House of the Dragon

[music]

0:00:04.5 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke, I’m Landry Ayres. Winter has come and gone, and after a disappointing end to the original Game of Thrones series, we found ourselves back in Westeros once more for a historical look at George R. R. Martin’s world. Joining me today to discuss House of the Dragon, our deputy managing editor at Reason, our old friend, Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:29.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Can’t get rid of me that fast.

[chuckle]

0:00:31.0 Landry Ayres: As well as a first time guest on the show, senior editor at Reason, Robby Soave.

0:00:38.6 Robby Soave: Thanks for having me.

0:00:42.1 Landry Ayres: I don’t know about either of you, but I really had no intention of watching House of the Dragon when it was announced and really when it was promoted. You know, there are banners and ads all over these major cities talking about it. And I was like, I… They completely lost me at the end of Game of Thrones. I loved the first 95% of that series, watched it every week, was part of the sort of collective experience of seeing it week to week and really enjoyed it and completely lost me at the end. So I had no desire to watch it. But after some urging from Natalie in particular here, I decided to give it a chance and I was pleasantly surprised. And I think a lot of people were had a pretty good reaction to this series. So what was it about House of the Dragon and how this first season unfolded that you think allowed for that redemption of this series and this world that they live in? What was different about this that allowed it to sort of stake its own claim in Westeros?

0:01:48.9 Robby Soave: They’re just… They’re trying harder. The people who making it are clearly actually trying in the way that they were trying. And I totally agree with what you just said, through the first 95% of Game of Thrones. You know, what’s so sad and so frustrating about that is they just kind of stopped at the end. They stopped caring. They stopped writing… Like they use the same line of dialog for Jon Snow over and over and over again in the last four episodes. He just, he says literally the same thing. You can see a… The fact that you can see a coffee cup on screen with less valid…

0:02:20.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I was just about to say that.

0:02:21.0 Robby Soave: Is emblematic of the lack of care, attention to detail that they were paying by the end. This which I think, I get the sense might not have happened if George R. R. Martin had been as involved in the Game of Thrones show as he is in this show. So he is so involved in House of the Dragon. I think it’s very funny to compare, like House of the Dragon is advanced mode, like they were… In Game of Thrones, they changed the name of one of the characters, Theon sister, right? They they change her name from Osha in the series to Yara ’cause they were concerned that Osha was too similar a name to another character, to the Wildling woman who takes care of Brad. Can you imagine that now in House of the Dragon, none of the… Like two characters have the same… There’s Aegon, Aemond, another Aegon, a Daemon, Rhaenyra, Rhaenys, Rhaella. Like they’re not even… They’re just saying “Keep up, keep up with us”. That’s George R. R. Martins storytelling and it’s great. It works.

0:03:27.2 Robby Soave: It expects something of the audience, and it treats the audience like a mature audience that is gonna try to wanna figure out some of these things. And it’s just working. It’s just really working. It got better and better as it went on. And I’m so happy to have that experience again that we were having, I would say through the first six seasons of Game of Thrones, at least.

0:03:48.9 Natalie Dowzicky: I also think… I was saying this to Landry earlier. I think House of Dragon did a very, very good job. If you hadn’t watched Game of Thrones, which I mean, all of us have watched Game of Thrones and watched it as it came out. If you hadn’t watched Game of Thrones, you still could like enjoy House of the Dragon and know what was going on and did not need the Game of Thrones context. And I do think House of the Dragon did a better job, at least in this first season of like kind of laying the groundwork than Game of Thrones did, because Game of Thrones in the very beginning, I felt like was a little cluster, like a little clustery in terms of like trying to understand who was important, who wasn’t important and kind of like the narratives that you needed to pay attention to.

0:04:32.9 Natalie Dowzicky: And I found far less people being confused about the first season of House of the Dragon than you did like during the first season of Game of Thrones where everyone was like, “I’m not really sure who I should care about”. And also, then they killed half the characters that I thought I was caring about, which I mean, there’s much, much more death to come. But [chuckle] I think House of the Dragon did a much better job of like not holding the hand of the audience because there’s like the diehard Game of Thrones fans still enjoyed it and didn’t think it was too loose. But I think it did a good job of also being open to an audience that isn’t like so immersed into the Game of Thrones universe too. ‘Cause I had like three or four friends that did not watch Game of Thrones that loved House of the Dragon and now they wanna go back and watch Game of Thrones.

0:05:16.0 Landry Ayres: I was really interested and particular about the groundwork that they set because there is a directorial choice that they make at the very, very beginning of this new series, which I don’t remember happening frequently in Game of Thrones if they did at all, which is the use of narration and voiceover, which kind of fixes the perspective and point of view for the story from the beginning. And it’s, I believe it’s Rhaenyra who’s talking about her father, Viserys at all this time. And it kind of fixes the point of view and lets you know that you’re seeing these events unfolding as she would have perceived them or even heard about them if she wasn’t there. And I thought that was interesting because the original Game of Thrones novels obviously bounce between different perspectives and in first person, whereas you get this detached third person viewing point when you watch the entire series, which creates a bit of a disconnect between the two. Whereas this one, it feels a little more cohesive and says that while we’re gonna get this sprawling story about this whole conflict and vying for a succession and the throne and all of this, really Rhaenyra is where we start and is actually where we end the series. It’s her perspective and her change that we start with and where we end. So I think this is a good opportunity to ask about her character because it’s so central to the plot.

0:06:56.0 Landry Ayres: Are we supposed to root for Rhaenyra? Should we, in that way? Because she’s a great character. She’s very interesting and complex and has gone through a lot of things, especially when you juxtapose her with a character like Daenerys, which invites a lot of comparisons when looking at Game of Thrones. So what do we make of her character?

