Everyone’s itching for a fight in the penultimate episode of Westeros Weekly – here’s our House Of The Dragon season 2 episode 7 review.
In a scene in this week’s episode of House Of The Dragon, Alicent goes for a little swim. Lying on her back and staring up at one of the episode’s few dragon-less skies, it’s an apt metaphor for an hour which feels more like it’s treading water before a big finale than advancing the plot on its own.
The key players are clearly gearing up for a fight, too. Rhaenyra is on a recruiting drive for eligible bastards to swell her common-folk army of dragon riders (which so far is an army of one, but I suppose you have to start somewhere). Daemon is in meetings with young Lord Oscar Tully in his bid to marshal the Riverlands. And Aegon’s had a massive army all along – though it doesn’t seem to have done him much good (his faction looks very much like Aemond’s, now, which I’m sure will end well).
Accordingly, there’s not much in the way of entertaining politics or the hatching of schemes, and the pace of the episode does er towards the slow side. There’s a bit of a sense of the writers pushing characters around on a chessboard before they start taking pieces proper – everyone was more or less in the right position at the end of the last episode, they just needed a nudge that may not quite fill an hour of TV.
Still, there are plenty of nice moments in here. The parallels drawn between King Aegon’s painful attempts to walk around his bedchamber and the latter stages of his grandfather’s illness are nicely done, and the political consequences of ascending low-born folk onto the backs of scaly demigods have the feel of the start of a much bigger problem for Rhaenyra and her faction down the line.
Ahead of next week’s season finale, though, this very much feels like the calm before a storm. It’s hard to blame Alicent for her bath, really – sounds like we could all do with a quick rest.
House Of The Dragon is streaming weekly on NOW and Sky Atlantic.
