The Five Ways to Overwhelm Episode 9 of House of the Dragon

Every ninth episode of a game of Thrones The season was a box office hit. Episode 9 shocked viewers with Ned Stark’s death and the Red Wedding and delighted them with the battles of the Bastards and the Blackwater. We at The ringtone placed three Episode 9s in the top five of our thrones episode ranking, and viewers consistently gave them top marks.

After the emotional highlights of “The Lord of the Tides” maybe the best house of the dragon Episode so far, hopes have been high for dragon‘s first episode 9. But “The Green Council” is a disappointing mess and the low point of an otherwise enjoyable first season of franchise television.

Unlike everyone thrones Season penultimate attempt, the characters of this episode 9 were unconvincing. His tension didn’t rise. And its plot fell flat as the episode stumbled to an end. There’s still room for dragon to recover when the Targaryen Civil War begins in earnest. But here are five overarching reasons why Dance of the Dragons has gotten off to a lackluster start.

1. Unsteady tempo

Broadly speaking, The Green Council has one consistent lineage: the Greens vying for the crown of Aegon after the death of King Viserys in the closing shot of Episode 8. But the steps taken from the starting point of the king’s death to the goal of a The inauguration of the new king was terribly hasty and then terribly uneven.

In which Fire & Blood book, the death of Viserys leads to a long debate in the small council over how they will react and who they will crown. That was also the expectation on screen, not least because of the title of this episode.

But this scene moves much faster and ends much more abruptly in The Green Council. The council immediately set about implementing what Tyland Lannister calls its “long-term plans.” “Yes,” adds Otto Hightower, “there’s a lot to do as we’ve discussed before” — this is how both Alicent and the audience learn that the Small Council has been secretly planning to crown Aegon for a while.

Instead of showing these crucial discussions, dragon instead, informs viewers that it’s already happened and it’s time to move on. Then Lyman Beesbury protests and Ser Criston murders him by banging his face on a small presence stone. Apart from Harrold Westerling, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, none of Beesbury’s longtime colleagues seem to care about his sudden death, let alone express their horror. It’s time to move on again.

And within minutes, with almost no debate, the meeting breaks down. It’s time to move on again; the rest of the episode awaits. And while some of this disorganization may reflect the Greens’ desire to move on to Aegon’s coronation as quickly as possible, the result is that most of the episode dramatizes less interesting material than the lack of debate over who inherited the Seven Kingdoms from Viserys should rule.

2. A lack of dramatic tension

Speaking of less interesting stuff, the episode’s main problem is a lack of suspense, commensurate with its placement in the season. I was bored for large parts of the episode! In a episode 9!

That’s because the central tension of the episode isn’t whether Aegon will be crowned instead of Rhaenyra. That much is a fait accompli, decided minutes in; as Alicent says as she presents her case to Rhaenys, “Aegon will be king.”

Rather, the central tension is whether Otto’s men or Alicent’s will find Aegon first, because Otto hires the Cargyll twins Arryk and Erryk to bring Aegon to him – while Alicent asks Criston and Aemond to deliver their son to her. But Otto and Alicent are on the same general side in this conflict. Rhaenyra and Daemon, leaders of the opposing successor faction, don’t appear at all in this episode – a conscious narrative choice, for their absence underscores their distance from any decisions made immediately after Visery’s death, but one that softens much of the dramatic tension from the episode.

Otto wants Rhaenyra killed immediately to remove any challenge to Aegon’s fledgling reign; Alicent doesn’t want her ex-boyfriend murdered, nor does she believe Viserys would have wanted his eldest daughter to die. But Alicent has no reasonable alternative way of dealing with the deposed heir; She tells Otto, “We will send terms to Rhaenyra on Dragonstone – true terms that she can accept without shame,” though it’s hard to imagine or define what those “true terms” might be.

Otto and Alicent agree on the most important decision, however, as they both want Aegon to be crowned, so the tension between them feels artificial. Much of the episode follows the royal game of hide-and-seek through the streets of King’s Landing, but the outcome seems predetermined one way or another: if the Cargylls found Aegon first, Aegon would occupy the Iron Throne and Rhaenyra would not. If Criston and Aemond found Aegon first… Aegon would still be sitting on the Iron Throne and Rhaenyra still wouldn’t.

The outcome may feel important to Alicent because she wants a chance to beg the future king not to kill his half-sister. But what’s the payout for the viewer if Alicent wins the epic lengthy Aegon scavenger hunt? It’s not that Otto can’t talk to Aegon later.

