What is going on with Kate Middleton?

Which cult is popping off right now?

What the hell is a trad wife?

And why are we so obsessed with them?

I'm Jody Walker. And I'm Chelsea Stark-Jones. And we're obsessed.

Obsessed with all the pop culture happenings, filling our group chats and For You pages.

And we want to talk about them with you. Our new show, We're Obsessed, is for all the things we're loving, buying, watching, listening to, and spiraling over right now. Follow the Ringer Dish feed on Spotify to listen to We're Obsessed every Friday. This is the stuff, Lionel. Lads have learned together, trained together, knock each other down, pick each other up.

You'll certainly form a lifelong bond, wouldn't you agree?

That is the hope, your Grace.

Greetings. Welcome to the House of R, a RingerVerse podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Mallory Rubin, and it is my absolute pleasure to invite you not only back to the Dragon Pit, but also to House of R's newish podcast feed. Joining me today, rolling her small ball and muttering, Dear me, God's be good. It's Joanna Robinson. What's up?

Bad babies. Oh, my gosh. It's almost time.

I know.

House of Dragons, almost here.

So excited. Screach. Joanna. Yeah. Dragon Screach goes here. We have another loaded Hot D Primer show today. We are going to be doing a season one look back, which we'll explain more momentarily. We are going to be chatting with House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal, joining us for a wonderful interview. Wonderful. Before we get to any of that, though. Quick programming reminders.

Oh, so glad.

We've got a bunch today. I'll run through them quickly. Over on the RingerVerse, Loaded Week, Wednesday, The Midnight Boys Reaction to the Ackolite episode 3. Thursday, the Midnight Boys. Instant Reaction to the Ackolite. Episode three. Thursday, The Midnight Boys: Instant Reaction to the Boys. Season four. Premiere, pew, pew, pew, pew. Friday, mint edition on Inside Out to Junior Mints. Get ready. Here on the House of R. Yes. We will be with you on Thursday. You don't have to wait till Friday this week. Thursday. For our deep dive into the Ackolite episode three. And then, of course, on Sunday night, we He and Chris Ryan will be with you.

Yes.

To react to the Hot D season 2 premiere on Talk the Thrones. And we have some related news to share. We're on video now.

Oh, my gosh. Not just Talk to Thrones.

All of it.

All of it.

Full video pods for House of R, Talk to Thrones, Midnight Boys coming on Spotify and on the brand spanking new Ringerverse YouTube channel. You can see our little trailer that we made on the Ringerverse socials, and then you can just go to that YouTube channel and hit subscribe. It is very cinematic. People got a real unvarnished look at your daily process where you're reading multiple books at once. And at my daily process where I was watching Oreo videos on YouTube.

The same. We're the same.

So check out the YouTube channel. Check out the videos on Spotify. We're We're very excited to be on video at long last. Can't wait. Please join us for this new journey that we are all sharing together during our very busy and exciting summer. Speaking of exciting things that are happening this summer, and speaking of Talk the Thrones, and speaking of getting to see our faces, if you're so inclined. Talk the Thrones, live at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, June 25th.

That's just around the corner. Really soon. So soon.

Two episodes of House of the Dragon Wolf are there by then. So we'll be in the throes of a new Throne season. What better time for the two of us, for Chris Ryan, to gather as the three heads of the Talk the Thrones dragon, and spend a little time together in Westeros with some of our closest friends who will hopefully be buying tickets to the show to come hang out with us in Los Angeles. So go to theringer. Com/events if you have not gotten your tickets yet, and join us. We really are excited for that show. It's going to be a blast. Doana, how can everybody follow along?

It's a lot going on. And if folks want to make sure that they don't miss a single thing, live shows, Talk the Thrones, Midnight Boys, House of R, everything else, follow us on social, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok. Follow the RiggerVerse YouTube channel. Do it, all of it. It's all going to be there for you.

Do it.

Listen, it's House of the Dragon time. We love your emails all the time. We really love your emails during House of the Dragon time. So hobbitsanddragons@gmail. Com. Please do give us a shout. Spoiler warning today.

Yeah.

Season one of House of the Dragon in Intimate Details.

