House of the Dragon - “Unbowed and Unbent” Review
There is a recurring structural irony in “Unbowed and Unbent” that the episode itself seems to recognize with quiet satisfaction: Alicent Hightower is trapped in the Red Keep, a prisoner of the queen who promised her freedom, and yet every man who has ever benefited from her maneuvering is blaming her for his failures.
Ser Criston Cole, mud-streaked and elegiac on the banks of the Blackwater, fantasizes about the songs that will be sung of his sacrifice – then embellishes the daydream with the detail that even his ex-girlfriend, locked in the Red Keep, won’t escape the earworm of his legend. He is saying this to Alicent’s brother. In Harrenhal, Aemond wakes from nightmares of his fratricide and concludes the root problem is his mother, who obviously preferred Aegon. Across the Crownlands, Aegon himself confides to Larys that his failure as king traces directly to his parents’ favoritism.
The irony is that Alicent, meanwhile, is doing the only thing she has ever done: attempting to protect the one child she might actually manage to help, while the children she failed grow into threats. Her conspiracy to provide Helaena with an abortifacient is thwarted by her daughter’s refusal and then by Alicent’s own choice to drink the tonic herself to throw Mysaria off the scent. The attempted escape through the Red Keep’s hidden passages, ending with mother and daughter trapped between dark castle walls in a dead end, is the episode’s most visually precise piece of storytelling: two women in a labyrinth not of their making, out of options in both directions.
The more interesting political development is what Mysaria chooses to do when she suspects them. She does not report the pregnancy or the first attempted escape to Rhaenyra. Alicent’s description of survival at court – the value of secrets kept, the cost of having nothing left to barter – has apparently found its mark. Whatever Mysaria’s motivation, the first fracture between the Mistress of Whispers and her queen is now visible.
Rhaenyra herself is governed this episode by what Daemon names explicitly: blindness. She is blinded by grief and by vengeance, unable to confront the reality of Jace’s death directly enough to even visit Joffrey while he is awake. She is kneeling before devotional candles in a sept while the bodies of her Gold Cloaks accumulate on the streets – assassinated with gold Daeron coins left as a calling card, Ormund positioning his teenage ward as a third Green claimant to the throne in the most pointed possible way. The macabre Last Supper of gutted Gold Cloaks that awaits Daemon at the episode’s close – “A Feast for Traitors” painted on the wall – announces that the war inside King’s Landing has entered a new and uglier phase.
Daemon, for his part, is blinded by the immensity of his own self-mythologizing. He rallies the City Watch with promises of Dorne bending the knee and a new Valyria, unable to imagine an enemy he cannot vanquish by afternoon. The empty barracks and the arranged bodies are his education.
Aemond is recovering at Harrenhal, emerging from his sickbed to kill four Ironborn raiders while bleeding from the kidney, the old maniacal self returning in his eyes.
Aegon, in Rook’s Rest, stabs Janos to protect his identity – and smiles as the life drains from his victim’s eyes.
Three sons of Alicent Hightower. Three potential claims. One queen, beset on all sides, unable to look clearly at what surrounds her.