House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 2 Recap: If This Be Victory

Spoilers below.

Episode 2 of House of the Dragon’s third season opens underwater, in the dark, looking up at the body of Jacaerys Velaryon, Rhaenyra’s eldest son, drifting among the wreckage of the Battle of the Gullet. Above him, the wreckage of an entire fleet litters the water: scorched hulls, drifting bodies, fire still finding things left to burn. Baela Targaryen, Daemon’s daughter and Jace’s betrothed, flies low over the water on her dragon Moondancer, scanning the ruin below.

Soldiers carry Jace’s body back to Dragonstone, Baela walking in front of the procession. “The battle?” asks Ser Lorent Marbrand, the knight who carried out Jace’s last order before he died. (This order was, of course, to lock his mother, the queen, in her chambers.) “‘Tis won,” Baela replies. The words come out hollow.

When Rhaenyra Targaryen, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne and leader of the Black faction, emerges to meet them, understanding arrives slowly, then all at once: denial, disbelief, then horror. Her knees hit the stone in front of Jace’s stretcher. “What have you done?” she asks her dead son, again and again, shaking his body as if her grief were an argument she might still win. When Lorent tries to pull her away, she turns on him with real fury—“How dare you set your hands on me?”—and when he offers her his sword and his life in penance, she has no use for either. “Will it wake my son?” she says. “Will it change the truth of his folly and yours? And yours! All of you who knew what Jacaerys had done and stood by.” It’s a brutal scene, beautifully performed by D’Arcy.

Elsewhere on the coast, Rhaena Targaryen, Baela’s twin sister, rides to the Eyrie and meets Lady Jeyne Arryn (Amanda Collin) outside its walls. She pleads for asylum, having inadvertently caused the death of Rhaenyra’s heir with her inability to control her dragon, Sheepstealer. “I have done a terrible thing,” she confesses.

Jeyne already knows about Jace’s death. “You were supposed to be on a ship to Pentos,” she says. Rhaena offers the only leverage she has left: She offers up Sheepstealer himself, now roosting near the Vale, in exchange for Jeyne’s silence and protection. Jeyne isn’t interested. “I cannot stop a dragon from abiding where it pleases,” she says. “I do not wish to see you again.” One episode ago, securing a dragon looked like Rhaena’s long-awaited triumph. Now, it has made her a fugitive nobody wants at their door.

Daemon Targaryen, meanwhile, is celebrating a victory he doesn’t yet know has come at a terrible cost. His men have Jason Lannister’s severed head on a pike when Ser Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale) arrives bearing wine and a royal summons. Reading the news, Daemon learns the crown prince is dead, and he is to return to Dragonstone, where he will ride for King’s Landing with Rhaenyra to claim the throne for his queen. He gives his men their orders—garrison Harrenhal, march with strength—then walks off to find Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin), the woods-dwelling midwife whose rivermen helped defeat the Lannister army.

“I have seen that your coming has been an omen to the end,” she tells him. When he asks the end of what, she gives him only riddles, then a price: She wants Harrenhal, after a lifetime of watching the castle change hands without anyone cherishing it.

“The crown is not in the habit of giving out castles to midwives,” Daemon tells her, amused. Instead, he says he will speak with Queen Rhaenyra, who may be convinced to extend her “some other reward.”

“I ask for food, and you offer me rubies,” she says. “For all their worth, they will never satisfy my hunger.” She tells him to go home and never come back.

On the beach below the Gullet, Alyn of Hull searches the dead for his father, Corlys Velaryon, still unaccounted for since the battle. Baela lands nearby to tell him not to give up—“Many before have left my grandsire for dead, and they were all mistaken”—and the two of them talk through what Corlys has and hasn’t given each of them. Nearby, Alyn’s brother, Addam of Hull, is visible in the distance atop his dragon Seasmoke, still searching the wreckage for Corlys’s body.

