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- October 10, 2022
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One episode removed from the end of its first season, Game of Thrones loudly announced its cruel intentions for the audience, by chopping off the apparent main character’s head. From the death of Sean Bean’s top-billed character Ned Stark onward, Thrones viewers knew to expect the unexpected at every turn, with no character too safe to die.
For its part, House of the Dragon has taken a different tact with the actor at the top of the call sheet, Paddy Considine. Given the show’s built-in premise about succession, and given the franchise’s violent history toward its own protagonists, the death of King Viserys Targaryen has felt like a guaranteed outcome since the very first trailer, let alone the very first frame of the series. The surprise is not that Viserys will someday die, leaving his daughter Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and wife Alicent (Olivia Cooke) to duke it out over who gets to sit on the Iron Throne. The surprise is that through eight episodes and two decades worth of story, the increasingly ill Viserys is still alive—barely standing, sure, but still standing all the same.
At least, that’s the case until the final moments of “The Lord of the Tides,” House of the Dragon’s eighth episode, directed by Geeta V. Patel and written by Eileen Sham. The bedridden, broken-bodied king is barely breathing in the last scene of the episode, grasping skyward and speaking at ghosts we can’t see. It’s implied Viserys has either drawn his final breath, or is about to. In any event, Viserys himself acknowledges the inevitable in this episode, gathering his entire family together for one final feast and one last attempt at peace.
“My own face is no longer a handsome one, if indeed it ever was,” the skeletal, one-eyed Viserys tells his loved ones. “But tonight, I wish you to see me as I am. Not just a king, but your father, your brother, your husband, and your grandsire who may not, it seems, walk for much longer among you. Let us no longer hold ill feelings in our hearts. The crown cannot stand strong if the House of the Dragon remains divided. Set aside your grievances. If not for the sake of the crown, then for the sake of this old man who loves you all so dearly.”
It’s an impressive show of life from a man so clearly on the edge of death, and it’s only his second most impressive feat of the day. Let’s rewind the clock to that earlier moment, and let’s start by resetting the story’s stage.
Set six years after the most recent episode, “The Lord of the Tides” centers on the matter of who will sit on the Driftwood Throne of Driftmark as the titular Lord of the Tides, should yet another powerful man die: the Sea Snake Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), apparently grievously wounded in the forever war in the Stepstones. By all rights and certainly by Corlys’s own wishes, the title of Lord of the Tides should pass to his grandson Lucerys (Elliot Grihault). But that’s not how everyone views the matter, certainly not Corlys’s borhter Vaemond (Wil Johnson), one of the loudest voices in the room when it comes to the true parentage of Rhaenyra’s three Velaryon sons.
“My brother cares only for the history books,” Vaemond tells his sister-in-law, Rhaenys (Eve Best), who currently rules over Driftmark while her husband plays at war. “But what of the Velaryon line? It’s supposed to be snuffed out by House Strong?”
At first, Vaemond’s case to become Lord of the Tides feels like a strong one indeed. With Viserys’s declining health, Alicent and Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) have been left to rule in his stead, and they are likely to rule in favor of Vaemond, as a means of stripping further power away from Rhaenyra. But when Rhaenyra and her husband (and the king’s brother) Daemon (Matt Smith) come to King’s Landing to plead their case, their arrival gives King Viserys the exact emotional jolt he needs to Grandpa Joe his way out of bed and back into the proverbial chocolate factory known as the Red Keep.
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