Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of House of the Dragon.
If you weren’t sure what to expect going into the long-awaited second season of House of the Dragon, the title of the first episode, “A Son for a Son,” offered a pretty big clue about what was to come.
Picking up pretty much immediately after the events of the Season 1 finale, the Season 2 premiere opened with Rhaenyra Targaryen (played by Emma D’Arcy) still in the throes of grief following the death of her son, Lucerys (Elliot Grihault), and his dragon, Arrax, at the hands of Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) and his dragon, Vhagar. When she finally returned to speak with her council at Dragonstone, she made one demand: “I want Aemond Targaryen.”
Being the vengeful uncle-husband that he is, Daemon (Matt Smith) set to work putting a plan in motion to take out Aemond from inside the Red Keep. Except, things didn’t exactly go as planned. Although Daemon intended for his hired assassins—a City Watch malcontent nicknamed Blood (Sam C. Wilson) and a castle rat-catcher known as Cheese (Mark Stobbart)—to kill Aemond, they instead settled for 6-year-old Jaehaerys, the firstborn son of Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his sister-wife Helaena (Phil Saban), when Aemond was nowhere to be found.
Read More: House of the Dragon’s Searing Second Season Has More to Offer Than Just Fire and Blood
Simply known as the “Blood and Cheese” plot in George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, the A Song of Ice and Fire companion novel on which House of the Dragon is based, showrunner Ryan Condal described the brutal murder of Jaehaerys as a moment where, “George kind of outdid himself in his own George-ness, in terms of finding the awful depths of certain characters.”
“A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones have really conditioned people to expect the unexpected and expect the horrible,” he told Entertainment Weekly in May. “But, yeah, that one’s pretty horrific. We’ll see what people make of what’s to…