0:07:18.1 Robby Soave: Yeah. So I’m a big fan of Rhaenyra from the source material. I should say I’m extremely familiar with the source material. And actually, the way the source material is structured is so different from the way the Game of Thrones source material is structured that actually speaks to some of the differences you were just getting at. Because Game of Thrones, the books are a narrative. Like each chapter is from Aerya’s perspective or it’s from Brad’s perspective or it’s from Sansa’s perspective. Whereas the House of the Dragons source material is like a history textbook. So it’s from the perspective of a couple different historians who are revisiting these events sometime later and recalling them. And those historians have their biases and they have disagreements about how the events happened. And the show has handled that very smartly. Like, for instance, the fire at Harrenhal where Rhaenyra’s lover Harwin Strong dies and also the Hand of the King, Lyonel Strong.

0:08:20.4 Robby Soave: So in the source material, historians don’t know what caused that event. So some people speculate that yes, Larys Strong, the vindictive, disabled scheming younger brother did it. Or some people think it was just a natural occurrence that Harrenhal’s cursed. Some people think Viserys ordered it because he was annoyed by the shame brought to Rhaenyra. In the source material, Laenor, her Rhaenyra’s husband, who leaves, is actually believed to be killed from the way the parents would believe it. So they added to a lot of… They put some ambiguity. So in those cases, they actually took out ambiguity because they showed you what actually happened. But then they nod to like Rhaenyra and Daemon’s first hookup, that night of awakening for Rhaenyra. In the source material is that like there are rumors that happened. There are rumors that didn’t happen. There are rumors the Criston Cole thing happened. There are rumors that didn’t happen. And even the way they shot it made it kind of ambiguous, if you know what I mean.

0:09:15.9 Robby Soave: So I loved their choices on all those lines really well. But overall, yes, Rhaenyra is a main character in this. The way she was, I would say, one of like four main characters from the source material. You really do… You’re set up to just kind of have to root for her, right? She’s great. I love her from the source material. I think my one complaint is I like to ironically or in a contrarian way support characters. And it probably in the source material, it’s a little bit more ambiguous that like there are good things about the greens and bad things about the greens. There are good things about the blacks and there are bad things about the blacks. In this, it’s like, I don’t know how anyone could be rooting for the green. Everyone’s on Rhaenyra’s side. Like Daemon’s problematic behavior aside, like everyone wants the Rhaenyra faction to win.

0:10:06.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. Honestly, I kind of still love Daemon because I think…

[chuckle]

0:10:11.3 Natalie Dowzicky: I think he’s… And I know they were trying really hard, especially in the, I wanna say the first five episodes to get us to not like him. But I think his character is so interesting and complex. I think there’s a lot going on there. I think he is one of the characters that there’s just so much more like nuance to his role. And also like, gosh, what was the one episode that like, I think he had one line in the whole episode or one or two lines in the whole episode and he was by far the best actor in that episode. But I do, my one problem with Daemon is I didn’t… I wasn’t like quite on the like crab feeder narrative. I was like, “Is this really necessary?” I know they needed to set up that like he went away and fought for… And that’s why he like disappeared for so many years. But then he just comes out of nowhere after years of fighting and was like, “Yeah, now, I’m going to win the battle”, just to shove it to Viserys basically.

0:11:07.8 Robby Soave: Yeah, that was dumb. That was dumb.

0:11:11.3 Natalie Dowzicky: That whole plot line was like a little tenuous, I think. Also just didn’t seem like incredibly relevant. But there’s… I don’t know a single person that’s like, “Yeah, I’m on team Alicent”.

[laughter]

0:11:26.9 Natalie Dowzicky: I just don’t, I just don’t get it. Rhaenyra, well, they’re setting us up to love Rhaenyra ’cause then she’s going to do all this crazy stuff and we’re going to have to be like, “Damn, we were already on her wagon”, so now like…

0:11:37.0 Robby Soave: And I can root for bad people. By the end of Game of Thrones, I love Cersei. I wanted her to win. I was like, “What?” No, she’s a modern ruler. She has separated church and state. She’s done with all this nonsense. It would be fitting if she just won. So I can support the bad people. I just don’t feel that way at all about Alicent’s faction.

0:12:00.0 Landry Ayres: Right. There’s nothing… Alicent doesn’t have the same type of charisma that someone like a Daemon or a Cersei has. There’s a certain level of status or it’s almost vindictive the way that she acts out of it. And it seems kind of childish and like it doesn’t have control. She doesn’t get that type of like really a firm grasp on what her power is until much later in the series, whereas someone like Cersei or Daemon is, comes out of the gate and it’s like, “I know who I am and what I’m capable of”. And that confidence and self assurance is alluring, even if it’s coming from really dangerous people, which I think is another lesson that this show can sort of talk about for the charisma of leaders and how we allow ourselves to slide into more authoritarian ways of doing things just because we like personalities, even if the actions that they take are less than savory at the best.

0:13:04.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I do think a weird part of Alicent’s character is that it’s almost as if she’s trying to come off as naive in some ways. And I say that ’cause like, I don’t think… I would not give her the status of being conniving, like I would say Cersei is. But the scene, I think it was in the last episode where she’s sitting with the council and she’s acting surprised that they’ve been working behind her back to try and get Aegon on the throne. And I’m like, “Wouldn’t you have assumed this?” I was like, this seems silly that… She was like, Well, I was trying to do it in a way that was like more accepted”. And I was like, “Of course all these crazy dudes are like, no, we’re going to do it this way”. And this is like, I just don’t… I think she is a little bit more naïve, like if you compare it to Cersei, certainly. And it’s like, I don’t… She’s like almost… I wish she was more conniving, honestly, I wish she was more evil. [chuckle]

0:14:05.0 Robby Soave: I mean, she wants to put her beautiful baby boy on the Iron Throne. She always has wanted to, like that’s her motivation.

0:14:09.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, but he doesn’t want it.

0:14:11.4 Robby Soave: That’s an understandable motivation, that’s the… From a historical or even real life perspective, people want their house to prosper, et cetera, and this is a opportunity, and is animated, I guess, by the idea that if you’re looking for some legitimacy to what the greens are doing that yes, that, that Rhaenyra’s children are not legitimate, are not actually Laenor Velaryon’s or whatever, but…

0:14:37.4 Landry Ayres: The line that always gets talked about is like “The people won’t respect the leader if they’re not truly the heir to the throne” or “If Rhaenyra is named, even though Viserys has named her as his heir and will become queen that the people won’t respect her because she’s a woman”. And there’s this… They bandy about this like fear of a, like a populist uprising where in reality, most of the like problems and fighting and what’s going to prevent people from ruling effectively, at least in this era of Westeros, it seems is the people who are, you know, behind the scenes making everything happen, the people on the council, the hand, the other Lords and keeps across Westeros, whereas the, the common people are kind of detached and don’t really seem to care.

