Review: House of the Dragon, "The Lord of the Tides" | Season 1, Episode 8
The prequel feels like it finally reaches its potential, at least for a moment
In the midst of last week’s episode of House of the Dragon, which worked overtime to rush the younger generation of this blended Targaryen family into the limelight, I came to a realization. For as much as the early episodes seemingly placed Rhaenyra as our central protagonist, and built out Alicent as her friend and then rival, they are not actually the anchor on which House of the Dragon has built its first season. That honor belongs to Viserys Targaryen, King of the Seven Kingdoms, literally disintegrating in front of our eyes.
There’s two reasons for this. The first is the idea that all of this comes down to decisions he made: pushing Aemma to he death to have a male heir, the choice to name Rhaenyra, maintaining this position after Alicent bore a son, and every subsequent decisision he made that would eventually lead to the absolute mayhem within his family that we saw in “Driftmark.” But the second is that, out of all of the show’s characters, he is the one …