[ESTE ARTÍCULO CONTIENE SPOILERS DE LA CASA DEL DRAGÓN, TEMPORADA 2]
When the dragon house landed on HBO Max in summer 2022, fans of Game of Thrones They expected a lot from her. After all, the prequel born from the book Fire and blood, of George R.R. Martin, would bring to the screen the civil war between the Targaryens known as the Dance of the Dragons, an epic and bloodthirsty event on par with the best massacres in Westeros.
The first installment of the fiction, which laid the pieces for the coming dynastic battle, convinced the followers of the universe Game of Thrones thanks to its brave approach to obstetric violence, to performances as vindictive as that of Paddy Considine and to the uncontrolled dragons of the protagonists.
the dragon house return now to Max It has become one of the best bets on current television, with a second season that finally takes us into the Dance of the Dragons. Its first episode, Son for son, has recovered one of the most brutal and cruel events in Fire and blood, which has as protagonists Blood and Cheese.
What is the terrible event that begins the second season? How did we get here? We review the sequence and compare it with what happens in the book, even more painful than on the screen.
The death of Lucerys in ‘The House of the Dragon’
To understand the event carried out by Blood and Cheese, we first have to understand what triggers it. And, for that, we have to return at the end of season 1 and the accidental death of Lucerys Velaryon (Elliot Grihault) at the hands of his uncle Aemond (Ewan Mitchell).
The son of Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and rider of the almighty Vhagar engaged in an aerial fight with the second offspring of Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) in Storm’s End, where both had gone in search of allies for the war for the Iron Throne between Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Rahenyra.
Aemond just wanted to scare the young man, but he lost control of his dragon and Vhagar ended up devouring his opponents, unleashing the Dance of the Dragons that will confront the Blacks and Greens in the second installment.
In this way, the second installment begins with Rhaenyra mourning the death of her son and her husband. Daemon (Matt Smith) obsessed with taking revenge as soon as possible on the Greens as a show of power. Without consulting Rhaenyra, the warrior sets in motion a plan to claim the life of a Hightower-Targaryen male child in compensation for Lucerys’s.
Blood and Cheese: what happens in the book ‘Fire and Blood’
On the pages, Daemon seeks revenge with the well-known “an eye for an eye,” here rephrased as “son for son.” But, instead of wanting to put an end to Aemond, the culprit of what happened, he charges against Aegon as king of the Greens and decides to hit him where it hurts most by attacking his male offspring.
Unable to take the Red Keep with his army, he consults with Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno in the series) and pays two small-time assassins, Blood and Cheese, to do his dirty work: the first is a violent butcher and sergeant, while the second hunts rats in King’s Landing.
Due to his job, Cheese knows the tunnels of the Fortress, so they manage to sneak into the place without being seen. Likewise, the murderers know that every night, Helaena (Phia Saban) takes his three children, Jaehaerys (six years old), Jaehaera (six years old and Jaehaerys’ twin) and Maelor (two years old), to visit his grandmother Alicent.
In this way, Blood and Cheese hide in Alicent’s room after killing her maid and imprisoning the queen regent, and wait for Helaena to arrive with her little ones. They take down the guard guarding Helaena and block the entrance to the room before making the queen choose which male child to kill.
Helaena offers her life, but they refuse, insisting that it must be one of their children and threatening to rape her daughter and destroy all the children if she refuses to choose. Forced to choose, the queen points to Maelor, since, at two years old, she does not understand what is happening.
However, the thugs explain to Maelor that his mother wanted to sacrifice him before turning around and killing Jaehaerys, Aegon’s heir. They then leave, taking with them Jaehaerys’s head as proof of the success of the assignment. Without a doubt, this is one of the most atrocious episodes in the book, including psychological torture for Helaena and the beheading of a defenseless child.
‘House of the Dragon’ softens the Blood and Cheese scene
In the series, Daemon promises freedom to Mysaria, imprisoned on Dragonstone, in exchange for information. The prince ventures to King’s Landing, where he bribes first Blood, a general who hates the Hightowers, and then Cheese, who knows the tunnels of the Red Keep well thanks to his job hunting rats.
He unites them both to finish off Aemond. “You must find and kill Prince Aemond Targaryen,” he explains to them: “He has silver hair and one eye, he should be easy to find.” When Cheese asks Daemon what they should do if they don’t find Aemond, Daemon stares at him, but we don’t see his response.
Cheese and Blood infiltrate the Red Keep through the tunnels with a dog, posing as rat catchers. They pass by Aegon, sitting drunk on the Iron Throne with his guards, and manage to reach the upper floor, where the royal family’s bedrooms are located.
Since there is no one in the room where Aemond was minutes before, Blood heads to another room. By the time he goes looking for Cheese, he has a knife to Helaena’s neck. “Who is she?” Sangre asks. “She is the queen,” Queso responds with a laugh. “Son for a son, he said,” Blood repeats, referring to Daemon’s order if they didn’t find Aemond, and attacks, pointing at Helaena: “Does he look like a son to you?”
It is then that Cheese points out the cribs in which the twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera sleep. Since the little ones look so similar, they don’t know how to distinguish who the boy is and they ask the mother. She tries to buy them by offering them her valuable necklace, but in the end she is forced to point out a crib. Sangre doubts that she is really giving them the king’s heir and thinks that the man is in the other crib, but Queso realizes that the young woman is telling the truth.
The child is murdered off-camera as the image follows Helaena, who picks up her daughter and carries her out of the room. She escapes to her mother’s room, where she is she is sleeping with Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel). When Alicent asks what happened, the young woman answers: “They killed the boy.”
This is how the first episode of the second season ends, with the Greens suffering a loss that will make the war as personal for them as it already is for Rhaenyra after Luke’s death.
the dragon house has softened the Blood and Cheese scene by playing with Daemon’s intentions, who here, unlike on the page, primarily wants to kill Aemond. They also do not show the violent murder of Aegon’s firstborn on screen nor do they make Helaena choose between her two sons, leaving Maelor (who in Fire and blood carries the weight of knowing that his mother was going to sacrifice him) out of sequence.
It is not the first time that the series softens RR Martin’s brutal writing, especially where the Black faction is concerned. Let us remember that, in the first season, Rhaenyra helped her first husband escape, Laenor (John Macmillan), granting him freedom by passing him off as dead. In the book Laenor died at the hands of Qarl, his lover.
On the Green side, the dragon house It has also shown a more human image of Aemond than in the novel in his aerial confrontation with Luke: Alicent’s son lost control of Vhagar and accidentally killed his nephew, while on the pages the murder had nothing accidental.
Following Jaehaerys’ tragic end, the dynastic battle within the Targaryen clan has become more personal. She will have to wait a week to see how Aegon counterattacks and what Rhaenyra thinks about her husband’s latest plot. The Dance of the Dragons is already flaming.
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