0:15:32.1 Robby Soave: 100%. They have to be herded into the dragon pit for the coronation. Actually, the way their expressions are shot in that whole thing is so indicative, which really they don’t care. They can’t tell this people apart.

0:15:41.4 Natalie Dowzicky: They do not careful.

0:15:42.9 Robby Soave: They can’t tell one blonde haired person from another. Like they have this, “Oh, a new King. That’s nice”. They probably don’t know what the name of the current King is.

0:15:52.0 Landry Ayres: Which would, which would track with what like the real comparative, I don’t know, the literacy rate of the 12th century or something, which is about what we’re equivalent to according to George R. R. Martin.

0:16:03.0 Robby Soave: They don’t… The small folk, they don’t care at all. If there’s gonna be a rejection of Rhaenyra for whatever reason, it’s gonna be, well, maybe the nobles were going to do it. But the people are so, they care about the price of bread, they’re inflation voters here, they don’t have a vote.

0:16:21.0 Natalie Dowzicky: In that scene, there’s this funny, they like pan to the crowd a few times and a few people are looking over like, “Oh, should we clap now?”

[laughter]

0:16:29.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh, you’re clapping. I’ll clap to you”. That’s literally what that scene was like.

0:16:33.5 Landry Ayres: I really did expect like Otto Hightower to pull a please clap at some point and it like…

[laughter]

0:16:39.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Hold the sign up.

0:16:45.0 Landry Ayres: One of the things, I think Rhaenyra says it at one point, they’re talking about like, what’s going to ruin House Targaryen early on in this series. And I think she says like the only thing that could tear it apart was itself. And when you take a big picture, I guess it is the entire house of the dragon, even though it breaks into factions and all these different houses because of all the marrying off and people taking different holds and things like that. But what really is, do you think, is there one cause, whether narratively or sort of in the structure of the world or within the Red Keep that caused this descent into chaos and conflict that we’re obviously going to see in season two that everything is built up to? Is it this like slow crumbling of institutions that people are scared about with Viserys being named king because of the Jaehaerys the first having to name the contested succession and then him naming his daughter and not having a son and everyone trying to figure out who’s going to come next?

0:18:00.3 Landry Ayres: Is it this lack of constitutional rule that… They say like, “Well, the law is… ” and they say, “Well, whatever the king says is law”. And then everything comes breaks at the point where Viserys dies and Alicent is just like, well, at the very end he told me this. So it’s about what the king says, but only one person hears it, but everybody goes with it anyway. So is it that, is it people scheming behind the scenes? Is it that none of this matters and they have lost the support of the people? What do you think is really at play here? And what do you think that is trying to say about modern politics today? Because I think we can’t talk about this without making some sort of link and why it’s so resonant with audiences.

0:18:42.7 Robby Soave: I think it’s dynastic and territorial. Westeros has at this point even, I would say probably even weaker legal institutions than the comparative time period, which is medieval England, which at least has the Magna Carta after King John, et cetera. This is really… It’s the king’s word, it’s the law. I guess the religious kind… The church is a little bit of a check on the king, but it doesn’t seem like it’s any more of a check than the medieval church was, it’s comparable to that. Yeah, we see… I know from reading or listening to what George R. R. Martin’s inspirations are, he’s very inspired by the War of the Roses, The Hundred Years’ War, et cetera, in medieval England, even though his world is the size of like South America, but it’s the kind of English medieval history which a lot of those, those constant wars mostly fought on personalities, mostly personality based conflict that one son fights another or that you have multiple marriages.

0:19:53.8 Robby Soave: It’s very familiar in that way. And that’s kind of what is happening. I think in the modern, it shows you how easy that is to happen if you don’t have strong institutions, if you don’t have… If you don’t have legal norms, clear checks on the, the the sovereign’s authority, either vis-​a-​vis a constitutional system or just some kind of… Or even in the kind of absolutism sense where still there’s the Leviathan, right? There’s still some kind of consent from the governed being given to the monarch, like we’re before that, we’re just… And then, but the… A major difference being these forces have access to the equivalent of nuclear weaponry. And they are the only force that has them. They’re the US before the Soviets get these missiles. So no one can stand against like, no one can oppose House Targaryen except other elements within House Targaryen. It’s very interesting… While they’re doing the counting in that last episode, Daemon’s going, “Okay, we have this many dragons, they have this many dragons and we would probably win, but like every… Because we have literally more dragons, but they have the biggest dragon, and everything will be set on fire and everyone will die if we do this”.

0:21:12.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I do think too, what’s interesting, I was talking about this with someone recently, but if… Would this all have happened had Alicent not heard what she thought she heard when Viserys died? Absolutely. This still would have happened. And they would have like…

0:21:28.0 Landry Ayres: It would still happen.

0:21:31.1 Natalie Dowzicky: So it would still happen. If that was just like a convenient, like, “Oh, I knew I was right, but anyway, he like validated that for me”. So I still think that would have happened. I think it’s an interesting, within the House Targaryen, they’re trying to figure out who’s in the end group. So, there’s this struggle over who’s more Targaryen in that sense, which like the whole scene was like counting the, “Well, they have seven dragons and we have 13”. And I mean, one of their dragons is basically like a puppy. So it’s not all that helpful.