Yeah, a helpful little season one refresher. Anything that happened at any point in season one could come up today. That's it. Season 2, Trailers. Marketing material for Season 2, things like that could come up, but we're mostly looking back- In the interview, yeah. At Season 1. Yes, when we get to the chat with Ryan Condal, we're looking ahead, of course, to Season 2, but in our Season 1 refresher. Season 1, the Wider Throne's Universe. It's really it. Let's do it. If you haven't seen Season 1, you're like, I want to dive right into Season 2. Hopefully this helps you. If you've seen Season 1, thanks for coming here to refresh and to hang. Great to have you. Let's do it. Have a goblet. Let's go for it. Pull up a chair, grab a small ball. Okay, Joe.

Stop delaying. Let's do it.

The rapid-ish fire refresher. We decided to do this for your genius idea as we are in the run up to season 2 in the choose aside marketing campaign. Dueling recap, this was your thought. And And part of what's exciting about this is discovering if, as we revisit each episode of season 1, all 10 episodes, do the same things that stood out to us in real-time stand out to us now? And do the same things that feel most important to one of us feel most consequential to the other? How many of these selections will be about feet or hats or small balls? And how many will be about deeply resonant thematic moments? We're about to find out because we are each going to share the three things. From every episode, we're going to go, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. The three things that feel most important to us while revisiting season one. When we say three things... We're doing our best.

We really want this to be rapid fire, so we're going to do our best.

How many smuggles will there be? How many bundles? I mean, it's a house of our podcast, so that's part for the course. All right, Joe. I don't know what's on your list. You don't know what's on mine. There are probably going to be some moments where we're like, I'm counting on the other person to have this. There are going to be plenty of moments where we have the same thing. I'm really looking forward to this. This is going to be a blast. Why don't you kick us off with the first most important thing from episode one, episode one, The Heirs of the Dragon.

To be clear, I'm not doing this in any order of importance. I'm doing it in like, rough-ish-ish chronological order in the episode.

So I'm going to start here. I didn't really do chronological order or necessarily order of importance. I don't know if I had an organizing principle other than vibes.

It doesn't much matter. Vibes only is works. Okay. In one darkened speech, King Viserus's brother, Prince Damon, takes himself out of the running to sit on the Iron Throne by maybe or maybe not saying something very shitty and rude about Viserus's dead infant son, whose birth killed his beloved wife and queen. And I mean, let's be honest, Damon probably said it.

He's here for a day.

He's here for a day.

Tough one.

Damon, heir to the throne, out of the running.

That's point number one. That's a great introduction, that episode. Just fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. My first selection for the series premiere is my first smungle, fittingly, right from the jump. It's the choosing of the heirs times two. The Wounds of the Great Council of 101 AC, selecting Jiharras' successor, this introduction to House Targarian at the height of its strength, 10 Adult Dragons, and then seeing Viserus selected over Renis, and this very crucial opening note that we get in the prolog, the patriarchy could not be more real. And we build into cementing and affirming that idea throughout the episode, Reniera and Emma talking about the child bed is our battlefield. Reniera at her mother and brother's funeral saying, I will never be a son. This crucial note is there from the jump, as are the Harbangers in terms of Targarian division. The only thing that could tear down the house of the dragon was itself. That is the note that opens the series as we make our way toward the Targarian Civil War of Succession, the Dance of the Dragons. And then, of course, that builds toward the end of the episode when Viserus does choose, sorry to deem in the subject of your first pick, to name Reniera Eir.

We get to see the little looks and glances and delays and hesitations on given faces as it's time to swear obesance. That note from Viserus to Rhaneera, A dragon saddle is one thing, but the Iron Throne is the most dangerous seed in the realm. It's like, I got to chill rewatching that. It's just fantastic. So this is what the series is about.

And when you revisit the first episode, They established that focus quite effectively. I love you. I love you madly. I'm still excited for this program. This whole episode, you and I had very different interpretations of this prompt, and I'm excited to see this continue to roll out because here's my bullet point number two. Viseras announced that his daughter will be his heir, and all the dudes look very excited. Misogyny, we solved it. That's it. We did it in episode one.

Misogyny, it's over.

