House of the Dragon: Episode 9

"Usurp? We all surp!" L to R: Otto (Rhys Ifans), Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Criston (Fabien Frankel) discuss the reason for the treason.

From the looks of it, hundreds die, and hundreds more are injured. Aegon doesn't listen to his mother's wise counsel on the subject of good governance, of course, and spends the scene whining that his father never loved him. When she returns to her chambers, Larys is waiting for her with the news that Talia, her handmaiden, is part of the White Worm's spy network. Otto, impressed, agrees to "look into it," which is Westerosi for "prepare a white paper on the potential to launch a task force to investigate the feasibility of forming a shadow-committee, pro-tem." (That said, it's very clear that the show wants us to kink-shame Larys here — to see this whole setup as sick and twisted, or even somehow as something that logically follows out of his default, gestalt creepiness. Alicent pieces together that Otto and the rest of the council mean to kill Rhaenyra to prevent her and Daemon attracting enough followers to challenge Aegon. (In this scene, Tyland leaves plenty of room between himself and the combatants, representing all of us who've taken our beers with us to a far corner of the bar the second we sensed a fight brewing.) He gets hanged in the courtyard for all to see; fandom is a bloodsport, y'all. Talia dutifully informs Alicent, then not-so-dutifully lights candles in a specific window of the Red Keep — a signal to Mysaria that the king is dead. It also helps to turn a paltry few pages of the book into a full hour of television. (Note that while up in the Red Keep proper, the pious Alicent ordered the dragon iconography of House Targaryen replaced with that of the Faith of the Seven, down here, in the bowels of the castle that only the servants ever see, the dragons persist, in the wall sconces that light his way.) The characters in Blood & Fire are a lot more...linear, shall we say, than those of House of the Dragon.