3. The Consequences of Viserys’ Last Words

A major reason for the lack of suspense in The Green Council is that essentially everyone in this episode – or at least essentially everyone with power – wants Aegon as their king. This count includes Alicent, who only told Rhaenyra in the last episode that she would make a good queen, and who is clearly repelled by her eldest son’s behavior.

But her mind changes due to Episode 8 ending with a miscommunication straight out of a soap opera. In his final moments, Viserys mistakes Alicent for Rhaenyra and tells her that he believes in Aegon’s dream. The outcome is predictable, as Alicent takes Visery’s ramblings as a true change of heart and spends Episode 9 repeatedly telling the infidels that she witnessed a deathbed audible from the king.

Despite many other possible explanations for her son to be crowned, the confused Viserys Alicents’ utterance fully justifies Aegon’s claim in The Green Council. Does Alicent voice her concerns that Rhaenyra and Daemon may kill Aegon, Helaena, and Aemond to remove potential contenders to the throne? Is she referring to her opinion of Rhaenyra’s pride and impurity? Does she worry about how best to unify an empire she believes won’t accept a woman’s rule? No, no, and no — she just says, as he tells Rhaenys: “It was my husband’s last wish.”

Perhaps, given the Small Council’s secret planning, Aegon’s coronation would have progressed without Alicent’s support. But if Alicent had been conflicted or even opposed to her son’s imminent rule, the events of the episode might have unfolded differently, with more actual tension between the main characters.

That this change came about as a result of a stupid misunderstanding is completely at odds with the typical consequences in this well-founded story. Apparently a whole civil war was started because too many Targaryens are named Aegon. dr Seuss’ Too Many Daves didn’t change the fate of an entire continent.

4. An excessive focus on inferior characters

As the episode develops into a city-wide search for the prince, several minor characters come to the fore. This means that the most important episode of the season revolves around characters unfamiliar to the audience.

For the most part, the Cargyll twins have hardly appeared or been introduced prior to this episode, but the camera follows them throughout King’s Landing. Rhaenyra and Daemon aren’t in this episode – but a trip from Cargyll to a children’s wrestling ring is!

(“Prince Aegon spends many nights in this place,” says a Cargyll to his brother. “Now do you see what he is?” As if viewers hadn’t already had their eyes opened to Aegon’s nature as they watched the loutish rapist of watched a prince in recent episodes.)

Ultimately, they find Aegon via a tip from Mysaria, who is involved in a puzzling, secret conspiracy to hide (or kidnap? This whole subplot) the prince. Mysaria and her spy at the Red Keep, Talya, are more familiar to me than the Cargyll twins — but I can still count on one hand the number of Mysaria lines and scenes since her tête-à-tête with Daemon all the way back Episode 2, and her unique accent hasn’t gotten any more understandable since then.

The final member of this unfortunate group is Larys, who continues his bad impression of Littlefinger in this episode. At least viewers get to know Larys’ motivations for serving the Queen thanks to a highly awkward scene in which he, um, delights in the sight of her bare feet. But this development doesn’t make his character any more compelling.

5. The confusing action at the end

The final confusion of the episode came in its closing scene. First, after fleeing the Red Keep, Rhaenys is carried away by the crowd and led into the Dragonpit to witness Aegon’s inauguration. Hooded and unassuming, she resembles Arya Stark’s position at the end of “Baelor” when the young girl stands in the crowd during Ned’s beheading.

But Arya didn’t have a nuclear weapon under Baelor’s Great Sept like Rhaenys does in the Dragonpit. As Aegon Blackfyre, the Conqueror’s Valyrian steel sword, swings in front of the cheering crowd, a sudden explosion erupts through the ground. Meleys, the dragon of Rhaenys, rises through the hole (a huge departure from the source text, where Aegon’s coronation proceeds smoothly).

It seems that dozens of innocents die while Meleys tramples the masses. However, with Aegon, Alicent, and all of Rhaenyra’s other traitors poised in front of her dragon’s snout, Rhaenys pulls an Obi-Wan Kenobi and turns to leave rather than ending the war before it even begins.

It appears that dragon wanted, well, a dragon scene, so it made it up – but forgot that it made sense, either to the plot or the characters involved. The result is a scene that, much like The Green Council as a whole, left me confused and underwhelmed and wishing I hadn’t pinned so much hope on another amazing Episode 9.