Premiere of the second season of “House of the Dragon”; Death of “Blood and Cheese”

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers for the season two premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon.

After the first season ended with the quick and shocking death of a child – Rhaenyra Targaryen’s (Emma D’Arcy) son Lucerys Velaryon – the second season of “House of the Dragon” began with a series of grief-driven decisions and insidious plans that led to the gruesome murder of another child: Jaehaerys Targaryen, the grandson of Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke).

Little Jaehaerys, the son of King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Queen Helaena (Phia Saban), is killed in his bed by two men nicknamed “Blood and Cheese.” One of them is a hulking former member of the City Watch, the other the royal Pied Piper. The pair sneak into the palace on orders from Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) to find and kill Aemond Targareyn (Ewan Mitchell) so that Rhaenyra can take revenge for Aemond’s role in Luke’s death.

Instead, Jaehaerys is killed when Blood and Cheese fail to find Aemond. They come across Queen Helaena and her two sleeping twins – a boy and a girl – and demand to know which of the two is the boy, believing this fulfills the “son for son” part of death demanded by Daemon. Helaena points to her son and then runs with her daughter Jaehaera to the safety of her mother Alicent’s room. There she finds Alicent sleeping with Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel).

This entire death sequence in “Blood and Cheese” differs in many ways from the heinous act in George RR Martin’s book “Fire & Blood,” the book from the “Game of Thrones” universe that tells the fictional story of the Targaryen family and serves as the basis for “House of the Dragon.”

In Fire & Blood, Jaehaerys is still killed by Blood and Cheese. But in the book, Westeros’ “historians” say that the men were not specifically ordered by Daemon Targaryen to kill Aemond, as is the case in House of the Dragon, but were only given the order “an eye for an eye, a son for a son.”

Also in the history book: Rhaenyra does not demand Aemond’s death; the murder of Jaehaerys takes place in Alicent’s bedroom, not Helaena’s, where Blood and Cheese tie Alicent up and use her as bait while they wait for Helaena and the children to come in and say goodnight. Additionally, instead of pointing to Jaehaerys to show that he is the boy and effectively determining his death, Helaena chooses her youngest son, Maelor, to die, hoping that Blood and Cheese will spare Jaehaerys. But they kill Jaehaerys anyway.

“One of the challenges of adapting ‘Fire & Blood’ is that the book contains intentionally contradictory narratives, often with three different perspectives on the story that don’t agree with each other,” says Ryan Condal, showrunner of “House of the Dragon.” “So our job as adapters is to find an objective throughline here to draw the audience into the narrative as we believe it was intended.”

Starting with the change to have Rhaenyra call for Aemond’s blood, Condal says, “It felt like Rhaenyra was out for vengeance despite her grief, but she would choose a target that had a strategic or military advantage. Of course, taking out Aemond would not only directly punish him for his betrayal and murder of Luke, but it would also eliminate the rider of the world’s greatest dragon, giving her side an instant advantage.”

“Rhaenyra lets her anger flow in her voice, and I think that’s something we didn’t see a lot in Season 1 – certainly not in the older Rhaenyra,” says D’Arcy. “She always tried to convey that fire. And in this season, after Luc’s death, she finally lets that thing burn.”

Condal says the elimination of Helaena’s choice between Maelor and Jaehaerys “simply doesn’t exist yet in this version of the story” because time in Season 1 had to be compressed so that Helaena and Aegon’s children, as well as Daemon and Rhaenyra’s youngest children, “are younger in this part of the narrative than they were in the original book.”

For Helaena actress Phia Saban, the elimination of the character in this “blood and cheese” equation and the fact that Helaena points directly at Jaehaerys, leading to his death, is “almost more heartbreaking.”

“There’s something about her not being able to escape the fact that she said ‘yes, that’ that weighs on her so much,” Saban says. “But I also think she really felt like she had no choice, because I think there’s so much at stake – it’s the highest stake in her life – and when he says to her, ‘Tell me the right one or I’ll do horrible things to your kids,’ she believes him. She says I can’t screw this up, I have to be completely honest. And I think it’s actually more heartbreaking that she’s honest.”

Condal decided that the death should be seen audibly in the shadows and visually on Helaena’s face, rather than showing the act itself on screen. It was, he says, “a subject of some discussion” in the writers’ room.

“We knew it was going to be gruesome and brutal – we didn’t want it to be unnecessary or over the top,” says Condal. “The idea of ​​that sequence was to dramatize a robbery gone wrong. So we move away from the central narrative of the world of Daemon, Rhaenyra, Alicent and Aegon and suddenly we’re following these two characters we’ve just met in an alley in Flea Bottom. Daemon has given them a mission to go in and find Aemond Targaryen, and we follow them, and we follow them, and we don’t cut away and we don’t go back to the other narratives – oh God, what’s going to happen?”

The idea behind it, says Condal: “Now we are suddenly in Helaena’s subjective perspective – we follow these two guys and then we enter her world and see how it affects her and feel what she experiences as a result.”

“Yes, it’s a small child, and it’s horrible. But because we don’t really know Jaehaerys as a narrative character, it made more sense to experience this horrific event through Helaena’s eyes,” Condal adds. “You instinctively know what’s happening off-screen, but I think it’s the emotional tension I feel when I experience this through Helaena’s eyes that really touches me, and I’ve seen it 100 times.”

Then there is the crucial difference regarding the location where the murder takes place: Alicent does not witness the death of her grandchild, but is in bed with Criston Cole when he is slaughtered.

“It adds a level of shame and guilt that Alicent has never experienced before, because he is unwell with the head of the Kingsguard, who is supposed to be keeping the castle locked,” says Cooke. “It’s a theme that runs through the whole season: If they hadn’t got involved in this affair, would this have happened? They see themselves as entirely responsible for it.”

Although the premiere ends in tragedy and promises darker days, it begins with a little fan service: “House of the Dragon” offers a first glimpse of the North, the home of Jon Snow and the Stark family from the original “Game of Thrones.”

“That was a big moment in the book, and who wouldn’t want to see Winterfell again?” Condal asks rhetorically. “I thought it would be a great treat for the fans. We haven’t seen the North since the original series, and that was still many, many years away. But we wanted to go there for a reason.”

The specific reason in this case was to introduce the character Cregan Stark (played by Tom Taylor) and his friendship with Rhaenyra’s eldest son Jacaerys Velaryon (Harry Collett), shortly before Jace learns of the death of his brother Luc.

“I try not to do things just because we like doing them,” says Condal. “But this sequence is really the last place where this terrible news hasn’t been heard, because the North is so far away. So we start with the raven carrying the news of Luc’s death all the way to the North. And we see Jace in that last pure moment where his brother is still alive, at least in his mind.”

Condal points out that this is also intended to show that the world of Westeros is larger than this feuding family in the south.

“It also expands the scope of the world and reminds people that there are more places here than Dragonstone and King’s Landing – and that the North is a big part of what’s to come,” says Condal. “There’s a wall up there, and there’s a great power beyond the wall that might not affect the characters in this time period, but it does in the timeline of Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow.”

Michaela Zee contributed to this story.