Only after they have said as much as either of them can stand to say does the episode finally let Corlys’s descendants find him: breathing and bruised, washed up against the rocks. “If this be victory, I hope I never see another,” Corlys tells them later, when he is dry. He has nothing left to give Alyn, he says, but his name; Alyn tells him it is worth more than gold. The camera pulls back to find all four of them staring at High Tide burning in the distance—a fire that, for once, did not cost this family one of its own.

Still in their raven carriage rolling toward the coast, King Aegon II and Larys Strong are busy picking at the same wound. Aegon won’t forgive him for revealing his identity to their captors. Larys won’t apologize for the fact that it kept them both alive. But their bickering is soon interrupted by an actual ambush—soldiers, arrows, Aegon stabbing a man in the back—and once it is over, the two disagree about where to flee. Larys wants to head toward Duskendale, but Aegon insists on Rook’s Rest, where Ser Criston Cole keeps a loyal garrison. Stripped of his crown and his guard, Aegon is still choosing pride over caution, and two seasons have already taught us exactly how that ends for a Targaryen.

In King’s Landing, Alicent Hightower, the dowager queen, is already moving against the clock. She tells Ser Luthor (Tom Cullen), a captain of the City Watch, that Rhaenyra is coming and that she intends to let her in. Queen Helaena holds the city’s authority in Aegon’s absence, and Alicent means to use that authority to end the war without another siege. “Some would call that treason,” Luthor says. “Some would,” she answers. “The question is, would you?”

Back at Dragonstone, Daemon returns to find Hugh Hammer and Ulf White, riders of Vermithor and Silverwing, back from Harrenhal empty-handed. Aemond never reached their position, and after two days spent waiting, they simply left. Daemon’s fury is immediate and physical; he strikes Ulf across the face for daring to have an opinion about the queen’s orders. “You have erred,” he tells them. “Your error will cost us dearly.”

Daemon then discovers Mysaria, his former lover and Rhaenyra’s newfound adviser, outside Rhaenyra’s chambers. He questions her motives, having left her at Dragonstone a prisoner. But Mysaria reminds him, evenly, that he once promised her freedom in exchange for help finding spies in the Red Keep. They circle each other—their old resentments about loyalty and rank and who actually has Rhaenyra’s trust flaring—until a rider interrupts with word that Vhagar was spotted leaving King’s Landing.

It is Daemon who wakes Rhaenyra with the news. She is in bed, overcome with grief. “He defied me,” she says of Jace.

“That is what sons do,” Daemon answers.

She speaks of the wild dragon from the Battle of the Gullet, Rhaena’s barely tamed Sheepstealer, and Daemon swears he will find the beast. Then he tells her that Aemond’s dragon has left King’s Landing. Aemond and Vhagar’s absence is something Rhaenyra can finally act upon, and this is what finally gets her to sit up in bed. “The boys who clung to me, who hid their little faces in my skirts, dead, so that I may sit upon a throne of swords,” she says. Will she let them die for nothing? Daemon answers gently, telling her what he learned in Harrenhal: a vision of a girl with silver hair in a distant desert, dragons at her breast, the Song of Ice and Fire made suddenly, strangely real. He has no idea, of course, that this vision concerns Daenerys Targaryen. But he knows it must have something to do with Rhaenyra.

Alicent, meanwhile, runs into her own ambush. Lord Jasper Wylde (Paul Kennedy) corners her, needling her about Ser Criston, about a “secret meeting with the City Watch,” his hand finding her cheek before she can pull away. “The penalty for this would be death,” she warns him. He assaults her anyway, and to protect herself as he pulls at her skirts she grabs a stone off the table and smashes it across his face, and the fight that follows is ugly. Grand Maester Orwyle (Kurt Egyiawan) bursts in, and Jasper, caught, accuses Alicent of treason. Orwyle, knowing what he witnessed, arrests the lord instead.

“I do not know what you have done, Your Grace,” Orwyle tells Alicent once they are alone and she is confirmed to be unharmed. “I fear it is something desperate.” He’s not wrong.

At Dragonstone, Rhaenyra tells her remaining council she is flying to King’s Landing with Daemon and her new riders as escort. Grand Maester Gerardys (Phil Daniels) warns her the Velaryon fleet is too scattered to protect her. “She has me,” Daemon says.

