The following article contains spoilers for season one, episode eight of House of the Dragon.
In “The Lord of the Tides,” the eighth episode of House of the Dragon, Paddy Considine — undoubtedly brilliant throughout the series — got what will surely be his Emmy moment.
With the long-standing King Viserys on his death bed (…finally), half of his face rotting away like a corpse yet to be laid to rest, Westeros looks close to catastrophe. Underlings are swarming like vultures, ready to tear apart the body politic for their own claims to the throne; the cold war between Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy) looks a death knell away from sparking hot; the Targaryen kids, far from alright, are variously timorous shitheads or shitheaded brutes. This is far from the stability Viserys will want to leave behind, but judging by his perpetual death rattle, it doesn't look like he has much of a choice.
An earlier intervention, in the middle of appeals over who will become the next Lord of the Tides (Steve Toussaint's Corlys might've died in the Stepstones) showed Viserys' admirable force of will despite his frail form — but ended with Corlys' brother, Vaemond (Wil Johnson) getting his head cut off above the tongue. For all intents and purposes, this is a man staring terrible inevitability in the face and doing everything he can, while still in his mortal body, to prevent fate from taking hold. So in one last dramatic appeal to the better nature of his fractured family, he brings everyone together for a final meal.
His speech, then, is somewhere between a final act Richard III — though that might mostly be the cane, the hunch, the necrosis — and the deathly King Lear, appealing to his loved ones not to fall apart over petty rivalries and power hunger. With death in sight, Viserys plays the last card he has in his deck: he appeals to their familial bond, the love they share, the blood thicker than water, that which makes them dragons. He removes his Phantom of the Opera-esque crescent mask, revealing his cavern of a lost cheek and empty eye socket. “Tonight, I wish you to see me as I am. Not just a king. But your father. Your brother. Your husband. Your grandsire,” he rasps. “Set aside your grievances. If not for the sake of the crown, then for the sake of this old man, who loves you all… so dearly.”
It's bold, desperate rhetoric, but it comes deep from the heart, the spectral pleading of a man who can feel his legacy slipping from between his fingers — far from the cold, Roy family politicking we've grown accustomed to across the Game of Thrones franchise. This is both the moment that the previous seven episodes (and change, counting the first bit of the eighth) have led up to, and the trigger pull for the drama to come. While the old man's last appeal seems to work, the family toasting one another in belated recognition of the ties that bind, he inadvertently undoes it all with his final breath: thinking she's Rhaenyra, he tells Alicent that she (or her son, Aegon) is prophesised to sit on the throne and save Westeros.
Then, Considine ad-libs a brilliant thing, rounding off the deep tragedy of Viserys' adulthood as covered in those eight episodes: “my love,” he says, reaching into the dusty air above him, clearly calling out to Aemma, his wife who perished in childbirth (read: he forcedly hacked open for a C-section, but hey-ho) in the pilot. Viserys then dies. At least we think he does. Whatever the case, it was easily the best episode of the season so far, and the first to really reach the heady heights of its parent series' early outings. For sure, there's a big Paddy-shaped hole in the drama now — but look at how soon Game of Thrones ran after Sean Bean helped it to walk. And Considine might just've been better.
House of the Dragon is streaming on Sky and Now. New episodes air Mondays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic.
