House of the Dragon - “Faceless Men” Review
Ser Criston Cole dies without an honorable last stand. No meaningful gesture of the kind that dying men in this genre are so often granted. He is ambushed in the Riverlands, his army routed, and he is killed with arrows.
It is, in its way, a perfectly calibrated piece of storytelling.
Criston Cole has spent three seasons being wrong about almost everything. Wrong about Rhaenyra. Wrong about the succession. Wrong about his own capacity for moral clarity. He spent his final episode walking toward an unwinnable battle with the certainty of a man who has confused despair with wisdom, calling himself “clear-eyed” at the precise moment when his vision had narrowed to a single vanishing point. The show did not owe him a noble death. The show gave him the death that his choices earned: lonely, pointless, unmourned by anyone.
Aegon’s storyline continues its descent. His growing instability – the burnt king becoming something more volatile and less predictable than anyone in his orbit is equipped to manage – is given its most disturbing expression yet in an episode that understands his dangerousness is no longer primarily political. Larys continues to manage him with the particular skill of someone who has long since abandoned any pretense of loyalty in favor of pure self-preservation, reading Aegon with a cold accuracy that makes him the most consistently unnerving presence in scenes that do not otherwise belong to him.
Aemond remains at Harrenhal, increasingly isolated, the eye patch and the lake and the ghost of Vhagar’s absence giving his scenes a Gothic quality that the show has not previously attempted for this character. His grief is not sympathetic – the show does not ask us to sympathize with it – but it is legible, which is the more interesting achievement.
With two episodes remaining, “Faceless Men” has done the necessary work of setting up the remaining two episodes of the season: it has cleared the board of pieces that were blocking the final configurations, and it has moved the most important characters into the positions from which the season’s concluding acts can be played out.