Review: House of the Dragon, “Rhaenyra the Cruel” | Season 2, Episode 2
HBO, not giving us an episode title for three hours is a paddling
“Some good may yet come of this.”
When Otto Hightower learns of the horrible fate of his great-grandson and heir to the Iron Throne, he doesn’t really grieve per se. While Alicent is distraught, and believes that the gods are punishing her for her sins, he basically tells her to look on the bright side: this is a tremendous gift in their diplomatic war with Rhaenyra, an easy way to smear her name and paint her as a child killer and kingslayer.
It’s not dissimilar to Daemon’s reaction to the news back on Dragonstone: as Rhaenyra expresses her outrage that these lies are being spread about her when she had nothing to do with the murder of Jaeherys, her husband sits there smugly, saying nothing. When she confronts him, it becomes clear that he has no desire to be responsible for the mistake, nor is he willing to apologize. He frames it as fulfilling her desires and avenging her son’s death, but that’s not what he was doing. He was asserting his own authority and power, because that’s all that really matters to him. It’s a fight that’s been brewing throughout the entire series, and Rhaenyra is now strong enough to see how he’s been manipulating her, and how all of this is still about his lost claim to the throne rather than her own.
There are clear links between Otto and Daemon—they’re each the devil on the shoulder for the standard bearers of Team Green and Team Black, respectively, and they’re both forced to grasp at power indirectly having no clear path to the Iron Throne in their own right. But what “Rhaenyra the Cruel” reinforces by its conclusion is that while both men are unfazed by the morass of morality created by their actions, there’s a difference between their motives. Neither really cares about the human costs of their respective causes, but Otto believes in a way Daemon doesn’t that his personal goals align with that of the realm. He might be more concerned about optics when Aegon hangs the ratcatchers en masse as opposed to their actual lives, but his fury with Aegon is about the idea of carrying on Viserys’ legacy, and his traditionalist belief that a king under his control has the best opportunity to do so. Where Daemon’s confrontation with Rhaenyra reinforces his selfishness, Otto’s argument with—and subsequent firing by—Aegon reveals an old man whose Machiavellian designs have been about legacy rather than spite or revenge.