‘House of the Dragon’ Season 1, Episode 4 Recap: The Full Targaryen

By Jeremy Egner

Season 1, Episode 4: 'King of the Narrow Sea'

“You Targaryens have strange customs.

It was Alicent on Sunday night who won the Understatement of the Week award. The constant weirdness of the Targaryens on TV dates back to the early days of "Game of Thrones," when we heard chatter about a mad king and saw another Viserys groping his naked sister before marrying her off to a barbarian horse lord. Whenever a new one was born, we heard more than once that the gods would flip a coin.

In Sunday's "Dragon House", the coins kept flipping for those already here. Daemon returned as a conqueror with a new haircut and seemed redeemed until he took Rhaenyra on her despoliation journey through the seedy old city. Rhaenyra regained our sympathy during a sad procession of suitors before losing it by recklessly risking the life of her closest companion and luring Ser Criston into her chambers to play hide and seek. Viserys was generous in his initial forgiveness of Daemon and then in his festering midnight lust. ("The hour is quite late..." Alicent protested, but the king gets what the king wants.)

It all culminated in seeing a physically rotting ruler kick his hanged brother in the ribs for sleeping with his daughter in front of everyone in the brothel — and seeing said brother respond by asking for his niece in marriage in the name of family tradition.

So yeah. Weird habits.

Admittedly, my untrained eye couldn't see how far the incestus interruptus went before Daemon had a crisis of conscience. But the fact that I'm even bringing this up means that with the Crabfeeder now dead and the Sea Serpent pouting in Driftmark, we got a Full Targaryen this week. While the Hightowers were kicked in various ways — Viserys started the episode with two fingers and ended up losing an entire Hand — the entire hour-plus was devoted to dragon-flavored psychodrama.

That's more or less what we were promised. Before the season, showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik (Sapochnik has since left) hinted that "House of the Dragon" would be a more straightforward melodrama compared to the peripatetic, realm-hopping "Game of Thrones." (So ​​far, I miss the structure of "Thrones" almost as much as its humor, mentioned last week.) Sunday's episode was pure soap opera — illicit affairs, secrets, family betrayal, literal palace intrigue. In keeping with the maximalist storytelling tendencies of "Thrones," the strategy seems to be that if you're going to make soap, you might as well make it as operative as possible.

Many of the scenes were hard to watch, but let's face it, let's now disclaim the disclaimer that applies to this week, the previous weeks, and all the weeks to come: This stuff is objectively gross. The "bonding" of uncles with nieces is crude; old men's sore bedsheets for teenagers are harsh; sexual slavery is gross; child brides are gross. For all the fragility of age differences and so on, we're all held to some degree by modern moral standards if we're going to agree with this story.

But grossness is also partly the essence. While the Targaryen rulers believe they are nobly motivated by Aegon's prophecy of future darkness mentioned in the premiere (more on that in a minute), "House of the Dragon" is ultimately about the decline of a convoluted, deeply inbred clan whose power is enabled by their access to the world's most terrifying weapons . While I doubt the show will take us all the way back to the beginning of "Game of Thrones," this story ultimately leads to a king who is insane to the point of wanting to burn everyone down and getting killed for it. A few decades later, he is followed by his daughter, who eventually follows a similar path.

So it's about the long collapse of the dynasty (until what Jon Snow, née Aegon Targaryen, does in his planned sequel, though empire building doesn't seem to suit him). Among the things that undo dynasties are ineffective leaders, infighting, and the moral corruption allowed by unchecked power. Inbreeding is key to the fall as probably the primary cause of the Targaryen madness described by the coin toss principle. (At least it keeps the madness in the family.)