Yeah, we solved it. It's over. All the guys look super excited that a woman is going to be heir to the throne. That's it.

And no one will have a question or a concern or comment on that matter in the future, probably.

No, that's it. That's my rapid fire bullet point. What's your next rapid fire bullet point, Mallory?

To be fair, you said the three most important things from episode.

That was the prompt.

I think I'm answering the prompt. My second most important thing from episode one, Dragon Dreams and Dragon Warnings. We get this very taunting, harrowing glimpse of this dream that has driven and guided a huge stretch of Viserus's life as he is recounting it for Emma in her bath, and of course, for our benefit as well, our son was born wearing Egon's Iron Crown. We love, here at the House of R, a misread, self-fulfilling prophecy. And Viserus's obsession with having a son is on our minds throughout the entire season, building toward a different son from a different marriage, Egan putting on that iron crown. And on the prophecy front, Viser is sharing Eagon's Song of Ice and Fire with Reniera? This was a huge moment for book readers because this is new, new to the show. We did not know this was coming. And the way that this shapes not only our sense of the connected, wider thrones universe, but Reniera's view on responsibility. And then, of course, in that same conversation, he shares what is ultimately like a central thesis for the first season of the show, which is the hubris of dragon control. There are power men should never have trifled with.

One that brought Valaria, it's doom. If we don't mind our histories, it will do the same to us. So that's poisoning us for everything we're building toward in the finale and this broader portent that will be on our minds as we watch the entire dance. Wonderful. The Diger reveal, as it pertains to the prophecy, does come later, but this is still how I encapsulated this.

Viserus reveals that a moderately important prop from season one of Game of Thrones is actually the most important prop in all of Westeros, and that a prophecy, a song of ice and fire, about the Prince who has promised in long winter to come.

So, yes. Moderately important prompt. Prop. Prop.

I almost had it ratcheted down. I think the cat's pod dagger is not the most important prompt of season one of Game of Thrones.

You know? The Night King might have some thoughts.

Yeah. No, that's what I mean in season. The point is, when they first designed the cat's pod dagger, they weren't like, A, this is definitely going to be the thing that kills the Night King. We don't even really know what that is much later down the road. And B, it's going to be a huge part of House of the Dragon as well. I feel like if they had known that, they would have designed it a little bit differently than they did.

Yeah, fair. My third is just establishing the Allison and Runeera bond, because This is another quite substantial page-to-screen evolution. Seeing not only what this relationship looks like and how central it is and foundational it is for their lives in terms of their shared experience and journey, but where they each are inside of that. Our opening note from Allison is, I believe I'm quite content as a spectator. Thank you. That's what she's saying to Reniera. Then Reniera sitting, resting her head Allison's lap in the godswood as they study the tales of Nymeria, this page that will make its way through the season and through the decades. And they're just friends, Mallory.

Just pals.

Just pals. Just pals. Just pals.

Just pals.

And there's that, we see really how their confidence. That's the other thing that really stands out on a rewatch. Reneera saying to Allison, For as long as I can recall, it's all he wanted. Meaning of the Serus and his desire for a son. And then, of course, for Allison with her relationship with her father. Like, right away, Otto is pimping out his daughter, go check in on the king, stand with him, and maybe read to him as he works on his Lego sets. Couldn't be more important to establish that relationship in the opening episode, given the way that Reniera and Allison function in the story moving forward as the respective heads of these respective sides. So neither of us picked the triarchy, dominating our first small council meeting right from the beginning.

Don't worry, the crop theater will come up later for me.

You didn't have Viserus's festering backsore or the first I promise you, we will get to the King's Wounds. You got some rotting flesh. You got some rotting flesh coming in future episodes.

Let's do episode 2.

Episode 2, The Rogue Prince. Joe, what's your first point?

I'm going to guess the end to something you just said about Alicent, which I think was Very important. User@high towerhody asks, Am I the asshole? Am I the asshole for putting on my dead mother's dress and seducing my best friend's dad over late night model making?

It's a good question.

