Spoilers ahead for Episode 3 of House of the Dragon Season 2 on HBO.
The first two episodes of House of the Dragon Season 2 delivered some deaths that determined war within the Targaryen family tree was inevitable, and both the Greens and the Blacks were advancing into the riverlands in Episode 3. Daemon arrived at Harrenhal first, but his arrival wasn’t triumphant so much as spooky, and the experience reunited Matt Smith with none other than Milly Alcock for a sequence director Geeta Vasant Patel shared was highly emotional.
Geeta Vasant Patel directed the game-changing eighth episode of Season 1 before returning for Season 2, and she spoke with CinemaBlend about the Daemon-cenric twists of Episode 3 and the surreal reunion of Matt Smith and future Supergirl Milly Alcock as Daemon and Young Rhaenyra.
Matt Smith's Tearful Reunion With Milly Alcock As Daemon And Rhaenyra
First things first: how House of the Dragon handled Daemon's story to bring in Milly Alcock. Daemon Targaryen was about as paranoid as he’s ever been in Episode 3 when he was given a room at the distinctly spooky ruins of Harrenhal. Not only was he wide awake late in the night, but he’d blocked the door handles with swords to guarantee that nobody on the other side would be able to get through without breaking the door down.
Or so it seemed, anyway! The door started banging so hard that Daemon seemed like he could have used Caraxes as well as Dark Sister just in case. Shortly after, though, it became clear that Daemon wasn’t awake, because he followed the sound of a woman singing to find a figment of Rhaenyra sewing the head of young Jaehaerys – who was murdered by Blood and Cheese in the Season 2 premiere – back on.
But it wasn’t the older version of Rhaenyra played by Emma D’Arcy. Milly Alcock, who portrayed the teen version of Rhaenyra for the first five episodes of the series, reprised her role (sort of) for Daemon’s dream representation of his niece/wife, and… well, if there was any doubt that Daemon felt at least a shred of guilt and conflict over Jaehaerys’ death, I think the dream qualifies as proof to the contrary.
Milly Alcock’s appearance came as a surprise, as House of the Dragon didn’t announce that the original Rhaenyra actress would be part of the episode. When I spoke with director Geeta Vasant Patel about Episode 3, she broke down the scene:
It was a wonderful thing to have her there. I think narratively it was right on. I think the writing of that scene is brilliant in that there's only one person who can get underneath Daemon's skin, and that's Rhaenyra. And the fact that she just told him he was worthless means that he's got nothing with the adult Rhaenyra, but what he remembers [is] the person who loved him the most was the young Rhaenyra. When he walks into that dream, she turns to him, and she judges him, and is basically saying, 'You killed a young boy. How could you do that? Look at yourself.' She's the mirror for him, because otherwise he walks around and doesn't care what anyone thinks. But with Rhaenyra, she's the only person that gets to his heart. And so that's the first time that we see Damon process his actions.
Considering that Daemon’s trip to take Harrenhal in Rhaenyra’s name took place shortly after she dropped some scathing comments on him, it tracks for Daemon that his dream would be of a simpler time: when she was younger, and neither one of them could be “Your Grace” just yet. Patel went on:
When we shot that scene, something that Milly and Matt and I talked about was that this scene is the product of all the scenes before it, that if you took all the words out, she could just look at him and it would break him. And so we ran the scene many times, just finding our way to it. And at one moment, Milly looked at Matt, and his face just broke and he was in tears. Then I was in tears and many of the crew were in tears. It was such a beautiful moment of [that] this isn't Game of Thrones, this isn't House of the Dragon. This is just a man who made a mistake and just realized it.
While it's tempting to say that the dream was nothing but product of a guilty conscience and sleeping in a distinctly creepy castle, the appearance of a weirwood tree later in Daemon's dream and the appearance of Alys Rivers undoubtedly means a lot to readers of George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood.
Daemon Is A 'Broken Man'
House of the Dragon has delivered plenty of scary scenes over the two seasons so far, and Daemon has in fact been responsible for several of them, including (but not limited to) executing Vaemond in King’s Landing and killing his first wife contrary to Fire & Blood. No location has been quite as eerie as Harrenhal, however, as Daemon explored what amounted to ruins in the dark, with rain dripping down on him before finally stumbling on the people holding the castle for Larys Strong.
