“Rhaenyra Triumphant,” this week’s episode of House of the Dragon, takes place almost entirely within the Red Keep at King’s Landing. Most of it focuses on the newly ascended queen as she realizes the realm she’s fought so hard to reclaim is, well… it’s in a bit of a shambles. It’s a sort of messiness she’d never even considered, and in a new interview, Emma D’Arcy talked about Rhaenyra’s headspace as she awakens to the difficulties she now faces. The Queen of the Seven Kingdoms has been troubled by a lot of problems in season three so far. She lost another son. She had to behead her first victim in front of a very judgmental audience. The previous king, Aegon, is MIA—as is his brother, Aemond, who has a dangerous dragon in his corner. Then, there’s the whole “Ormund Hightower is now a power player” situation. But while Rhaenyra expected the Dance of the Dragons to include scheming and sea battles and armies being set on fire, she didn’t think she’d discover the crown’s treasury is flat broke. No money for her fancy coronation, much less to fund even basic necessities. Also, there’s a serious rat problem in the castle.
“I think there’s something nice that at once Rhaenyra is a monarch taking up her premiership, and at the same time, she is a person going back to the family home,” D’Arcy told Variety. “And I like the idea that even in a case such as hers, there’s no immunity to the sort of forced regression of the family home. It speaks to something that’s very exciting about the show broadly, which is the sort of fundamental entanglement of the personal and political here.”