Listen, we all know that there are- Was that up for it? There are many extenuating circumstances here. Allison is being manipulated, maneuvered, all that stuff. It's not her grand seduction plan. But we will revisit Allison and the Am I the asshole question as we go through. But yeah, it's the Dead Mother's Dress that really puts Otto on the shit list for me, among many other things. But the Dead Mother's Dress is really a problem for me.

He's got some thoughts on Westerosi drip. And who can blame him? Who can blame him? My first one is another bundle. It's just key choosing. So I have a few things inside of this that It could be other bullet points for you. I'll hit them quickly. The choosing of Sir Kristen Cole.

A bullet point number two for me in a move that certainly won't haunt her for the rest of her life when your promote hot, Dornishman, Kristenrishin to the King's Guard.

God's. He's dawnish. He's dawnish. Got to just listen to Otto here and gone with one of the- I know.

For once, Otto was right.

Politically helpful choices that would have bolstered a relationship with another house. But no, Kristen Cole, you maniac. Welcome to the party.

I think I have maybe three or four instances where it's #autoisright, and this is one of them.

Oh, exciting. Is that your main takeaway when you watch season one on the whole?

I just mean in general. I think three or four is pretty low.

Are you putting in Otto is right, bog, next to your Thanos's 'is right' bog?

No. Go ahead. No? Okay. Next. For you.

I love watching 'auto'. The bowels of the pleasure den. No, save it. We'll get there in a couple of episodes. The Choosing of Allison Tye Tower. Big one. Big one. The broken and repaired Stone Dragon. The Viseris is saying to Lena on their walk, I imagine even Dragons get lonely and then dropping his Stone Dragon in front of Allison. He's barely able to contain himself when she presents him this Superglen Dragon. Have you ever related to Viseris more?

You love a Lego.

I love a Lego. I've said many times, I just pour over the plans, but this is someone else who Stone Masons do all the real work. The way that this decision alienates Coralis, blindsides Reniera, this is just astonishing stuff from our guy, Viseras, Targarian. The way that entwined with this question of who will Viseris choose to marry, that Renice and Reniera conversation conversation, she warrants inside of that. And that was a conversation that we found ourselves returning to a lot throughout our season one discussion. Men would sooner put the realm to the torch than see a woman ascend the Iron Throne. And Reniera and Renice are not on the same page there, nor are they through much of the season. That's such a crucial conversation.

Are you saying we didn't solve misogyny in episode one of House of the Dragon?

I regret to inform you that we still have some work to do on that front. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I thought the stars did it. I thought the king did it. But okay. All right.

What's your next one, Jo?

It's my last bullet point. On the Bridge of Dragonstone, Rhaneera and Damon make a fool of Otto High Tower's attempt at diplomacy as their Dragons, Cyrax and Criaxes, flirt with each other. This, I think, is not just important because we go back to this Bridge of Dragonstone, not just important because Masaria, our favorite character is here, but important because it previews what's to come in this war where it's like, as we talked about a lot, Otto likes to wage war with quills and ravens and that stuff. But really, this is a battle of Dragons. It will always be a battle of Dragons. And so what What use is someone like Otto Hightower if both sides of any conflict, be it a stolen dragon egg or whatever, have a dragon?

Sheath your steal. So you mentioned Messaria, and I guess we could just say it was an unspoken thing that our first real time, obviously, it's in episode one as well in the brothel. But the scene with Messaria and David on Dragon Stone is really That's where we hit another level of transcendent experience on Accent Corner and made with child. Wonderful stuff. I thought that was one of your picks, but no.

Oh, Messari? No, Messaria does not feature anywhere on our list. Messaria Accent Corner.

Nor did you have in your your final three here, Magga bowls with Melos? Weird. No. No. Interesting. You didn't pick what's to mislike, She's 12, She will mature? Did you assume I would be covering that?

You and Corleys are always thinking about the same thing. You don't have Sir Crispin?

I guess you do. Sir Crispin took place on the Bridge, and so that counts. Okay, here are my next two. My next two are both key themes that We're hammered with here and then play a role across the season. So the first one is the idea of decisiveness versus trepidation, because this is where Runeera's readiness to act when Viserus will not is brought to the fore. You have Dragonrider's father, send us. We move toward the finale when Runeera's own children are ready to say that.

