‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Premiere Ending Explained: Showrunner Ryan Condal Explains How HBO’s Version of Blood and Cheese is Different from the Books

House of the Dragon Season 2 premiered on HBO and Max tonight, revealing the next horrific chapter of the bitter Targaryen civil war known as the “Dance of the Dragons.” House of Dragon Season 1, of course, ended with Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) learning that not only had her half-brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) usurped the throne from her, but that another half-brother, Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), was responsible for killing her young son Lucerys “Luke” Velaryon (Elliot Grihault). How would Rhaenyra and her Blacks respond to this brutal blow? Well, we now know how Rhaenyra’s husband Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) decided to respond…and it’s awful.

**Spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 1 “A Son for a Son,” now streaming on Max**

House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 1 “A Son for a Son” ends with Daemon hiring a Hightower-hating gold cloak and a ratcatcher fond of munching on cheese to sneak into the Red Keep to kill Aemond Targaryen. When the hitmen, known in George R.R. Martin’s lore as “Blood” (Sam C. Wilson) and “Cheese,” (Mark Stobbart) ask what they should do if they can’t find Aemond, Daemon gives them an offscreen order to take a “son for a son.” That is, they are to murder one of the male Targaryens in the palace.

House of the Dragon then shows us the two hired killers bumbling their way through the Red Keep until they arrive on the floor the royals live. They’ve just missed Aemond, but they don’t know it. The ratcatcher eventually finds the sweet, odd Queen Heleana Targaryen (Phia Saban) in the nursery with her two slumbering children. The would-be killer refuses to murder the Queen because Daemon ordered, again, a “son for a son.”

Held at knifepoint, Helaena is ordered to reveal which silver-haired child is her son, Prince Jaehaerys. She points at one of the two children and as Blood and Cheese get to work murdering the child, Helaena scoops up the other and walks through the palace in a panicked daze. When she finally arrives in her mother’s room, she collapses and simply says, “They killed the boy.”

So what the heck went down? What does it all mean? And why have book readers been awaiting this horror show they nickname “Blood and Cheese?” Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 1 “A Son for a Son”….

House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 1 Ending Explained: What Does “They Killed the Boy” Mean?

In case you were confused, Helaena and Aegon have two children: Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. As is hinted early in the episode, even their parents have trouble telling them apart. (Well, at least Aegon needs to get close to his silver haired tykes to tell the difference.) Jaehaerys gets some prime screentime early in the episode — much to Tyland Lannister’s (Jefferson Hall) chagrin — because he’s Aegon’s heir.

When Blood and Cheese corner Helaena, they ask her to identify the boy. She points at one bed and the killers debate if she’s lying or not. Cheese thinks she’s being honest, so they go to work decapitating the child.

It’s not clear until Helaena says, “They killed the boy,” that she did indeed point to Jaehaerys.

How Is “Blood and Cheese” Different on House of the Dragon than in the Books?

House of the Dragon fans have been long anticipating how the HBO show would deal with this grisly episode in Westerosi history because it’s one of the most disturbing sections of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood — and the pressure was not lost on series showrunner Ryan Condal.

When Screen Rant’s Deven McClure asked Condal if he felt “pressure” to get “Blood and Cheese” right during a recent roundtable interview Decider attended, he said, “I mean, sure.”

“Anticipation is great, but you can never deliver exactly on people’s expectations, especially when there’s so many people that read these books and then have their sort of interpretation or vision of what the thing is,” Condal said. “So you just try to make a good version that works for an audience that has read the book and hasn’t read the book.”

That said, there are some key differences to the scene from how Martin’s “sources” describe it that might rankle fans.

In the book, Fire & Blood, Daemon specifically reaches out to Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) to hire the assassins in King’s Landing — whereas in the show Mysaria identifies them from afar, while Daemon travels to the city for the assignment. There’s no indication that Blood and Cheese were told to target Aemond, nor are they quite so hapless. They deftly infiltrate the Red Keep, murdering maids and guards, and even tying up Queen Alicent. In the book, they wait until Helaena specifically comes to Alicent’s chambers with her children to say goodnight to make their move.

When Decider asked Condal at the same roundtable why he made Blood and Cheese more bumbling, he said, “I think history is just messy…When you set something in motion like that, in a dangerous, high stakes situation like this, you can’t predict the outcome.”

“I mean, Daemon hires a guy. He sends them in on a plot and it’s a heist mission that goes wrong,” Condal said. “We actually don’t hear what Daemon tells them right before, you know, when they ask, ‘Well, what happens if we can’t find them?’ And my sense is that we know from their conversation inside the room that Daemon almost certainly said some version of like, ‘Don’t leave empty-handed.'”

Another way in which Blood and Cheese’s actions are presented as more horrific and more pre-meditated in the book has to do with one Maelor Targaryen. In Fire and Blood, the twins are six years old and their younger brother is two. As the family is held hostage, Cheese explains they are “debt collectors” looking for just one son to square things. He then asked Helaena, “Which one you want t’lose, Your Grace?”

Martin insists that Helaena begs to be murdered in her son’s place, but when she’s told she has to choose one son or they all die, she tearfully names Maelor. The speculation is that not only was Maelor younger, but he was not the heir.

Cheese tells Maelor, “You hear that, little boy? Your momma wants you dead.” And then Blood beheads Jaehaerys, not Maelor.

So why not include this dramatic portion of the tale? Ryan Condal told Decider it was because they already had to compress so much information in Season 1 that there wasn’t room for little Maelor.

“The first season, in the book, like that story would take place over more than 30 years. And it’s just if we tried to do that, we would have to recast every character in the story and it would have been even more difficult to produce and dramatize than what we had,” he said. “So it just means that, you know, Helaena and Aegon’s kids and Rhaenyra and Daemon’s kids are just younger in this than they would have been in the original story.”

“So it just means that Maelor didn’t exist in this time.”

You can see a shorter, third bloodline emerging from Aegon and Helaena in the House of the Dragon Season 1 opening credits, suggesting he still might exist in the show.

“But Jaehaerys is the heir and he’s the one that ends up dying in the book,” Condal said. “And that was the thing that sort of felt core and key to the adaptation.”

Why Don’t We Know What Daemon Said to the Killers in the House of the Dragon Season 2 Premiere?

Confused why House of the Dragon cut away from Daemon’s final orders to Jaehaerys’s killers? During the roundtable, Consequence’s Liz Shannon Miller asked this very question and Condal explained it was to invite audience speculation.

“As in Season 1, the ‘Heir for a Day’ comment, we know in the book that Daemon said that or is thought to have said that, but we don’t actually know what Daemon did,” Condal said, harkening back to the show’s very first episode. “We were wondering, ‘Did Otto take an opportunity for something Daemon did say and then twist his words in order to manipulate Viserys?’ I think that’s where the fun of the interpretation of this world comes in.”

Condal said even though we don’t know exactly what Daemon said, there is the possibility he suggested killing one of the children. “I mean, the guy is, you know, he’s a fascinating character, but he’s capable of great monstrosity,” Condal said. “We don’t really trust him and we don’t know where he is or where he comes down on all of this.”

Why Do Game of Thrones Fans Call the Prince’s Killers Blood and Cheese?

There’s no specific rhyme or reason for the book canon nicknames of “Blood and Cheese” outside of the characters’ reputations. Blood, the gold cloak, had a violent nature. Cheese was a ratcatcher, so he probably had access to more fine frommage than your typical smallfolk. The show, at least, gives us a moment where the anonymous ratcatcher is eating cheese.