Game of Thrones also established early on that the stakes for child’s play were high in the second episode, Mycah the butcher’s boy is slaughtered off the King’s Road after Arya hits Joffrey and events spiral out of control. Their development was treated with the same generosity as the growth of adult characters - the grownup Starks may have treated season one Arya like a silly little girl, but the writers never did. One of the central trademarks of Game of Thrones was that its children were often its most intriguing characters, subject to the winds of narrative, blown off course by events too big for them to control, and then launched into lives they did not expect. The crew is a little tinder box of monarchical conflict, waiting to ignite. Aegon is the leader of the pack of new Targaryens, made up of his curious and gentle sister Helaena (Evie Allen) their dragonless and mocked brother Aemond (Leo Ashton, who plays the role with admirable restraint) and Rhaenyra’s curiously brunette, bruiser sons, Jacaerys (Leo Hart), who goes by Jace, and Lucerys, who goes by Luke (Harvey Sadler). Now he’s developed into a young man (played by the excellent Ty Tennant, grandson of Peter Davison, the fifth Doctor in Doctor Who, and stepson to David Tennant, the tenth Doctor), eager to spill his seed all over the rooftops of King’s Landing and bully his nephews and younger brother to the point of serious emotional harm.
The last time we saw Aegon, he was a little lad, running about at his second name-day celebration, ogled over by doting nannies. The hints here aren’t subtle - House of the Dragon knows that any show about succession must necessarily deal with wombs and their avatars - but here, the show makes the most of the metamorphic motherhood of raising dragons. The space in between is filled with roasting eggs, unhatched eggs, gifted eggs, and one particularly weird Aeg - Aegon, the firstborn son of Viserys and Alicent, flaxen-haired menace, and hyper-public masturbator. “The Princess and the Queen” is bookended with birth scenes.
Martin’s highborn - those that make it safely out of the womb, that is. House of the Dragon is hitting its stride with the kind of underhanded plotting and grotesque malfeasance we’ve come to expect from George R.R. And yet episode six brings a markedly better narrative, some real bite to the major characters, and a slew of little tykes who just might start gutting each other before they come of age. It’s ten years later, and we have the same old Westerosi troubles.
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