But they were not ready.

Well, Luke, we mourn you still. We mourn you still. And on that On that decisiveness front, this is also where we get that great cordless line that we talked about so much across the season. To elude a storm, you can either sail into it or around it, but you must never wait it's coming. And ultimately, one of the great indictments of Vissara's The Peaceful's Reign is that he too often waited something's coming. And then my third point, my second big theme here is just the idea of Second Suns. Obviously, that's the closing scene of the episode with Coraless.

Damon and Coraless.

Cording Damon. I just always love this. This is not germane to the point I'm making now, but I always love that scene when Damon says, It was never my brother's strongest trait. And Coral says, What? Damon says, Being king. Just remarkable stuff from Damon Targarian. But This idea of second sons, Coral is saying, Our worth is not given, it must be made. What I love about this in this episode is how we start to understand here not only how that can be something that characters like Damon and Coral in this conversation align over, but also it can be a through line and a truth that is shared between people who are opposed. Like, Otto, as Damon pointed out in the first episode, is a striving second son who's not content. And then, of course, also there are going to be second sons who are seeking to clear the way, like Laris or second sons who believe that they're better suited, like Amand. And then while the women of the story are obviously not second sons, there's a shared truth there, too. The focus in the season on the characters who, by the rules of the land, were not meant to inherit power, but then wind up wielding it is so elemental to this story.

Chris and Cole is a huge, huge part of that. I hate him, but classes is standing in Kristen's way. And the way that then that power, the power that has to be snatched or just like, clawed out and stuff like that, then it just winds up being brutally applied often because it had to be brutally won.

Speaking of brutality, Joe, let's go for a hunt. Let's do it. Time for episode three, second of his name.

King Viserius, Targarian, gets wildly trashed.

Hammered, annihilated, sauced.

Confesses to Alicent that he has some doubts that all the signs and portents he received about putting Runeera on the throne. Turns out, sexism wasn't solved way back in episode one. Wild.

Oh, man. This is a big episode for wine.

Oh, yeah.

You know, Viseras couldn't be more sloshed. I always love to get the frunterous face with Jason Lanister's like, Oh, the finest tonneed wine in the realm. And she's just like, This tastes like shit. Absolutely.

Garbage.

Great stuff. So you're telling me all three of your bullet points are not about Laris. Only one of them, I assume, but not all three?

My guy is not in this.

He didn't make the cut. He's coming in later episodes. That's fine. Oh, yes. That's fine. I thought all three might be about him.

In more ways than one. He will definitely be coming in a later episode.

Tell me. Oh, boy, we're back.

Yes, Laris sideling his way into the gossip. Oh, The gossip circle with all the bitchy old ladies of Westeros, as you know, is one of my faves.

Great stuff. It's great stuff. My first one is signs and portents. Portents and signs. Schemes and schemes, schemes and plot, signs and portents, portents and signs. A couple of subsets of this. The baptism by blood. Runeera and her boar, demon in his craze-scale laden, crab, feater, Oos. A lot of symbolism at play there. And then, of course, the White Heart. All of the talk throughout the episode about the signs and portents and what this means on Agon's name day. And then, Viseris can't kill the brown stag as everyone stands there and watches. It is a heart-wrenching scene in so many different respects. And then the white heart appears to Reniera and Kristen Cole, and that's it. Kristen is the only one there to see the white heart appear to Reniera. It's her portent, not Egan's, but no one knows. Great stuff.

Except the worst guy in Westeros. Okay. I'm just going to knock out- But he's not wearing a dumb hat yet, Joe, so. I feel like the dumb hat is just always upon him.

Do you just see it? Does your brain autocomplete that? I feel like the true dumb hat is his personality.

So I'm going to knock out my other two bullet points because they're They go under what you just said. So speaking of science importance, which I literally did have here in the docs, speaking of science importance, Runeera, meanwhile, sees a very symbolic white stack that lets her at least know that she's meant to rule. And Damon kills the crab feeder and somehow does not get grayscale. How? We'll never know how. Speaking of body parts, the king, it should be said, looks rather ill and likely won't last much longer.

