Fate for the Targaryens is etched in fire. Something that the fourth chapter of The House of the Dragonalready available in hbo max, he has just made clear with dazzling subtlety. It is not just a metaphor. The power of the royal family rests on the increasingly flimsy foundations of a game of manipulation. One in which the threads of influence that move around the Iron Throne are increasingly brutal and aggressive.
Previous episodes showed how the possibility of stranglehold could pit factions of the Targaryens against one another, even in the shadows. This time, the fight is frontal and is linked to the fact that Rhaenyra is a critical character. On the one hand, it represents the danger of a weak, questionable succession that is not subject to anything other than Viserys’s decision.
On the other hand, Daemon’s greed, encouraged under a brilliant and cruel gaze of the resources at his disposal. Between both things, the seven kingdoms watch and wait. The king’s decision in favor of the male heir remains perhaps inevitable or, in any case, essential. But for now, his daughter is the very center of peace in Westeros.
Responsibility is carried on the weight of the crown
The fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon he makes that clear with an opening sequence showing Rhaenyra trying to choose a future king consort. Her marriage and quality as a maiden have become a matter of absolute interest to the Iron Throne.. So essential that the court considers it fundamental and Viserys gathers nobles of all backgrounds and ages to fulfill the responsibility.
But the heiress does not accept the father’s decision or the inevitable. Little by little, the plot analyzes the fact that the princess begins to ask herself questions. Her importance and value, but especially her identity.
Who is Rhaenyra, regardless of her place in a dynastic future? Four years had passed since the nobles of Westeros bowed the knee to her. However, the time that has elapsed has only made her position more vulnerable and the possibility of her real claim harder.
With two brothers, an uncle who dominates Los Stepaños de Piedra and no support, the princess moves on a fragile stage. On the verge of collapsing, either because he accepts a marriage that will destroy the woman he discovers she may be or because of the machinations around her. For Viserys, the daughter who will inherit power is unknown. For the kingdom, a dangerous possibility.
A broken queen in the fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon
The brilliantly executed script explores the very roots of dynastic influence. She does it with a patient and raw reflection on the roles that each man and woman who holds power must play. Viserys, pressed at all ends, tries to ponder what the kingdom needs.
But it does not come to a conclusion, nor does it come to a decision. Rhaenyra struggles to cling to a probability in the history of a continent that deplores her for merely contradicting tradition. Alicent, mother of future kings and daughter of the man capable of facing the Iron Throne from the shadows, is a hostage. The plot of the fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon analyse, with unusual subtlety, perception of duty and obedience. Beyond that, also the value that each member of a broken family represents in a random map that is about to change.
The new queen, who her father used as an open door to absolute power, is now a slave to the submission that the throne requires. “I don’t want to be locked up in a castle just to expel heirs,” Rhaenyra complains to this disheartened young monarch. “I’m sorry,” the heiress is quick to say, aware that the king’s wife is trapped in a circle of silent suffering.
In fact, this fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon strives to show, over and over again, the life of women in a cruel, violent and voracious kingdom. She does it through Alicent, broken, helpless, in the midst of her father’s ambitions and the demands of a place that exceeds her. Her narration presents her as fragile, on the verge of falling, with no other power than that of engendering. She with a baby in her arms, dazed and sorrowful. The child’s cry resounds amid the veiled fears and revelations. Also, as she bathes Viserys’s bruised body, which slowly deteriorates before her eyes. In the royal bed in which sex becomes an ordeal.
But it is Rhaenyra who symbolizes the break with the past and the harbinger of the kingdom that is established on her shoulders, despite the opposition. At the same time, she is the key point to hit the circle around the Iron Throne. A place inaccessible to anyone who is not a Targaryen.
A king without a crown, a sinister plan
Daemon Targaryens knows it. With great impetus, he will attempt a move of unusual and refined cruelty that will unbalance the precarious balance in Westeros. Invested as the King of the Narrow Sea, in this fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon he arrives at Viserys’s court with a firm step. In addition, he hints that his failed right was fulfilled in other regions. He looks at his brother who stripped him of a right that he assumed as his own for the first time as an equal. With all the power that his triumph at Los Pedaños de Piedra gave him, the confrontation seems inevitable..
But the Lord of Dragonstone is even more adept at manipulation than he is in battle. Unpredictably, he kneels, throws down his sword, and hands over the crown he wears at his temples. With both, he puts the full weight of the responsibility they carry in Viserys’s hands.
For now there will be peace, or so Daemon’s submission seems to suggest. The hug between brothers makes the court applaud. However, Rhaenyra understands better than anyone that her uncle is only taunting her, that he steps back to strike harder. When and where?
