(Warning: This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 2, Episode 4.)
House of the Dragon has shown remarkable restraint with its looming Targaryen civil war. Season 1’s barbs between the Greens and the Blacks were largely verbal and political, not physical. Even after a usurped throne and the deaths that followed escalated matters, the two warring factions resisted the call to pull out their biggest weapon in the arsenal for anything more than patrol duty.
That changed in Episode 4 at Rook’s Rest, a minor but strategic castle in the Crownlands. Criston Cole’s (Fabien Frankel) campaign to capture the castle and cut Dragonstone off from the mainland drew in Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) and her dragon Meleys. Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) was waiting in the woods to attack with Vhagar, and an insecure King Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) rode in with Sunfyre to prove himself. The ensuing “Dance of the Dragons,” which saw three dragons fight in the sky to the death, ended in absolute carnage: Countless bodies of nameless soldiers burnt to ash, with Rhaenys and Meleys both dead in the wreckage.