One of the things I enjoy most through visiting Season 1, going from episode 3 to episode 4, no concern about whether Damon got grayscale, but he did need to get a haircut to get rid of all the blood that stained his silver mane. Oh, Damon. Okay, my second one is Corkschips. This is a great episode. For... I have a very fond memory of us and Chris talking about how to make a match in Westeros.

I mean, our guy Harwin Strong makes a wonderful entrance here, admiring Rhaneera in all her blood-soaked glory.

The lustful look on Break Bones' face as Rhaneera walks in and then the cut to Jason Lanister like, Euh, no, thanks. Yeah. Sensational stuff. On the Jason Lanister front, I always get such a kick out of Rhaneera saying he's arrogant and self-serious, and Messer is saying, Oh, I thought you might have that in common. Very confusing.

Messer has a bar, a few bars. Does.

So Reneera is saying to Kristen, How How lucky you are to have a say in your own life. And this is the stretch of the season, including in the next episode in our chats with Allison, where Reneera is in very much like, The grass is always greener, the vantage point. And the moment of needing to confront that she will have to wed leads to so many incredibly entertaining conversations. As you know, my favorite of which is Otto going to Miseris. Worth watching, even if you never turn on subtitles, do it for this scene because we get some Grogu-esque babbling.

Babbling and cooing.

Yeah. Fraying on and saying... And Otto makes this pitch, What about something closer to home? The boys just heard Do, Otto. Yes. But it would seize the endless proposal. That scene just kills me. It's so funny. The Lanor pitch from Lionel. And it builds this really heartrending conversation between Reniera and Viseris, where she's like, You have no further use for me. The way that she is confronting throughout this entire episode, and this builds into my third point, which is this is where the push for Egan begins in earnest. The carriage ride to the hunt. No one's here for me, Rhaenera says. It is just so heart-wrenching to see her confronting this new reality. This is also where we get to see Allison to go from her her blue outfits into her red and black before, something that I suspect we'll talk about in a couple of episodes. Still to this day, absolutely outrageous. Egan, the Conqueror, babe. Second of his name.

Second of his name, yeah.

Downright treasonous, Hoburt.

Do you want to make your moniker for the season, the Conqueror Babe, Mali Rubin, the Conqueror Babe.

Yes.

Where's the Mersh? Mali Rubin, the Conqueror Babe.

Great stuff. Yes, that would be wonderful. If everyone could clap also when I'm introduced as such, I would appreciate that. You got it. Thanks. Good call. Good call. This is where Otto really starts to apply the pressure to Allison. The road ahead is uncertain, but the end is clear. Go work for Sara. We see he's getting the pressure from Hoburt that's leading him to apply that pressure to Allison, et cetera. Despite all of the crucial fulcrums and seismic events that unfold, the It needs... You watch this episode, you revisit this episode, and you're like, Well, could it have gone another way? How many better choices could people have made to have prevented this, or was this the inevitability that Otto is outlining here? I'm glad you had the Drunken Bonfire with Viserius and Allison. It's great stuff. Very sad. I so wanted it to be true. To be a dream of myself.

I'm going to miss Viserius so much. Season 2.

What if I was wrong? Me too. Great one. Episode 4, King of the Narrow Sea.

Let's do it. I just want everyone at home to know we are all obviously benefiting from Mallory's incredible all the work that Mallory has done to put this together, and I want to honor and respect it and admire it. Just let you know, the original idea for this episode was three sentences per.

But we expanded it to bullet points.

But then we changed the idea because that wasn't too much or that wasn't enough. We expanded it to bullet points, and I did I didn't know that this is what we were doing.

Thus, my lack of awareness that we still had a sentence cap after we changed the idea specifically to avoid a sentence cap. Real twist. Okay. King of the Narrow Sea, put on the Driftwood Crown. Take us through it.

What's your first pick? In a move that certainly won't haunt her for the rest of her life, Ronira pisses off Westerosi lords up and down the continent by not taking their various proposals of marriage very seriously.

Great scene. Yeah.

Fantastic stuff. Blackwoods, Brackens, everything you could possibly want. You love a Bracken. You love a Blackwood. I do. I do. A Barathean, I'm a little mixed on, but here we are.

