House of the Dragon S1E6 is live! And we have …uhhhh…literally who? We start the episode with another fun game of: Is this a time shift? A new character? A flash back? A fever dream? A bad idea for this series to keep jumping time? All of the above?! Some of the below!? Eenie-Meenie-Minie-Mo?!
Literally Who?!
OK–So the Princess is in another castle or time or castle in time? I guess it’s the same one from before but an odd casting choice for the older princess that looks nothing like the younger version except for the uhhh hair? Maybe none of the others were cast…nope. All the men are still the men. I know women can’t age in Hollywood but this a bit extreme.
Green Eggs and Ham–Sam ya craven!
Oh! An egg! I do admit it is pretty cool to see the eggs be a feature in this show. It goes to point how common-ish dragons were for this history. It is also a good way to show eggs were given for birthing, much like Danny’s was hoped for.
A boy and his dragon. It seems that they go into more lore here on having the dragon imprint on a single rider. If you’ve seen the Book of Boba Fett, you will understand the basic run of it. In short, it’s only interesting when Baby Yoda shows up. In this series the role of Baby Yoda is played by Matt Smith.
How do you like your white meat?
This is the weirdest episode of Euphoria I’ve ever seen…
And we cut to the Queen and Sir HolyWhiteKnightDude walking and talking. Then we cut to some kid jerking off like he’s Homelander. Wait. Blonde hair? Check. Jerking off on a city? Check. Maybe from some sort of weird marriage? Check.
The Queen is a bit direct with her spawn. Mostly don’t be a dick or you’ll end up like Ned Stark. And the kid is all like ‘Who the heck is Ned Stark?!’ and she’s all like ‘Exactly’.
Cut to: Matt Smith and his non-child bride driving a dragon and then making a joke about (checks notes) child rape. Are the writers tone deaf? Lazy? A bit of both? Oh, I think we all know the answer to these multiple choice questions are: All of the Above!! Seriously, can we go one episode without a mention of a kid being sold off?
Matt Smith seen here recovering from his broken back.
As we see another battle of kids we see the obvious of un-known parents come back to a prequel. Gee…white hair…White hair…curly dark hair? It doesn’t take a Master of Science in Biology to understand that mommy diddled the milk man.
I wonder who the father could be…hmmmm….
After a fight we get spoon fed that the guy who looks just like the two kids that look nothing like their white haired ‘father’ is actually the father of the kids. Shocked Pikachu face. Then we see the rather openly happy ‘definitely the father’ of the kids come in drunk and with his boyfriend. I want to like this version of the story the Knight of Flowers should have had during the GoT but was robbed. Seeing someone hide who they are in the court and trying to say ‘Hey, I did my part’ is interesting. However, the GoT version would have been a better story. The Knight of Flowers was brave and talented. His sexual orientation was not his identity. He was so many things other than gay. Fast forward to this prequel and we get a frustratingly shallow version of what could have been.
The number of women on the small council is maybe a bit of ‘let’s make this for today’s audience!’. I don’t remember these claims from GoT that ‘well, she was on the small council!’ It was more Cersei grabbing power and being upset she couldn’t openly sit on the meetings until she was the most powerful person. Much like the changes Danny was making by bringing women as advisors was a counter balance to how they did it in the West.
The Princess makes a good point. Mostly that she has a bastard as a kid and they should marry each other’s houses? So wait. This is (OK some math is needed):
Her friend marries her daddy. They have a kid. (That makes it the half-brother/sister?)
She has a kid with some rando. That makes it her father’s grandson, which makes the kid a nephew to the step-sister/brother).
She wants to marry the son to the daughter. So, the grandson is marrying the daughter? Uhhh…
I must have blacked out trying to do the math. I come to and see the hand of the King try to retire as of the Hand because of some ‘weird things happening’. We had one Hand get booted out for telling the king the semi-truth and the other one quits because he doesn’t want to tell the king any truths.
As the queen sits down to think of the offer, she has dinner with literally who? Oh! The son of the Hand of the King. Great. I guess it’s Lord Larys, which I had to google since I thought she said Lord Varys. God, how I missed Varys and most of the other cast.
We cut to (No pun) a woman bent over doggie style trying to give birth. We see Daemon having to fight the same decision his brother did. Lose the wife and gain the kid or lose the kid and gain the wife. In one telling scene, the dragon won’t burn her alive and we have her mettle and his.
Ooops, my bad. Funny, we see him kill off one wife and then have the other taken from him.
Oh, that Trogdor…
Now things are getting heated up..errm….moving. We see the princess talk to her husband and her baby daddy. The husband is happy he gets to take his lover. The baby daddy is happy he doesn’t have to pay child support as a group of no-tongue ruffians cuts them down. I think I’ve seen this before. Oh yeah, it was called Macbeth.
It looks the Queen is having second thoughts on having the other dude do her bidding without knowing exactly what that bidding is. I guess see this with the lines ‘careful what you wish for’ and ‘you will reward me’. Winner of Creepy dude of the series goes to: This guy we don’t even know or probably care about.
We now go to found footage of Jim being forced to watch the previous episode
I said ‘Man, I hope the next episode is better or at least has any action at all in it’. This episode delivers the action and it strikes a balance with plot, too. I think some character development for certain people is sorely needed as some are just caricatures and shadows of people. However, out of the six episodes thus far, this seems either the best or possibly tied for second best (with the Matt Smith heavy episode of the early part of the season).
Hitting the ‘just past mid-point’ of the season, we see things are going quickly now. We also see that the rest of the season will have more deaths and probably to at least one, if not two, main characters. No, I don’t count the hand of the king guy a main character. We hardly knew anyone who died and we probably couldn’t care less about the deaths so far. I think that is about to change.
I can’t wait to see what the show does for the last part of the season. Until next time…
