Put a pin in that it'll come back.Įnter: Daemon Targaryen, the King's cheeky - well, cheekbony, anyway - younger brother.
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Corlys Velaryon (told you!) warns that some of the Free Cities have formed an alliance called the Triarchy, and their admiral - one Craghas Drahar, aka Crabfeeder - is brutally ridding the Stepstones (a string of islands between Westeros and Essos) of pirates. The show puts more of its chess pieces on the board: Queen Aemma is pregnant again, and offers the headstrong Rhaenyra some truly terrible "lie back and think of Westeros" motherly advice. They walk through the same courtyard in the Red Keep that Cersei will turn into a giant Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? board, centuries later. We meet teenaged Rhaenyra and her friend Alicent Hightower, daughter of Otto Hightower, who's the Hand of the King.
That's the Dragonpit, where reside the royal family's dragons. That giant domed building dominating the skyline? That's not the Great Sept of Baelor, which won't be built for years. We may be 172 years in the past, but the servers in HBO's VFX department have had four years of updates since GoT ended, and it shows. We get a dragon's-eye view of King's Landing, which is looking a bit more precisely rendered these days. Here, the battle lines will largely be drawn within a single family, in just a few familiar locations. Take that a signal that House of the Dragon's chief conflict won't manifest, as GoT's did, as a sprawling worldwide clash involving numerous far-flung Houses and kingdoms. Instead, we just zoom into the three-headed dragon sigil of House Targaryen. Opening credits! Which expressly do not send us swooping over a map of Westeros to visit clockwork versions of the various locales that will figure in this week's episode. The Great Council chooses Viserys, even though Rhaenys is older, because the patriarchy is nothing if not utterly predictable. Not to mention the fact that most of the characters are sporting the same long, plantinum-blonde wig. (I know, I know - we're not even two minutes in and already there's a Rhaenys and a Rhaenyra to contend with. In that corner: the king's grandson Viserys Targaryen, standing beside his wife Aemma Arryn, who is pregnant with their daughter, Rhaenyra Targaryen. In this corner: Rhaenys Targaryen, the king's granddaughter (she's standing beside her husband Corlys Velaryon, aka the Sea Snake - we'll be seeing a lot more of him).
We're witnessing the Great Council of 101 AC, where the inheritor of the Iron Throne will be decided. We open at Harrenhal, the vast ruined castle that got famously dracarysed by Aegon the Conqueror, founder of the Targaryen Dynasty, a century before. The now 100-year-old Targaryen Dynasty is at its height, as the royal family holds the reins to 10 full-grown dragons. House of the Dragon opens about 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. I've written a couple handy primers to help us all get in the right headspace, but essentially: Forget what you know, you won't need it much. We're all of us here, back on our dragonscat. All of us - HBO, the Seven Kingdoms, you, and me of course, the guy who recapped Game of Thrones for NPR lo those many years ago. well, for House of the Dragon 's premiere episode. This recap of House of the Dragon 's premiere episode contains spoilers for.