[laughter]

0:22:08.2 Natalie Dowzicky: But I think there’s this… They all have this overwhelming cell sense of like, “Oh, we represent House Targaryen and we’re stronger than them”, whoever them may be. But the weird thing about this is like, there was the, I think it was in the last two episodes, the greens were wearing, obviously wearing the house Targaryen emblem because they’re Targaryens, but it was visually in there, like “Green get up”. And I was like, “That looks so wrong”, because they’re like so used to seeing the red and the black. And he was like, “They can’t stomp on our ground”. But there’s also the weird power dynamic that goes on in there because like I mentioned earlier, like Aegon, Alicent’s oldest son, Aegon, not the other Aegon that’s coming. Like when they’re in the carriage and they’re trying to find him, he’s like, “I don’t want… “, basically says, “I don’t wanna be king”. And so, there’s also like a weird power struggle going on there too, that he’s like, “Why are you looking for me? Like, I don’t need to be king. Like I never wanted this”. And Alicent’s like, “No, you’re gonna sit down, you’re gonna shut up. You’re going to be king”, [chuckle] which is like another weird like power dynamic going on that he was like, “Well, this has been assigned to me”.

0:23:24.1 Natalie Dowzicky: And it’s obvious, very obvious to me that Aemond wants to be king and I can’t wait to see how that unfolds. [chuckle]

0:23:31.4 Landry Ayres: Well, here’s the thing about Aemond, Aemond wants to be king. We all know it. Aegon doesn’t wanna be king. He’s not fit to be king. I’m sure that there’s…

0:23:40.1 Natalie Dowzicky: No, I think he wants to be king now, but when they first were like, when Viserys first died, he was like, “I don’t want this”.

0:23:45.7 Landry Ayres: Well, yes. Exactly.

0:23:46.8 Natalie Dowzicky: But I think now he’s like a power hungry Joffrey, right? He looked at… He had crazy in his eyes just like Joffrey did when he was holding the sword above the crowd. Like it was screaming Joffrey.

0:23:57.0 Landry Ayres: It’s true. It took that for him to realize what the power of the Iron Throne would really be. But I don’t know why Aemond who has, who knew what this was from the very beginning, didn’t just kill his brother when he had the chance. I was like, this is easy and no one would be that upset. Like you get rid of the two guys who were chasing him. You get Criston Cole or whatever. I can’t remember which one he was chasing.

0:24:23.0 Natalie Dowzicky: That’s right. It was with Criston.

0:24:23.9 Landry Ayres: But I don’t understand why they weren’t just like, this guy would be much more… I mean, I don’t know if he’d be a good king necessarily. He seems kind of cunning in that way, but he’d be more effective in that way. But I guess they have too much respect for like lineage and succession in that way.

0:24:43.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I honestly thought, because I have not read this book, so I honestly thought that when Aemond was like went looking for his brother with Criston Cole, I thought that Aemond’s whole aim and that whole like 10, 15 minute scene was to kill Aegon.

0:24:57.3 Landry Ayres: Yeah, I agree.

0:25:00.1 Robby Soave: I mean, but like he’s… Okay, he’s a bad dude, but he’s not that bad, I guess. Like he felt a little bad after he caused his nephew to be eaten by his dragon, right? He had that expression of like…

0:25:08.9 Natalie Dowzicky: His nephew/​cousin?

0:25:12.2 Robby Soave: No, it’s just… Well, yes, they’re all related in multiple ways, but yeah, their most direct would be nephew. But he…

0:25:18.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:25:20.0 Robby Soave: It would be… I think it would have been a little bit of a stretch if he just straight up murdered his brother for the throne. Like also he loves his mom, right? Their like mom would have been upset about that. It would have been, I think it would have been a little out, like again, bad dude, but not, that would have been on a next level just to like, just to straight up kill his older brother.

0:25:41.8 Landry Ayres: Sure. Yeah, we’ve got to get to like season three maybe before we just start jumping the shark like that.

0:25:45.7 Robby Soave: Yeah.

0:25:46.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay. But the other… That reminds me of like when the other person that I definitely thought should have died right away was when Otto came to tell Rhaenyra that Aegon was now king. I just, I wanted Rhaenyra just to… ’cause the dragons like perched up on the little bridge behind him. I was like, “Just blow him to bits. Come on”.

0:26:09.1 Robby Soave: I mean, if you kill the messengers, then you stop getting messages. Right? I think she had enough…

0:26:13.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I guess so.

0:26:14.3 Robby Soave: Self-​awareness there. Like there’s a long tradition in there. I read Romance of the Kingdoms, is a Chinese historical novel about the warring states period in like 200 AD. And the novel, it’s actually a little bit like this ’cause it’s real history, but the novel is like written later and is biased towards one of the factions and then adds all these magical elements. But like they’re always sending messengers and then you always, you get the messenger like, “Oh, screw you”, and then you behead the messenger and then you’re like, “Who would take this job?” as like, “Oh yeah, I’ll deliver messages to the rival kingdom”. Like the death rate of that is astronomical.

0:26:49.2 Landry Ayres: It’s them being like, “I think I could change him”.

[laughter]

0:26:54.0 Robby Soave: You know, work for us.

0:26:56.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, I guess technically, Jacaerys, I get the two… Which one’s the younger of Rhaenyra’s?

0:27:03.9 Robby Soave: Lucerys is the RIP.

0:27:05.4 Natalie Dowzicky: The one who died.

0:27:06.5 Robby Soave: Sweet little boy.

0:27:06.6 Landry Ayres: That’s true.

0:27:07.0 Natalie Dowzicky: The one who died is Lucerys?

0:27:08.0 Robby Soave: Is Lucerys.

0:27:09.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay, so…

0:27:09.9 Robby Soave: Lucerys is the older heir.

0:27:12.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Lucerys was technically a messenger and he died.

0:27:14.0 Robby Soave: Yeah.

0:27:16.1 Landry Ayres: Well, yeah, he was a messenger and not a warrior. And that’s what makes it extra sad, yeah.

0:27:20.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay. But in terms of a visual aspect of the way that that whole scene was shot, with the shadow of the dragon above his little baby dragon, that was beautiful. Like absolutely beautifully done. And I think it gave like, it gave us good scope and also like there was enough nuance to that scene. ‘Cause like you were saying earlier that Daemon, or not Daemon, Aemond, all these names sound the same.

