‘House of the Dragon’ Episode 7 Recap: “Driftmark”

Lady Laena Velaryon, ensconced in her sculptured custom coffin, is being committed to the sea, her body to be forever watched over in the watery dominion of the Merlin King. Which certainly sounds like a more chill place to be than the reception immediately following the ceremony, where steely glares abound. Prince Daemon stands aloof, and rejects the offer to rejoin the court made by King Viserys, who slumps in a chair, distracted and uncomfortable in his finery. Queen Alicent keeps one eye on Princess Rhaenyra, who encourages her son Jacaerys to comfort his twin cousins Baela and Rhaena. Prince Aegon launches a few nasty hot takes in the direction of the gathered, and proceeds to dive into a wine goblet. Princess Helaena whispers incantations over spiders she catches in a pile of oyster shells. And Prince Aemond tracks dragon calls in the gathering clouds. Otto Hightower glowers over it all, fondling his recently re-applied Hand of the King signet.

The foreboding that sweeps through “Driftmark,” episode 7 of House of the Dragon, bites like the surf that crashes into High Tide’s sea wall. Targaryens, Velaryons: mayhaps they’ve gathered at the latter’s ancestral seat in the name of mourning, but it’s plotting that has the floor, and Laena’s death only adds another variable to the simmering war for succession. Princess Rhaenys, aside from her very real grief, sees her daughter’s death as a means of routing the inheritance of Driftmark through her granddaughters, since they are of true Velaryon blood and Rhaenyra’s sons with Prince Laenor – as the entire court knows and Viserys is unwilling to see – are not. And she’s lost any tolerance for Prince Daemon. “Daemon does what’s best for Daemon.”

As a cloudy night falls over the island, Rhaenyra and the prince walk on the beach. She tells him that she and Laenor tried to conceive, to “perform their duties,” but there was no joy in it. With Harwin Strong she felt good, felt desired. But now her secret lover is dead, consumed in the inferno at cursed Harrenhal, a notion Daemon pushes back on. Ghost stories are one thing. But Queen Alicent’s ambition could certainly extend to murder. And with that, Rhaenyra returns to the joy she once felt with him. “I’m no longer a child,” she tells Daemon, and they repair to a driftwood copse to tenderly undo each other’s tunics.

Aemond is snooping around on the dunes nearby, but he isn’t looking to bust up any platinum-haired uncle-niece coitus. Instead, he creeps on a snoozing Vhagar, and eyes the tacking and saddle. The enormous dragon awakens, and here’s where you expect it to start speaking High Valyrian in the voice of Liam Neeson. But instead it’s Aemond who delivers the old commands. He climbs on. They take off, and he gets the hang of the reins. It’s officially Grand Theft Dragon.

Investigating the theft of Vhagar, Baela, Rhaena, Jacaerys, and Lucerys encounter an unrepentant Aemond. The gang of cousins attack him separately and en masse, there are punches thrown and insults over patronage hurled. And in the end, it’s young Lucerys who scrambles for a dagger and slices open Aemond’s face.

If the mood was tense at the funeral ceremony, it’s full-on emoji cringe face in the throne room after the melee of little royal cousins. An exhausted King Viserys is made ambulatory in his rage, and Ser Criston points out that the King’s Guard was never tasked with protecting princes from princes. Aemond, a line of stitches snaking across his destroyed left eye, is not only unapologetic, he’s proud – Vhagar is now his, which makes the dragon part of Team Green. And Queen Alicent will not accept King Viserys essentially picking up a tapestry and sweeping this altercation beneath it. “If the king will not seek justice, the queen will. Ser Criston, bring me the eye of Lucerys Velaryon.”

During her eye-for-an-eye vengeance play, Alicent looked at Viserys like she was asking herself when this husk of a man would just die already. She draws his Valyrian steel and steps to Rhaenyra, his daughter and the source of his willful ignorance. “Exhausting, isn’t it,” the princess says, firelight glinting off the raised Catspaw Dagger, “hiding beneath the cloak of your own righteousness. But now they see you as you are.” The blade finds flesh as queen and princess are pulled apart, drawing the first blood of the fomenting civil war.

In her chambers, Alicent is visited by Otto, who acknowledges the drama the confrontation will cause, but also compliments his daughter’s pique. “We play an ugly game,” he oozes, getting right out into the open with the Hightower scheme to secure power, and Aemond winning the dragon is another key to the plan. Later, aboard ship en route to King’s Landing, Alicent is still defiant. (She’s also resplendent in an absolutely fantastic, green-scaled leather wrap that comes complete with an Astrakhan border.) Larys creeps up, and the new Lord of Harrenhal offers the queen a little more of his own brand of bloody justice. Maybe later, she says. But it’s appreciated.

Laenor, of course, was absent from the princeling battle post-game. He was with his latest paramour, Ser Qarl (Arty Froushan). But once her husband joins Rhaenyra in their quarters where she’s being stitched up, she reassures him that he’s an honorable man in possession of the rarest of things: a good heart. And ultimately, that may be why she doesn’t conspire to murder his ass. Meeting with Daemon, Rhaenyra makes her own plans for protection of succession clear. “I need you uncle,” she tells him. “I can’t face the greens alone.” By marrying, and binding their blood in the ancient manner, the two pure Targaryens will lend strength to her royal claim. She understands, of course, that for them to marry, Laenor would have to be dead, a death that would lead to whispers about the princess’s complicity. Let ‘em whisper, Daemon says. It will only give us power. And Rhaenyra agrees. “We have always been meant to burn together.”

Their plan thus set, Daemon overpowers a palace guard, and makes Ser Qarl an offer he can’t refuse. Laenor and his lover then engage in a very public swordfight, which brings a commotion to the scene of the fracas. But it’s too late, apparently: Laenor’s body lies in the hearth, burned beyond recognition. And suddenly Rhaenys and Corlys Velaryon are faced with burying another one of their kids. Back on the rocks beside the sea, Daemon and Rhaenyra make ceremonial cuts to their lips and hands, daubing the confluence of their blood in markings on their foreheads. Dressed in red-tinged ceremonial cloaks, They are bound in their blood before a priest and their assembled children, who look on with a kind of stunned indifference. Mothers immolated in dragonflame, fist and knife fights with rival royal youngs, and fathers murdered under mysterious circumstances: for these kids, it’s just another day in the Targaryen-Velaryon universe. And as the camera turns from Rhaenyra and Daemon’s marital union, a final surprise. Ser Qarl joins another man in a small launch as they make for a ship bound for the Narrow Sea. His companion has a shaved head, but a familiar countenance: it’s Laenor Velaryon. He told his wife she deserved better than what he’d been. And she did him a secret solid, setting Laenor free to live humbly and love who he wants while her new marriage to Daemon coalesces strength against the machinations of Queen Alicent’s greens.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges