That easily sums up the first few minutes of Sunday’s House of the Dragon, which finally introduced the Demon’s wife, Rhea Royce, and then promptly killed her off. Actually, let me be more specific: And then he promptly killed her. (Read a full recap.) Since the series premiere, we’ve heard the Demon Prince take every opportunity to talk about the woman he was forced to marry. But all we really knew about her was that she was the heir to the Runestone and, according to Daemon, uglier than one of the many sheep scattered across The Vale. Remember in the first episode, Daemon even offered Rhea to Otto Hightower? Admittedly though, this was more about prompting the Hand of the King for his own wife’s recent death and less about the Demon parting ways with a life partner he hated dearly. So Episode 5 gave us our first real look at Lady Rhea, who turned out to be a skilled hunter with a very low tolerance for Daemon’s BS. I loved it IMMEDIATELY. Too bad that by the time her brother Viserys crossed her path, among the rolling hills outside the Runestone, she was deader than a Dracarys’d goat. “…A tragic accident has occurred, of the kind that shapes the fate of kingdoms: Runestone’s ‘bronze dog’, Lady Rhea Royce, fell from her horse while they were being stroked and smashed her skull on a stone,” writes George RR Martin in Fire & Blood, the main text of the show. In an HBO post-show featurette released after the episode aired, executive producer Ryan Condal pointed out that the ambiguity of that line seemed like the perfect place to introduce a little Daemon deviation. Later in the Dragon episode, Rhaenys mentions that Rhea’s neck and head were “crushing,” leaving little question as to what Daemon did with the rock he took right after his wife’s…accident? It certainly didn’t seem like an accident to me when the horse was bred, did it? We all agree that he spooked the animal and got lucky with what happened next, yes? (For what it’s worth, in Fire & Blood, Rhea “stayed for nine days before finally feeling well enough to leave her bed, only to collapse and die within an hour of emerging.”) But I dwelt too long on the objectionable details of Lady Rhea’s death. Let’s focus on how she used her last breaths as the Seven would have wanted: pissing off Daemon. “I knew you couldn’t finish,” she taunted him as he ran his boot along her forearm. “Coward!” Too bad we won’t be seeing more of Shadow and Bone’s Rachel Redford in the role. I liked it very much. Here’s hoping that if Daemon somehow ends up with her family’s ancestral castle, she’ll choose to haunt it, if for no other reason than to shame him for his inadequacies in the bedroom for eternity. A few more thoughts on the episode:
- With the amount Viserys oozes, bleeds, swells and lists to one side in this episode, how is this man still alive in the promo for next week’s big jump?
- Hmm, after that beat-down-murder on the dancefloor, is Ser Criston not the tender young lad I’ve been led to believe? However, his plea to Rhaenyra to run away together brought to mind that similarly doomed Thrones couple who talked about escaping their responsibilities and traveling to the Free Cities.
- Was anyone else confused by the knights rushing to the pre-wedding banquet? I guess the fight between Joffrey and Criston had broken out and they were responding to it, but we just couldn’t see it at that point? At first, I thought maybe Alicent had summoned the Hightower panopticons to stage a coup or something. What thoughts/questions/predictions do you have after this week’s House of the Dragon?