[chuckle]

0:27:44.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Aemond was like, wasn’t trying to kill his nephew, he was just trying to take his eye, or… And he was like, “Oh, my bad. Like he’s dead now”.

0:27:55.5 Robby Soave: And that was… Actually, that’s another example of it being a little bit different from the source material in the way, because in the source material, it’s just obviously no one was there to witness that. His body, the dragon’s body and the kids, but like wash up on the shore of Storm’s End the next day. And that everybody saw the dragon fly after him. So it’s reported that Aemond straight up murdered Lucerys, whereas in this interpretation, now the way we’re seeing it, we’re seeing that, well, I think he’s still very much at fault. Maybe it looks like he kind of lost control of Vhagar and didn’t quite mean for it to happen. But that’s not something you would know if you’re just reading the history. In the history of Westeros, it’s written that Aemond chose violence, kicked off that war because he just did that. So that… It’s very interesting in that way.

0:28:42.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, it was also, it was answering to the foreshadowing from earlier, because I think it was Viserys in like the first or second, pretty early on the first, second or third episode made this comment about how like, “We have the dragons, but we don’t control them”. And it was like a kind of a throwaway line at the time, but then now, I already went back and watched it. And it was like very clear that he was trying to say like, “Oh, sometimes, we can’t exactly control these huge beasts that like we’re very fortunate and lucky to have, and no one else has them”, and they just kind of go off the rails. Although, technically, Lucerys dragons started it, right? Because he’s chasing him. And then Lucerys dragon does a little fireball and they’re like, “Oh no, you’re done for”.

0:29:30.0 Robby Soave: We’re already showing more of the many, many sins of the very end of the original series of Game of Thrones, is just having wildly different dragon rules from minute to minute. Like dragons invincible, no one can stop them. They shrug off arrows. They shrug off your stupid little stronger, I forget what the… Arbalest bolts or whatever they were, in ome minute…

0:29:50.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, the bolts things.

0:29:50.7 Robby Soave: Then next minute, “Nope. Easy to take them by surprise, easily killed by them”. Then the next minute, “No, we’ve put them on… Every plank in the city is armed to the teeth with these. Nope. Can’t hit it. Invincible can’t be stopped”. It was just so frustrating, just so annoying. So now we’re back to no, it is a Daemon said it, I think in this last episode, “It’s impossible to kill a dragon. Very, very, very, very difficult. But dragons, when they fight, they kill each other. And so those are the rules we’re operating with. That makes sense. And cool”.

0:30:24.2 Landry Ayres: We mentioned earlier about the complete lack of care of the small folk in the world of Westeros and in King’s Landing specifically that we got a bit of a sneak peek at during the coronation. Is it just me? I don’t know. And I don’t know if it would work. So I’m curious to kind of bounce this around with people. ‘Cause I think it would be really interesting. I would love a Downton Abbey style, upstairs, downstairs, or like a lower decks, at least even if it’s just an episode, like we get a one-​off episode that is, we follow one of the people that is in the midst of the Red Keep. It’s one of the people that has to like bring the tea to Rhaenyra or to…

0:31:07.8 Natalie Dowzicky: The cup boy, right?

0:31:08.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah, the cup boy, or the woman who’s lighting the candles, who sends the messages to the white worm. Like there’s so many people, so many more people involved in the daily goings on that make the kind of banal events of a Regency drama really interesting and compelling, but we only get them from the really high perspective of the people who are specifically involved. And I wanna know, I want to see those events from the perspective of someone who is not a member of one of these like landed gentry or something like that. So I’m curious about if you think that would work or if it would lose the kind of Game of Thrones quality of it because so much of the series is about the like people vying for power. I was just curious about that ’cause I think it’s a dynamic that is missing from the show that we only get very brief like sneak peeks of and they only become important for for small events, but I think it’s much more than that.

0:32:22.2 Robby Soave: I absolutely agree with that. I think it would be very useful. Yes, and to see more perspectives that are not among the royalty. Some of the best moments of sequences in Game of Thrones occasionally dealt with things like that. I’m thinking of Arya and the Hounds explorations through the Riverlands where they really see firsthand the devastation this dynastic war has caused. They interact with people who are living through hell over it. And in the books, in Game of Thrones, occasionally, they’ll introduce usually a one-​off perspective. Oftentimes it starts the book or it ends the book of some other character maybe some character of insignificance who has some… Who interacts in a very interesting way, that one of my favorites that is not… It was not duplicated in the show at all, is this character in Old Town who is studying to be a maester and failing at it and he’s like getting drunk with his friends at the bar and you see edges of other characters there, it seems that one of his bar drinking buddies is actually one of the Sand Snakes impersonating a male to study at the…

0:33:32.0 Robby Soave: And then, the resolution of that story that he interacts with someone who’s like a… Who needs something from him and it very much seems like that person is probably Jaqen H’ghar, the face change, but it’s not confirmed, you don’t know, it’s just hinted at and then that’s never revisited until very… And then later, like chapters and chapters later Sam sees that character and there’s some some indication that that character has been replaced by Jaqen H’ghar. And it’s so cool, it’s so cool ’cause it’s not that you just… You have to really read between the lines on it, it’s just a theory people have. So I would love more of that, the goings on at the Red Keep. And we did get a little bit of that in the… It was hinted at I guess in the the greens episode where you have the cup boy reporting to the maid reporting to etc, but yeah, absolutely, we’re missing that perspective a little bit.

0:34:24.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. I guess all we really got was the, when we’re looking for Aegon, we’re going through the streets a little bit more and we’re like did that… There was the brief child fighting scene, which was also kind of odd and then…

0:34:38.8 Robby Soave: That was kind of extra.

0:34:40.2 Natalie Dowzicky: It was… Yeah, it was very confusing because I thought, I kept telling Robby, I was like, “Oh, I think they’re gonna play into more the fact that like Aegon has a bunch of bastards”, which they were already hinting at because they were showing all the blonde children that are now child fighters but that was more to just evoke that he’s crazy and doesn’t give a crap about anything and whatever. But I guess, I’m thinking about it like from a perspective, so if we got the perspective of a local person at the coronation, so they’re being like, they they had… The way they did is they had like Rhaenys being like shoveled in instead of us seeing it as a townfolk, so we’re seeing like Rhaenys being shoveled in ’cause she gets separated from, oh my gosh, what is that guy’s name? She got separated from one of her…

0:35:29.8 Robby Soave: Is that Eric?

