SPOILERS AHEAD
Tragedy ends the episode, and the season. Depressed, alone, confined to her quarters and cruelly force-fed after refusing to eat, the pregnant Queen Helaena throws herself from the palace window onto the spikes below. Her suicide is crosscut with footage of Tumbleton’s casualties as meanwhile her mother, Alicent, somewhere far away, watches as a flight of moths takes off around her — one last visit, perhaps, from a daughter who loved the beauty of insects and hated the ugliness of people. An achingly mournful piece by the composer Ramin Djawadi accompanies all these images. The sadness of it all, the sights and sounds of pain and waste, made me cry.
The episode is aided by some of the cast’s strongest work to date, with Matt Smith exploring the outer limits of Daemon’s tolerance for violence, Freddie Fox’s Gwayne emerging as a desperate voice of reason and Phia Saban embodying Helaena’s anger and misery. But this is Emma D’Arcy’s episode. Resplendent and imposing in Rhaenyra’s evil-queen get-up — a visual makeover that echoes her psychological transformation into a much more frightening kind of ruler — D’Arcy all but physically vibrates with the Black Queen’s barely contained fury and self-regard.
Tags: fantasy, George R.R. Martin, house of the dragon, new york times, TV, TV reviews