Every time we go to Storm's End, it's peaceful and calm and fine, and no one dies.

I feel like they said in the behind the scenes that they had all these fans to blow the leaves around on the floor of Storm's End just to make it feel stormy at all times here at Storm's End. But yes, Reniera, a large thread of this season, which becomes clear upon rewatch, is how Allison is going through an amassing allies, and Reniera is going through an alienating allies, and the allies that she does grasp for are not necessarily extremely helpful. So here we are. Here's a big diplomacy misfire. There's a lot that people blame Rhaneera for in terms of when they talk about her kids or whatever it is that I'm I don't think that's relevant at all to whether or not she could rule. This is. This shit here is in terms of this is not a good look for a future ruler of Westeros, what she pulls here at Storm's End. And we can only extrapolate what the rest of the tour has been like.

But it does all build toward Viseris during the Damon's Return Feast. You shouldn't deprive yourself. You want to see the tapestries? Go do it. Go do whatever the fuck you want. I love the family dynamic at play in that scene. Hilarious. The way the Damon's eyes are like, darting back and forth. He's watching Viseris and Reniera interact. I have missed some stuff. All three of mine connect and build toward each other. I'm certain you have one, if not all of them on your list.

The Bowels of a Plechardin.

Damon, Uncle Damon takes his niece, Roniera, to a brothel through King's Landing, and then to a brothel to full-around in public. Incest o'clock is here. Thrones, you never fail us. Secret passageways. This is like free range.

This is like free range, like wild incest, as opposed to state-sanctioned approved incest.

Exactly. Exactly. They don't call them the rogue prince for nothing. Damon removing Ramira's little beanie part of her disguise. Let's make sure people see us and that word travels fast. Definitely something that stands out. Revisiting this scene. This gives us one of the most iconic lines of the season, of the series, Fucking is a pleasure, you see. Poetry from Damon. And of course, we build toward one of, genuinely, our favorite moments of the season, which is Otto, like girding up the courage to go scheme the way he'd like to and tell Viseris. Plot and scheme, scheme and plot. Both. That they were seen together in the Bells of a Pleasure Den. Coupling. And then Damon makes his pitch to Viseris. He's like, Well, marry her to me. You know the traditions of our house? He's given him a little bit of a lecture, too. You are the dragon. Your word is truth. Not only are we watching Damon pursue what he wants here and navigate his demons, but we see this really crucial divide between Viserus and Damon in terms of how... They're both students of history in a different way, but how they think about Targarian might that's very present here, too.

I'll just build right into my second one from there, which is Reniera and Kristen, because that's how the episode builds as well. After Damon, the way that Kristen folds and gently places that white cloak before he and Reniera have sex, and obviously everything that this builds toward, not only in the next episode and the one after, but for the relationships in the story overall in terms of the dynamic between Kristen and Reniera, and then eventually, Kristen shifting his allegiance.

I have this summed up as, Damon abruptly cuts Reniera's personal tour of the bowels of a pleasure den short, and in a move that certainly won't haunt her for the rest of her life, she opts to complete her- I'm noticing a She opts to complete her tour of pleasure with Kristen Cole instead. Then my last bullet point is, Reniera promises to marry Corlice's nice gay son, Lanor. If her dad shakes up the org chart at King's Landing, and ships Otto Hightower back to Old Town for narking on her.

The King, it should be said, looks very ill and likely won't last much longer. Oh, man. Pasares. Just chunks of flesh falling off.

Just hanging on way longer than he should have. I just remember watching this in real-time and you and I being like, How many more body parts can he lose? How much longer can he hang on?

The ousting of Otto was also my third one, and obviously that connects in this episode to the Allison to Reniera, who believes whom and how does their conversation go? And that judgment that Allison brings to it initially, but then her decision to believe Reniera. But in terms of Viseras' festering source, of course, we have we get quite a view from above of his flesh slashing off his back because the way this episode is in her cut. I didn't choose to make him look that way.

Oh, you want to talk about Allison's No Good, Very Bad Night, which is like every night when you're Alice in high tone.