Lord Bartimos Celtigar (Nicholas Jones) calls it what it sounds like: a trap.

“If it is, so be it,” Rhaenyra says. “I’m done talking. Let Ser Lorent choose how he will die.”

Mysaria hands the queen her crown before she leaves. “Remember which one of us has been faithful,” she says, and Daemon, watching, cannot resist discussing afterward with Rhaenyra the company she keeps. (“I have no need of your approval,” Rhaenyra reminds her husband.)

They fly for King’s Landing—Rhaenyra on Syrax, Daemon on Caraxes, Hugh and Ulf flying cover behind them—passing low over the still-smoking ruin of the Gullet on the way. Inside the city, Alicent tells Helaena, Aegon’s wife and sister, to stand the guard down. Ser Rickhard Thorne (Vincent Regan) has already betrayed her plan, which means there is no time left for anything but speed. The two women share a brief moment amid the scramble: Alicent confesses that she now thinks not of what her daughter deserves but of what might make her happy. Helaena answers, after a pause, that she might like to keep chickens.

Aemond, believing he is riding Vhagar toward Daemon, descends on Harrenhal and torches soldiers, who scatter helplessly. Sword drawn, he cuts down Simon Strong’s men—and Simon himself—before he reaches for his own back, and his hand comes away wet with blood.

He finds Alys among the wreckage and crawls toward her. She does not touch him. The one-eyed prince who inspired fear for three seasons collapses in front of a woman who owes him nothing, in a hall two days’ ride from the throne room, where his mother, sister, uncle, and half-sister are, at that exact hour, finally free to do what his presence would have otherwise made impossible.

Rhaenyra and Daemon descend on King’s Landing to no resistance at all. “Alicent did as she promised,” Rhaenyra says. But, as Daemon puts it, “the true test is within.” Inside the Red Keep, the handful of soldiers who do resist fall quickly to Daemon’s sword. They reach the throne room to find Rickhard’s men blocking the way—until Luthor arrives from behind with his own men. “The guards at the gates have thrown down their swords,” he announces. “Do the same, or perish as traitors.” Rickhard’s soldiers comply. The throne is, suddenly, undefended.

But Rhaenyra will not sit until Aegon is found, and Aegon cannot be found, because Aegon is not here. He is somewhere on the road to Rook’s Rest, alive and uncaptured, while the war moves on without him. Instead, Daemon finds Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), Alicent’s father and the realm’s former Hand of the King, in the king’s prison, and he delivers the captive to the throne room in Aegon’s stead. “I assume everyone else is dead,” Otto says, resigned to his fate.

Daemon tells Rhaenyra that if she means to rule, she has to show her people she will not waver. She must kill Otto. “I don’t know if I can,” she admits.

“Let Daemon do it,” Otto offers. “Spare me at least from being hacked at.” But Rhaenyra does not shrink from the challenge. She takes up Jace’s sword.

She circles Otto, hesitates, then swings, first haltingly, then again with determination. Daemon, watching with something close to pride, takes the blade back from her to finish off Jasper with the ease of long practice. Rhaenyra climbs the dais afterward, her face wet, her breath not quite steady, and finally sits upon the Iron Throne.

Soldiers part the crowd to bring in Alicent and Helaena, and Alicent’s eyes go straight to her father’s body on the floor before they lift to find Rhaenyra on the throne above her. Neither woman says anything. They grew up together inside these same walls. Now, they look at each other across a lifeless body and a quieted crowd. Whatever was left of their friendship lies somewhere between them on the paved stone.

Rhaenyra has wanted the Iron Throne for decades now, and what she has lost in her pursuit of it is impossible to quantify. The crown does not reward grief; it demands that grief harden first into something more like fury. She paid that price this episode, as she swung a sword she barely knew how to hold. Across the room stood the one person who might understand what this action cost her, but who may be forever lost to her now. The throne is Rhaenyra’s—but what’s left of the woman she once was remains to be seen.