0:35:30.2 Landry Ayres: Eric?

0:35:30.5 Robby Soave: Yeah.

0:35:30.9 Landry Ayres: Yeah.

0:35:31.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Eric, yeah, yeah. So she gets separated from Ser Eric, and then she’s being shuffled in and obviously she can tell something is wrong. And then we see that whole scene from her perspective also because then she comes to the floor with her dragon. But could you imagine if we followed someone else in that shuffle being like whether it’s a shop owner or brothel person, whatever, and they’re getting shoved down this place, they have no idea why and then that… It gets disrupted by a dragon coming through the floor and just like…

0:36:04.0 Robby Soave: And disrupted, people killed, you would… That would be like…

0:36:06.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:36:07.0 Robby Soave: You survived, that’s like the day you went to the Boston Marathon or something and then when the…

0:36:11.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Exactly.

0:36:11.9 Robby Soave: Massacre happened, that would be your memory of it.

0:36:14.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. And also, then you would assume that if these are just like Lyman not understanding all the dynamics that are going on within the Targaryen family, you would assume then that that person whoever were getting from that perspective would see Rhaenys as like a terrorist because she came and killed all these people during a coronation of a king. So that is like a completely different dynamic. Don’t get me wrong, I love, I really like Rhaenys, but I do recognize that she slaughtered a bunch of people by doing that. But she, I think getting it from that perspective would have been interesting even if it was like a 10 minute bit. When like Rhaenys was like supposed to be getting her dragon or whatever and then we like cut back to it. But yeah, I do think that Aemon is missing a little bit.

0:37:00.0 Robby Soave: But the common folk not liking the dragons necessarily is something to watch for and pay attention as the show develops, then which would make sense.

0:37:08.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I also think… Yeah. I think it was also, like maybe there wasn’t really enough time in this first season to get more perspectives like that partially because of the time jump which I do think the time jump was executed pretty well considering you changed almost all the major cast members. We had babies going to mid teenage years, so I think it was executed well. So it had… It did get like a decent amount of criticism online for being a little chunky and like “Why didn’t you just start there instead of doing the time jump?” but I honestly appreciated the forward… Like was that first five episodes, right? I think it was five, five or six.

0:37:54.8 Robby Soave: Yeah.

0:37:55.5 Natalie Dowzicky: That were before the time jump partially just because I loved… Oh my gosh, it’s not Emma. Is it DRC who is the first one?

0:38:03.9 Robby Soave: Milly Alcock is the other one.

0:38:05.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Yes.

0:38:05.8 Robby Soave: Yeah.

0:38:06.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Yes.

0:38:07.9 Robby Soave: Too great.

0:38:08.2 Natalie Dowzicky: I love that actress and she did a fantastic job.

0:38:10.2 Landry Ayres: She was really really great.

0:38:10.3 Natalie Dowzicky: So did DRC. So that transition was very good. But I do think they gave themselves a bit of a challenge doing a time jump like that but I think they executed it well. I don’t know, some people were angry online about it.

0:38:26.9 Robby Soave: That was great, but…

0:38:27.0 Landry Ayres: I was… I thought it was great there were some times where I was like why did this person get recast but this person didn’t. It was…

0:38:33.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Ser Criston Cole has not aged.

0:38:36.3 Robby Soave: I wanna get on Ser Criston’s skincare routine.

0:38:40.1 Landry Ayres: Yeah. I mean, whatever he’s got, sign me up, I will do it.

0:38:43.6 Robby Soave: I guess just being angry for 20 years is he’s skincare rountine.

0:38:46.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, but then you would have wrinkles.

0:38:48.6 Robby Soave: Feeling spurned for years.

0:38:50.0 Landry Ayres: But I guess he just has to contain his anger for… It’s the fact that he’s a knight and has to just look so stoic all the time probably, that’s probably what it is.

0:39:00.8 Robby Soave: The time zones were necessary. If you’re gonna be this faithful to the source material as I think it was appropriate to be and we’ve we’ve seen that being faithful to George R. R. Martin vision is actually a good thing. You had the… There are so many kids and if you are gonna keep all of those kids, every single one of them, not consolidate any of them, you could see how without George R. R. Martin, the Benioff Weiss, the people who did Game of Thrones, they would have consolidated some of those children. If we’re gonna have all of them and we’re gonna… And we wanted to communicate to the audience who’s whose and that… Rhaenyra and Damon are both married to different people… Are married to different people who are siblings, and then married to each other, like to fully understand that and not be confused you had to do it this way.

0:39:48.0 Robby Soave: Like if you would just dropped us all into episode eight which is after the last time jump, we’d be like “Why do we care about these kids wait? Who are… Why are they… It wouldn’t have made any sense, so I think given their commitment to telling the story as it actually is it was necessary and it was handled, it was executed pretty well.

0:40:04.3 Landry Ayres: And then you also get to see the development of these people’s motives which is so much of what’s interesting about the show is them coming to… And I was really struck, Game of Thrones was always exciting and interesting and I liked the sort of the twists and you’re always wondering what’s going to happen, but there were only a few like handful of times where I was like… And and this might be just me there might be other people that feel differently but I was like emotionally invested in characters where I was like, “Wow I’m really feeling something right now”, other than a you know a handful of times. But there were multiple times even for you know Viserys from the beginning, by the time they’re having that dinner in episode eight and he is like demanding that everyone sit around and just like be cordial for this dinner and it’s so tense it was such it was a very emotional moment for him to see them start tense and then begin to relax and unwind and you can tell there’s like all of this tension that he begins to sort of release and it was really what was holding him together and that at the end of that dinner is when he begins his like descent and begins to die effectively.