They wasted no time in ceding the castle to Daemon, though, and were so accommodating that it’s hard to blame Daemon for thinking they were being too nice to not secretly be trying to poison him. The locale also seemed to fit Daemon’s mood after the fight with Rhaenyra and her insistence that she can’t trust him. According to the director, the approach to Harrenhal was to shed light both on the location and Daemon’s frame of mind, as Geeta Vasant Patel shared:
There's two things. One is obviously the structure of Harrenhal. But the other thing is, every time Matt and I looked at that scene, it felt like it could have happened anytime, anywhere. A guy comes in, it's a spooky place, it's really scary. He turns around the corner, a guard sees him. He's like, 'Oh my god, it's Daemon!' and he starts running. And then Daemon enters the room, and it's like, 'Hi, I'm Daemon, I'm taking over here.' It just felt like we couldn't figure out 'why now.' I finally went back and thought about it. I thought, 'You know what, wait a minute. This isn't about a man entering Harrenhal. This is about a man who was rejected by the only woman that he's let into his life, and where he's at in that moment, and Harrenhal reflects that.'
Rhaenyra may have been leagues away at Dragonstone while Daemon was investigating Harrenhal, but his decisions were clearly informed by their last interaction. And would he really be the rogue prince – or King Consort, depending on who you ask in the world of House of the Dragon – Daemon Targaryen if he handled that well? The director went on to explain how she approached what needed to change with showrunner Ryan Condal:
So then I went back through the scene, and I sat down with Ryan. I was like, 'Wait a minute. The dragon going into Harrenhal is like a man coming out of a fight with his wife, and he's drinking and he's reckless. He could kill himself, he could jump off a bridge, or he could kill somebody. We don't know, but this is the precipice of a place that he's never been to before. And that's where it intersects with Harrenhal.' So with visual effects, we created a movement for the dragon, we created a tone for that scene that was different than what we'd had before. Before a dragon was just flying through, and now we made this, what I call the drunken dragon, flying through this weather. Then when Daemon arrives into Harrenhal, I didn't want it to feel like Marvel. It's not a superhero. This is actually a broken man, so we changed those plans too.
Daemon is never more deadly than when he's on the back of Caraxes, but his state of mind in Episode 3 is a far cry from when he was roasting enemies en masse in the Stepstones back in Season 1. As the director pointed out, he was certainly not in superhero mode. Geeta Vasant Patel also credited other departments for their contributions, specifically naming cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt, who spoke with CinemaBlend about Episode 3. Patel continued:
We came in and Daemon is going through Harrenhal, and the one reference I used was Silence of the Lambs. Someone who's in a place he doesn't know, and for the first time, we see a different side of Daemon. Someone who is perhaps vulnerable and doesn't know where to go. He's been thrown out of his house. What's scripted was that he walks up, and he sees the guard, and the guard runs, and he lets the guard run. Instead, he's so emotional. He's so full of pain, but he is Daemon, who speaks in violence. So, Matt and I... decided that it was better if Daemon beats the hell out of that guy, because that's what he would do. Even though the guy was gonna run away. That's Daemon, because he's having a really bad day and if you get in his way, we wish you luck. So we shot it both ways, and that's what made the cut in the end.
The guard who encountered Daemon in a particularly painful time while in Harrenhal had some spectacularly bad luck, because Season 1 established that when Daemon is in a mood, somebody is likely to get punched... at the very least. Of course, Daemon wasn't just brooding over his wife or dreaming strange dreams during his time in Harrenhal. His insistence that he be called "Your Grace" is a change from Fire & Blood, and may suggest that Rhaenyra has to seriously consider if he husband wants to rule the Seven Kingdoms instead of her. Traditionally, the husband of a reigning queen would be Prince Consort, without any title of King.
All in all, it's safe to say that Daemon is no less complicated in the riverlands than he was in Dragonstone, King's Landing, or the Stepstones, and the war between Targaryens is still in its earliest stages. It's likely that forces from the Blacks will join him sooner rather than later in order to make a stand against the Greens. As Daemon has pointed out, the Blacks have the advantage when it comes to dragons, but it remains to be seen if Vhagar will be unleashed on the riverlands now that Criston Cole is Aegon's Hand.
Keep tuning in to HBO on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET for new episodes of House of the Dragon, or stream every episode so far now with a Max subscription.
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