House of the Dragon fans know there’s always plenty of uncomfortable drama filling the halls of the Red Keep. But season three’s nexus of cringe shifted far from King’s Landing in this week’s “The Dragon in Winter,” when the Targaryen urge for inbreeding took a particularly uneasy turn.
If you’ve read this far, you probably already know, but this week’s episode featured a love scene between Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and his mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke)—a scenario made more believable by the fact that Aemond gave his mother a lingering kiss on the lips when he departed for Harrenhal earlier in the season. House of the Dragon lets the intimacy play out long enough to make viewers fall for the ruse—after we all saw how repulsed Alicent was by that kiss in the season premiere. But it turned out to be Aemond hallucinating his incestuous desire, which, despite the traditions of the Targaryen family, is still outrageously icky. Instead, he realized he was really in bed with his witchy lover, Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin). Alys has a lot of mysterious knowledge, but even she was shocked by his reaction, and she’s none too pleased when the real Alicent shows up at Harrenhal moments later in “The Dragon in Winter.” In an interview with Variety, Rankin talked about the bizarre love triangle of sorts that springs up when Alicent, who’s there with the secret intention of killing her son, suddenly enters the scene.
