House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 5 Review: Ill omens and the question of charge hover

3/5

After last week’s climactic spectacular, action-fuelled sequences, the new episode of House of the Dragon, passive in temper, takes a step back, surveying the damages wrought a well as reiterating home truths. This bunch of truths doesn’t have any novelty. It’s no secret that being a woman in Westeros, irrespective of rank or title, will ensure one remains perennially at the mercy, condescension and prone to being instantly dismissed by the men around them. This is one of the most strikingly common features binding both the opposing camps.

Written by Ti Mikkel and directed by Clare Kilner, the episode once again fleshes out parallels between Rhaenyra ( Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent ( Olivia Cooke). Both are being more than generously indicated by the men around them that they, belonging to the fairer sex, don’t have the requisite experience for the tasks they might wish to be involved in. Rhaenyra’s small council insist on their deference and their utter loyalty to her but she can gauge they’d rather have her stowed far away from the line of action than be trusted to preside over battle strategies. But she also calls out their patronising, reminding them they haven’t seen any war more than her, as her father, Viserys’ reign was marked by peace.

Disgruntled and now with Rhaenys ( Eve Best), the only person she felt understood her dead, she has the calm and canny Mysaria ( Sonoya Mizuno) to express some of her agitation. She is anguished that she is being impeded from action herself, while scores fight and die under her name. Everyone around her is doing their bit. Rhaena ( Phoebe Campbell) tries to persuade the lady of the Eyrie of loyalty to Rhaenyra while Jace ( Harry Collett) negotiates with the Freys to be given control of the Twins.

“ I don’t know my path”, Rhaenyra tells Mysaria complaining her father didn’t prepare her for the military end of things. Mysaria reassures her there’s more than a way to fight a war, advising her not to undermine the strength of the restless, discontented commoners in King’s Landing. The Greens may have triumphed over Rhaenys but whether it could be called a victory looks uncertain, as their decision to parade Rhaenys’ dragon, Meleys’ head through the capital’s streets, is met with disfavour by the smallfolk. It’s immediately pronounced by them as an “ill omen” , much against the Greens’ hope of being received with glory and exultation. Parading a dead dragon is tantamount to sneering at the gods themselves. It only accelerates the twitchiness of the masses to try and flee the capital, where food is in shortage and payments for service indefinitely deferred, but they are prevented from doing so by the army.

In the situation of Aegon’s ( Tom Glynn-Carney) near-fatal, crippling injury, a dire need for a regent to rule in the interim arises. Alicent advances herself as the right fit for it, since she had also worked in such capacity during Viserys’ worsening health. However, she is shut down, with even the people she thought might have supported her, Larys ( Matthew Needham) and Criston Cole ( Fabien Frankel) siding with Aemond ( Ewan Mitchell) . This leads to one of the episode’s most indelible, standout moments, with the camera resting on Cooke’s face as a bristling, deeply thwarted Alicent realises she has almost no power or influence any more. The strategizing fades into a blur in the background as she confronts the fact of her losing her entire grip over events that she set into devastating motion.

Meanwhile, the Harrenhal plot track continues with Daemon ( Matt Smith) beset with the most peculiar visions and hallucinations, snaking off to a particularly icky one. If it wasn’t so clear up till now, the episode has him overtly spell out the ambitions he has been pursuing, to raise an army on his own name instead of Rhaenyra. Even if he succeeds in gaining the fealty of a house, he is also recapped about the cost of the devotion and that everyone knows his worst instincts. But this track is beginning to show strong traces of indulgence and tiring repetitiveness even though Smith nails the slippery mental states. This deviation from the central tracks takes up considerable time without much deepening what has already been amply established as to the guilt gnawing at Daemon while he pushes his agenda further into play. This episode resembles a waiting-in-the-wings approach, as the realm and its key players gear up for their next critical moves that can only instigate these consequences-more chaos, grotesqueness, betrayal and retributive bloodshed.