House of the Dragon: season two, episode eight recap – what were the writers thinking?

It’s a feeling we’ve all experienced at least once – you’re watching a movie or a TV episode, just waiting for the big reveal, the grand finale, when suddenly there’s climactic fanfare or a hard cut to a black screen and you find yourself asking in horror: hang on a minute, is that it?
Yes, after seven plot-heavy, strategy-focused, frequently gripping, occasionally ponderous instalments – and a pair of superb action scenes – the season finale might be the most laborious of the lot, an episode that seems to go out of its way to avoid elevating our heart rates. Instead, it sets up a host of potentially thrilling encounters – then stops dead before we get to any of them. It’s a frankly baffling episode of television, almost aggressively anti-climactic, a 69-minute tease with a payoff that we’ll have to wait two years for. What were they thinking?
It begins in Essos, where Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) is trying to persuade emissaries from the Triarchy to lend him their ships in an effort to break the blockade of King’s Landing. But while each of the three represents a different free city – Myr, Lys and Tyrosh, to be precise – they’ve chosen to meet on what appears to be the set of a low-budget 80s sword-and-sandal flick, a sultan’s tent full of muttering miscreants and musclebound warriors such as Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn), who says things like: “I will not sail with a man who cannot best me,” before wrestling said man in a pool of mud then propositioning him – sort of – over a flagon of mead. I kept half-expecting Rutger Hauer to wander in wearing a loincloth.
Meanwhile, back in Westeros, Prince Regent Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) is so furious about the appearance of several newly tamed dragons that he flies into a murderous rage, bounds on to Vhagar and wipes out an entire town. Or at least, that’s what we’re told has happened – all we witness is the aftermath.
Meanwhile, his mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke), has returned without fanfare from what turns out to be a random jaunt in the woods – she went off to have a bit of a think, or something – and has realised that she’s the only thing standing between Aemond’s desperate desire for dragon riders and her war-averse daughter Helaena (Phia Saban) (who, incidentally, has risen on the oddball scale from “a bit eccentric” to “can confidently predict the future”).
She’s not the only one having prophetic visions. King Consort Daemon (Matt Smith) has found his loyalty to his wife and queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) wavering in recent weeks – and a visit from her sworn representative Ser Alfred Broome (Jamie Kenna) doesn’t help, given that the fair-weather lord immediately switches sides and begs Daemon to claim the crown for himself.
Thank the Gods, then, for the loyalist tattle-tale Ser Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale), whose hastily penned missive warns Rhaenyra of her risk, and even more so for Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin), whose witchy ways allow Daemon – in a sequence crammed with three-eyed ravens, Night Kings and other momentary flashes of GoT fan service – to peer into the future and witness the true horror from which Rhaenyra is so determined to save Westeros.
For Rhaenyra, however, her biggest problem for most of the episode is not dealing with rogue husbands and raging regents, but rather ill-mannered house guests, namely Ulf (Tom Bennett), the common lout turned dragon rider. Dubious class politics aside, does Ulf seem an entirely different character than he did last week? Once a loudmouthed braggart with no real spine, he’s now quite content to speak truth to power wherever he finds it. Still, he’s making himself heard, which is more than can be said for either Hugh (Kieran Bew) or Addam (Clinton Liberty), who were largely consigned to the background, along with their dragons.
At least Addam’s brother Alyn (Abubakar Salim) finally got his moment, confronting his liege lord, captain and father, Lord Corlys (Steve Toussaint), on the Driftmark docks to tell the old man what he thought of him and what it was like to grow up a bastard. This was probably the strongest scene in the episode, thanks largely to Salim, who really sunk his teeth in. I look forward to seeing him ascend the naval ranks next season.
And so to the most obviously dramatic moment of the week, as Daemon belatedly made his choice, pledging himself, his armies and his dragon to the rightful queen. Yes, it was a solid, satisfying scene – but when the most exciting thing in an episode is a man kneeling in front of his wife, that’s a problem. Still, at least it was better than what followed, as Alicent clad herself in a hooded robe left over from The Traitors and sailed off to Dragonstone to treat with Rhaenyra.
Never mind the logistics of the thing – isn’t there a massive blockade? And didn’t Aemond just give a command to search every boat leaving the harbour? It felt completely absurd. Alicent may despair at Aemond’s actions, but the idea that she would sacrifice not one but two of her children to save a third just doesn’t ring true. The season closed with what amounted to a coming-not-very-soon montage, as dragons soared over the Narrow Sea, Stark warriors marched through the Twins and Daemon admired his horde of Rivermen, when what we wanted – hell, what we deserved – was the battle itself.
A few charred corpses and a frankly embarrassing bout of mud wrestling.
Zilch.
From YouTube philosopher (which is a thing, apparently) to serious acting may be an unlikely trajectory, but it was nonetheless the one taken by Thorn. Next season, let’s hope she gets to do more than just sneering, winking and rolling about in mud.