0:41:20.5 Landry Ayres: And it was a very, very emotional moment where you had seen years of this man’s life build up to this and all of the hidden feelings and the dramatic irony of some people know things that others don’t and the hidden motivations all came to a head and if you had just dropped in at that moment without any of that context, it would have been so sorely lacking, which to me makes it seem like you could pick almost any period in Westeros and with sufficient time and exploration you could probably make a compelling story. Princess Rhaenys her entire like fight for the Iron Throne when she wanted to be on it rather than Viserys, we could follow her instead of Rhaenyra and from the beginning of her story, that would be just as interesting if given the time and had the story been written for that. So I think it really is just a testament to the careful hand of the writing that if followed, like Robby was saying, if you really follow George R. R. Martin’s vision you’re going to understand the spirit of what makes these stories compelling rather than try and turn it into something that it isn’t, which is what happened with the original series.

0:42:49.0 Natalie Dowzicky: That scene was also fantastic because it was so relatable, ’cause we were talking about like… Everyone online was talking about like “Oh, this is what Thanksgiving dinner is like”. Thanksgiving dinner after the 2016 election, they just did it the Game of Thrones style. But that was one of the better… One of the best scenes because of it’s like it was so relatable and then all of the children standing up and giving their little quips about each other, like… Oh my gosh, the girl that’s married to Aegon who is…

0:43:23.3 Robby Soave: Helaena.

0:43:24.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Obsessed with bugs… Yeah.

0:43:26.1 Landry Ayres: [chuckle] Alright.

0:43:26.8 Natalie Dowzicky: Which she stands up and talks…

0:43:27.5 Robby Soave: And has prophecies.

0:43:28.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yes, she does prophecies. She stands up and talks about how marriage is terrible. And there are so many things like that. You’re like “Wow, this is just like… This is… ” They’re little jokes in there just for us to make it relatable. And ’cause everyone… I feel like everyone’s been at a dinner that’s like that, not to that extreme, obviously. But been to like that that has just those elements. So I think that was one of the best scenes especially in the last like few episodes that didn’t involve dragons of course, ’cause all those scenes get amped in my mind. Wait, we didn’t talk about the feet pics yet.

0:44:06.6 Landry Ayres: Oh okay.

0:44:07.0 Robby Soave: Okay.

0:44:07.5 Landry Ayres: If you wanna talk about feet Natalie, be my guest.

0:44:11.2 Robby Soave: He killed a lot of people for just to look.

0:44:14.9 Landry Ayres: For feet.

0:44:16.8 Robby Soave: Just to look.

0:44:18.0 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s… Wait, Robby, I never… I don’t think I asked you this. Did that… Is that how it went down in the book too?

0:44:22.8 Robby Soave: No, I guess, so Ser Larys’s loyalty to Alicent and the greens is mysterious in the source material, it’s not clear why he is so much on Alicent’s side given that his entire house which we now… Which we only know in the television series he had murdered was more closely associated with Rhaenyra and in fact Rhaenyra’s children are her… Are his older brother’s children, so no, he is… He has the…

0:44:53.4 Natalie Dowzicky: [chuckle] Like why?

0:44:54.0 Robby Soave: Foot… His own foot thing is from the source material that he’s club footed and is resentful over it, that is part of the source material but…

0:45:06.7 Landry Ayres: Yeah, no problem. If that’s your thing, that’s fine with me, that’s totally fine, but he killed so many people, like Robby said, just to look, that’s…

0:45:16.7 Natalie Dowzicky: That whole scene, I think everyone watching had a collective like, “Are you kidding me right now?” Like when that… Then that first scene where like Alicent’s like head is looking at the camera and he’s like just staring at her feet. I was like what the hell?

0:45:27.0 Landry Ayres: And it really did take me by surprise. I was like “what is this guy?”

0:45:31.3 Robby Soave: I would have liked… For him, I would have liked one more. I would have liked a scene between him and his father who he also killed in the fire, to better explain their dynamic because I didn’t quite… Man, he’s an evil character. I didn’t quite buy the level of evil he was doing given… ‘Cause his dad seemed like a nice guy, his brother was great, like…

0:45:55.7 Landry Ayres: His brother was like a cool guy. I was like, “This is so nice”.

0:45:58.3 Robby Soave: Yes, it was a lot. I would have liked a little bit more there, that and the crab people were about the only things I thought that were slightly under baked. Crabs don’t eat people, they’ll picket dead bodies but if you set a crab on someone who’s still like squirming, the crab is going to run away. Sorry to like shatter everyone’s thinking on how crab physics works but…

[laughter]

0:46:22.5 Robby Soave: Crabs are not zombies, they don’t like feast on the flesh of still living.

0:46:25.0 Landry Ayres: Well, in the step stone…

0:46:28.0 Robby Soave: I guess.

0:46:29.8 Landry Ayres: They have zombie crabs in the step stones. There are zombies.

0:46:34.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. Well, I guess the crab feeder Larys’s arc was a little rushed also because… And part of the fire stuff with Larys and he has the people that were imprisoned that he took out their tongues, they’re now like his little…

0:46:50.6 Landry Ayres: Right.

0:46:51.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Like he’s little executioners.

0:46:51.8 Robby Soave: Yeah, as soon as they get caught they can’t say who did it, I guess.

0:46:54.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:46:55.8 Landry Ayres: Got it.

0:46:56.5 Robby Soave: And then there was also, in that same general spew of scenes was like when he set up supposedly him or his people that carry out bad things for him, set fire to that other place, was that the…

0:47:13.4 Robby Soave: The white.

0:47:13.5 Landry Ayres: Was that the white worms place?

0:47:14.9 Natalie Dowzicky: The white worm?

0:47:16.0 Robby Soave: That was the white. It was not… That was not executed quite perfectly.

0:47:18.0 Landry Ayres: It was not.

0:47:18.9 Robby Soave: We were a little confused about what it was. That was right that was the white worms residence, so I guess that was him getting rid of the rival spy network. But of course, we did not see her die, so given that we didn’t see that I think everyone can reasonably expect that she survives that. But yeah.

