'House of the Dragon' Season 2, Episode 4 Recap: Fire in the Sky

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From its sobriquet on down, George R.R. Martin’s World of Ice and Fire is largely a bipolar one. Blacks fight Greens. Starks fight Lannisters. And in the prophetic Song of Ice and Fire itself, death wars against life.

The dragons flown by the Targaryen dynasty are an exception to this rule. In the source novels, various maesters and royals speculate that dragons are neither male nor female, capable of switching sexes as needed. True, they are the fire that helps turn back the ice of the Night King and his undead minions in “Game of Thrones,” and the most magnificent and awe-inspiring living creatures in the Westerosi bestiary. But they are also death incarnate, capable of inflicting carnage amid soldiers and civilians alike at an industrial scale.

And if need be, they can be called upon to kill one another, in battles as brutal as they are beautiful. There is a reason scholars within Martin’s fictional universe refer to the Targaryen civil war as the Dance of the Dragons: The conflict is as rapturous to behold as it is repugnant, often in the same scene.

This episode’s three-way battle between Princess Rhaenys and her red dragon Meleys, King Aegon II and his gloriously golden Sunfyre, and Prince Aemond One-Eye and the colossal beast Vhagar is a case study in the dragons’ duality. The script, by the co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal, contains a lengthy lead-up to the climactic Battle at Rook’s Rest — a trap set by the Hand of the King, Ser Criston Cole, and his primary ally, Prince Aemond, to lure Black dragons and their riders to their doom — featuring glory shots of Meleys and Sunfyre on their way to war. The director, Alan Taylor, a signature talent on “Game of Thrones,” makes it clear what kind of splendor the world will lose if these animals should die.

He also makes it clear what kind of horrors the world will see if they live. Rook’s Rest is a nightmare of burning men, crushed men, men fleeing for their lives from what are effectively flying nuclear dinosaurs. The riders try their best, for the most part, but neither dragon fire nor dragon feet are particular about who they snuff out.

Indeed, the episode’s most shocking moment comes when Aemond, who delayed his own assault when his detested brother Aegon crashed the battle uninvited so as not to appear weak, turns Vhagar against not only their enemy Rhaenys, but Aegon too. Only the timely intervention of Ser Criston prevents Aemond from striding across the broken body of Sunfyre and putting his fallen, burned brother out of his misery at the battle’s end.

The battle also spells the end of Princess Rhaenys. Despite her initial escape from Aemond, Aegon, and their dragons, she chooses to return and continue the battle. There is a grim cast to the eyes of the actor Eve Best in that moment, as though Rhaenys knows she is choosing to die.

It’s tempting to argue she is distraught by her earlier encounter with Alyn of Hull, her husband’s bastard son who saved his life at sea, but Rhaenys has never been that precious about her marriage. It is more likely she was simply in for a penny, in for a pound: Now that the war she’d long sought to avoid had begun, she might as well try to win it.

Yet I wonder if there is some despair in her decision. Rhaenys’s choice to spare the Green royal family when she had the chance to burn them all alive was one of Season 1’s most hotly debated moments. Every episode of Season 2 so far has focused on the lengths to which both Rhaenyra and Alicent have been willing to go to avoid open war between dragons, with both of them fearing for not only the safety of their loved ones, but — believe it or not — the good of the realm. In that context, Rhaenys’s caution last season makes sense: Had Rhaenyra or Alicent been in the same position, we now know, neither would have pulled the trigger either.

The same likely cannot be said for Daemon, who spends this episode battling hallucinations brought on either by the curse of Harrenhal or the magic of Alys Rivers, its resident witch. His sojourn in those damp, crumbling halls is delightfully gothic and replete with tips of the cap to other genre landmarks. In his visions, Daemon follows a doppelgänger of himself and beheads a young Rhaenyra, much like Luke Skywalker decapitated Darth Vader only to see his own face in “The Empire Strikes Back.” He sees himself with bloody hands like Lady Macbeth. He starts when he sees a black goat, who may as well be a cameoing Black Phillip from Robert Eggers’s horror film “The Witch.” This is not the sort of stable mind you need at the head of your army.

Nor would Aemond or Criston, the bloodthirsty ringleaders of the Greens, or Aegon, who is just trying to play catch-up with his brother and his Hand, have hesitated to burn their rivals. For all their faults, the Black and Green Queens are the Seven Kingdom’s best bulwarks against all-out slaughter.

At least they were until now. Alicent may have realized that her late husband, Viserys, did not in fact mean for their son Aegon to take the Iron Throne. But she’s also realized that it doesn’t matter. “The significance of Viserys’s intentions died with him,” she tells Larys the Clubfoot, her son’s newly minted Master of Whisperers. “Yes it did,” he agrees. As another HBO show once put it, “If it’s a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight.”

For her part, Rhaenyra realizes that Alicent can no longer be reasoned with. Her resolve to go to battle at once shocks her councilors, who for the most part seemed to have mistaken either her mercy or her gender for weakness. She assures them she was simply trying to ensure there was no other path before unleashing dragonfire.

This episode feels like the American answer to last year’s magisterially melancholy and moving creature feature “Godzilla Minus One,” the first Godzilla film to win an Oscar (for best visual effects). The director, Takashi Yamazaki, who also wrote and oversaw visual effects, followed in the footsteps of Ishiro Honda original “Godzilla” (1954) and Hideaki Anno’s nightmarish “Shin Godzilla” (2016) in rendering the King of the Monsters as a walking, radioactive primal scream — against war, against cruelty, against stupidity, against civilization’s ongoing assault against the people who comprise it. The death of the dragons is a stand-in for our own burning world.

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