The princess is cunning, shrewd and much more observant than might be supposed.. But it fails in experience. It is just the weak point that Daemon takes advantage of in his favor. He understands better than anyone that his niece is a “chaotic and unstable, bold as fire” spirit, like all Targaryens.
So it offers him the possibility of transgression. A map with a secret exit, boy’s clothes and an invitation. The heiress accepts and runs to Daemon, who awaits her in her most risky and perverse move.
The lurking danger for an impetuous heiress
King’s Landing is joy, excess and grotesque beauty. Rhaenyra soon discovers that life within the palace confines is a simple imitation of what lies beyond. that’s when The House of the Dragon, in its fourth chapter, creates a set of parallel images with a somber and disturbing appeal. Alicent looks to the future, as she fulfills her role as passive wife and object, as a privileged womb.
At the same time, the argument shows Rhaenyra, who runs through the alleys of the city, drinks and listens to the criticism against her. The young woman who becomes a woman soon finds that Daemon is hers as well as hers, it is the power that recognizes her as a reflection of her.
The Targaryens, who for much of their history have mixed blood and pleasure, seem to push the heiress and Daemon to the inevitable. Sex within a family that is based on incest is more than carnal: it is also symbolic.
But before that, Daemon stops and abandons his niece in the city. A statement of intent? Nothing is so simple with the prince stripped of power by dynastic right. Nor for the woman who inherited it thanks to him.
Rhaenyra returns to the castle, only to rebel against the maiden’s rule with Criston Cole. The scene of pleasure is superimposed on Alicent’s pain, confined to an old man’s bed.
Between the heiress and the queen, fate is a line of fire. For the series, the point of greatest interest in its exploration of sex, power, rebellion and responsibility.
A long-distance betrayal The House of the Dragon
Ser Otto Hightower was the Hand of Jaehaerys I Targaryen, considered the greatest king of Westeros. A man with the infinite patience to wait for absolute power. At the same time, one who went through a series of inexplicable coincidences that led him to become the second in the kingdom.
All of this is remembered by Viserys when he hears from the words of his adviser, the indiscreet rumors about his daughter. For Ser Otto, the strategy is simple. Rhaenyra is as reckless as her youth pushes her to be. She alone must wait, her conviction about the inevitable mistake is absolute.
As much as to put spies to the heiress and, later, carry out the last movement. “How far do you go to put your blood on the Throne?” Viserys says when Otto accuses the heiress in front of her father. “Sometimes, we must tell uncomfortable truths”, excuses the Hand of the King. But the regent, much more insightful than he has shown up to now, makes it clear: “You have waited to get here and I have seen everything you have done to do it.”
fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon: the last pieces move
However, it is Daemon who bears the brunt in this fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon. For the first time, Viserys sees his brother in his, all her unholy, neat awareness of the power she snatches away. “Give me Rhaenyra as a wife,” then asks the King of the Narrow Sea. But his brother refuses. “That she never has to see you again,” he makes clear. The break is complete and Daemon played the last strategy of his to lose the little power that mocking the Iron Throne allowed him to gain.
For Rhaenyra, the consequences are immediate. The queen, in a strange gesture of generosity, calls him out. After all, they are still two young women in a brutal world. “Your daughter is not given to deceit, but your brother is,” she says later to a disillusioned and furious Viserys. It is, perhaps, Alicent’s words that trigger the most critical point of a chapter full of them.
“This dagger belonged to Aemon the Conqueror,” Viserys says, once confronted by his daughter. He puts in his hand, then, an old prophecy and a weapon that Game of Thrones became television history. The Valyrian steel dagger that killed the Night King appears in all its glory.
At the same time, a promise. “From me will come the promised prince,” reads Rhaenyra perplexed in the sheet that burns in fire. “Your duty is to marry Laenor Velaryon,” Viserys demands. “And yours is to fulfill, it is your duty as king”, insists the furious heiress.
Separated from power, on the brink of war
Which one is that? Standing before Otto Hightower, Viserys, First of His Name, makes the decision that, perhaps, will lead to death and the kingdom to the debacle. “Your interests no longer coincide with those of the crown”, says the king in this fourth chapter of The House of the Dragonand seizes power from the Hand.
The man of whispers. The one who has been waiting for more than three decades to reach the Iron Throne. “You have nothing to do here anymore,” insists the regent. With which he closes a circle around him.
Grandfather of kings and the man who orchestrated every step to absolute influence, Otto Hightower, is forced back in this fourth chapter of The House of the Dragon. But only for the moment. Step back into the shadows, then make an attack on the center of power.