0:47:37.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, that whole… I understand him setting fire to his house and killing his brother and his dad, that all made sense, and then we jump to the fire at the white worm and I was like “Wait, is this the same… ” also because in that shot, there’s a guy, a hooded guy walking normally away from the fire which is presumably the guy that did it and I was wait but that can’t be Larys because he’s not limping.

0:47:58.0 Robby Soave: Right.

0:47:58.1 Natalie Dowzicky: So it’s a little… Yeah.

0:48:01.3 Robby Soave: It’s Tongue-​less… Tongue-​less little…

0:48:01.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Just tongue-​less people.

0:48:03.0 Robby Soave: Fire starters, I guess. I mean, buildings are very very easy to set fire to in medieval times, I guess.

0:48:06.0 Landry Ayres: Yeah. Well, but it’s also like they looked like stone.

0:48:08.1 Robby Soave: Yeah, they did look like stone.

[laughter]

0:48:13.1 Robby Soave: It should have been a wooden building, but…

0:48:14.0 Landry Ayres: Yeah. Also, they must have run out of budget with casting for the crab feeder or whatever, because they’ve got this like awesome makeup for him and this mask and he’s like a very imposing character not a line of dialogue.

[laughter]

0:48:30.3 Robby Soave: Yeah.

0:48:32.7 Landry Ayres: You could tell they…

0:48:32.8 Robby Soave: I hope they put a little bit more thought into battles in the in the future, like people… I guess people have treated Game of Thrones like it was really good on this front. I’ve actually like always had a lot of issues with some of the way their battles are laid out, not all of their battle, the Blackwater battle from season two of Game of Thrones with Sansa attacks the City, great.

0:48:53.2 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:48:55.5 Robby Soave: I was more underwhelmed by the Battle of the Bastards than some other people I guess, but the crab feeder battle made no… I did not believe that they had two dragons, I did not believe that they couldn’t just shoot fire into that cave forever until they were all dead and the archers don’t really do… They have two dragons, they can…

0:49:13.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. And then Daemon comes out and he’s like…

0:49:15.0 Robby Soave: It’s not good. It’s not.

0:49:15.8 Natalie Dowzicky: “I’m going to wave a white flag but then I’m not and then I’m going to charge at this thing that none of these archers have any aim”. He’s just diving for cover like it’s a video game and then like sneaking through, it was…

0:49:30.3 Robby Soave: I hope they… Given that there are a whole lot of battles with and without dragons to come. I hope they put a little bit more thought into some of those or I mean I guess don’t show them if they’re gonna be that ridiculous, but…

0:49:45.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay. Before we finish up, Robby can’t answer this question because he knows what happens. How many episodes do you think does Aegon survive in the next season, Landry?

0:49:58.4 Landry Ayres: Oh. How many episodes do I think he survive?

0:50:00.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, how far does he make it through next season? Or who do you think the first person to die is gonna be of the like main cast?

0:50:08.0 Landry Ayres: What’s even the point in guessing ’cause you’re just sentencing everyone to die, at a certain point other than a handful. I think, well, is Corlys dead? No, Corlys, he’s gotta die. Yeah, no, he’s gotta die. Now, he’s too old. He’s gotta die.

0:50:22.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Okay.

0:50:23.6 Robby Soave: Well, I won’t say anything. Yeah, who do you think Natalie?

0:50:26.6 Natalie Dowzicky: I think Aegon is gonna last maybe three episodes of the next season.

[chuckle]

0:50:35.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And the first person I think that’s going to die next is.

0:50:40.0 Robby Soave: I do know the answer to this question, so I can’t…

[laughter]

0:50:44.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I know, that’s why I said you cannot answer it.

0:50:44.3 Robby Soave: This person and this person and this…

0:50:49.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Honestly I think Otto.

0:50:50.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah, I could see that. I could see that.

0:50:51.6 Robby Soave: I will say just that the… Absolutely without getting anything away, the amount of death, again, given that we’re gonna be very… It’s clear we’re going to be very loyal to the source material. Unlike Game of Thrones where some characters are alive when they’re dead or some characters are dead when they’re alive. Like I mean in the point that Game of Thrones is in like Stannis is still alive, Ser Barristan is still alive. It’s just very different things. That’s clearly not going to happen with House of the Dragon. We’re telling a very faithful to the source material, with the room for creative because it’s not… We don’t know exactly how necessary all things happen. But so, I’m assuming that all the characters that die are pretty much gonna die pretty much on pace with the source material. It’s gonna be interesting to have them have their be happy time.

[laughter]

0:51:37.5 Robby Soave: Not just relentless, brutal slog or just… I would say the fifth season of Game of Thrones was almost too depressing at times. I think that was particularly pronounced in the fifth season when the whole burning of Stannis’s daughter, I really just… I like Stannis a lot in the source material. It’s not sure at all…

0:52:02.2 Natalie Dowzicky: That was hard to watch.

0:52:03.4 Robby Soave: That will happen in that has not happened yet in the books and it doesn’t… Stannis is written somewhat differently and that doesn’t seem like something he would do, seems like maybe something Melisandre would do like behind his back. But anyway, that was… Things got really… And that’s what… And then Aria brutally kills the one Kingsguard guy and Jamie kind of rape Cersei and Sansa’s with Ramsay, and it was just like an orgy of like the most like gruesomely dark…

0:52:29.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Just very violent.

0:52:30.0 Robby Soave: Parts of the show. It was almost… It was starting to become like just unfun to watch, like you needed like a pick me up after. So good luck to them not doing that again, given a lot of the choices there, that are not going to be really choices, given what happens in the source material.

0:52:48.5 Landry Ayres: Well, we’ll see if we can brighten it up in the probably two and a half years it’ll be until we get to see House of the Dragon season two, so who knows. We’ll have a new president by then but at this point…

0:53:00.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh my gosh.

0:53:00.3 Landry Ayres: Who knows at that point. Yeah, think about that.

0:53:01.8 Robby Soave: We’ll see if that coronation is contested.

[laughter]

0:53:10.2 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod. That’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E like the philosopher Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time.

[music]