily care for it i would like to see more scheming and less screaming more subtlety from her character but if that's how she was going to be all along i feel like younger Allison should have begun to go down this path a little bit sooner so it wouldn't feel so like two different people again i enjoyed a lot of the ways that it did echo game of thrones feeling kind of like history's repeating itself at times with again the way that there's a lot of kind of like lannister influence in how things are going down um so i i enjoyed those sort of like echoes um those i they don't feel like fan service they don't feel like huh recognize this is this familiar it doesn't feel like that at all it feels much more like again history repeating itself and the way that these dynamics have a way of kind of similar things happen when people are put in similar circumstances and there's similar rivalries and the game of thrones is a a cyclical game that the players may change but the game remains the same almost if that makes sense i do think the pacing is a little fast because we're gonna get another time skip um in the next episode i'm excited to see the adult verses of the kids because you know that will be exciting they'll be able to participate more actually in the story when they're not kids but it is a bit fast i do think if the show runners had known what a hit this show would be they would have taken a little more time with things i suspect that they were concerned they have lost their audience if they didn't get to the hurry up and get to the dance of the dragons obviously i don't know that for a fact but it does feel a tad too fast just a tad like i think it the show would benefit from a little bit of breathing room a little bit of time spent kind of digesting and sitting with some of the events of the show overall but that said given the kind of constraints they have with how quickly they need to get through these events i do think they're doing a good job of conveying the important information and helping us along to go through this story so i think ideally it would be a little slower but for being if it needs to be this fast they're doing a good job with it um the child actors were fantastic so i i we were with reyneera and allison longer so i don't know that i can say i will miss them the same way because we didn't really see them that much but they did a great job you know child actors are are harder to find um or like that can act very convincingly and very well i oftentimes just kind of don't expect it and i'm impressed if i find it so they did very good they did a very good job the child actors um i felt that reyneera and daemon's dynamic in this um particularly in this episode it did feel very much like a continuation of the dynamic between daemon and reyneera that we'd seen previously with the previous um reyneera so i thought the the not just the actors looking the same or the script being the same but it felt like between the two actors the the chemistry between them it felt like a just more mature version of what they had before so just like i said in the previous episode these older version of reyneera very much works for me and not just in how reyneera isn't acting in isolation but reyneera is dynamic and chemistry with other characters around also feels consistent and it's really important that it feels consistent with daemon in particular and i think that it really does as always the music the cinematography the costumes the sets all of that is gorgeous fantastic well crafted well done always feels immersive always feels consistent for the world um i haven't mentioned it before but the dragons the dragons are used very well and are are done very well they look as much as you can say something like this about a dragon they look very realistic like they don't just feel like oh a fantasy creature that can fly around and breathe fire i mean the dimensions the weight the size the danger everything about the dragons it feels very real their wingspan everything about them it feels less like a fancy magical creature and more like a very large you know like a dinosaur you know like it feels again the only word i can think of is realistic which is a weird word to apply to a dragon but i think you know what i mean and i think not only are they realistic um i think the show utilizes them very well they doesn't overuse them partly probably because of the cgi budget but they also the scenes where they utilize dragons they aren't just wow what a cool visual the dragons are always used just like everything in the show is always used to further the story to further the plot to further character development so scenes with dragons always feel even more epic for that because it's not just like oh cool visual how epic it's how epic because it is epic for story reasons it is epic for character reasons and so yes it is a cool visual but it's that much cooler because there is more to it more underpinning it than just the visual so yeah those are my thoughts on episode seven it's a great show i'm gonna be sad when it's over it feels like it's going by so fast even though at the end of each episode i'm like oh my god i have to wait a whole nother week for the next one but i can't believe we're already through seven episodes so we're gonna they're only gonna start shooting season two next year so we've got to wait a while before we get the next installment but let me know your thoughts in the comments down below about this episode about the show in general uh do you agree or disagree with me whatever you want let me know i post videos on saturdays at the random times well but i think saturday so like and subscribe to my patreon if you feel so inclined and i'll see you when i see you