Taking over for the sore bath and then Summoned for late night sex. And the way the episode cuts between Reneera's Night of the Reckless Pursuit of Freedom and Pleasure. Pleasure. And Allison, oh, the pleasure. Allison pinned beneath.

Doody.

That duty that we will keep hearing about. It is a really crucial stretch of the season. Episode 5?

We light the way. We light the way.

Murdercloak time.

I actually don't have murder cloak here. User@high towerhody asks, Am I the asshole? Am I the asshole for putting on a flashy green dress and making a late dramatic entrance to my former best friend/current stepdaughters's wedding banquet, and therefore upstaging the would-be bride?

This is also my first one. The full merch, the Hightower merch, with this gown. Very dramatic entrance. And I think we would just both like to formally thank Laris and Harwin Strong for explaining that green is the color. Not only of House Hightower, but when Old Town calls its banners to war. Thank you, House Strong.

Laris definitely would have a podcast, Bone.

Oh, yeah.

You know? Yeah. He'd be like, In case you don't know, this is the meaning of this green dress here.

I think it would be tough for Laris to have a podcast, though, when he's cutting out the tongues of the bulk of the people who make their way into his life. So I have a mission for you.

But he's not an interviewer on pod. He's an interrogator off pod. That's his day job. The podcast is his hobby and pleasure. It's that and looking at feet. Speaking of which, another bullet point I have is Laris imparts some completely innocent and very concerned and useful medical information about Ronira and some Moon tea to Allison. He's just trying to help and not at all eyeballing her ankle. So, yeah.

Anna is out. Nothing little finger-ing, lingal little I'll figure in about this at all. Just- Auto's out. Thought you'd want to know.

Laris settles in. Sees a vacuum of power.

He's got some thoughts on the local plant life. You know, not local, actually.

It It should be thriving here, Joe, but it is. Here we go.

My second one is Kristen Cole, your favorite character, murdering the Night of Kisses.

Yeah, I hate crime.

This is a tough one for Kristen Cole.

Not only It's a hate crime at a wedding banquet, but punches the future queen's consort in the face in front of everyone and keeps his job anyway. So good job, Allison, because she's got to be the only reason he keeps his job.

He had an offer for Reniera that hinged on cinnamon and oranges.

I love oranges and cinnamon. You know that about me. Same. You do.

You love an orange clove scent.

I do. But I also don't want to marry Kristen Cole. So Reniera and I have that in common.

Reniera was not ready to choose use infamy, as she said. She is the Crown. Big moment for Reniera. A huge moment, obviously, for the rift in their relationship. And Allison, not only- Would you say, though, that she could have rejected that I could have rejected that off her a bit more diplomatically, and perhaps her mishandling that is a move that might haunt her for the rest of her life? Sure, though, I'm unwilling to put Kristen's behavior on her near her shoulders. No, it's not. But I do like the theme.

It's not her fault, obviously. But she does a little bit laugh at his face, and you're just like, you know.

He literally says, You want me to be your whore as he cries and weeps over his besmirched honor.

I hate him so much.

He's like, I woke up early for this conversation. And this is all you have for me? That you are the Crown? This is not how I thought this was going to go. I don't know. Allison, stopping Kristen, who is- Amassing Alice.

In her confidence now. Laris and Kristen in one episode.

Killing himself. My last one is maybe a stealth one in this episode, but it always stands out to me. I love this scene. I love this conversation. It always feels important. Viseris, barely hanging on. And Lionel discussing legacy. When Viseris asked Lionel, Will I be a good king? I mean, obviously, as Thrones, viewers and readers, we're always like, Anything about legacy just pings up our Taewin-programmed minds to activate. But I love this conversation about, There's a part of me that wishes I've been tested. This idea for Viseras, this question of the crucible and whether he could have been forged a different man. We talk across the season like, what was the Stepsones as a crucible for Damon? And what are all these crucibles for all the characters? And then Viseris, the end note for him here is, perhaps it's best not to know. And that just feels like it sums up everything not only about his character, but the distinctions between characters like Viseris and then Damon and Reniera.

And Laris will have such an interesting answering speech to that in the next episode. Last thing I want to say, just so it's on the record. Yeah. Lina and Reniera do get married next to a pool of blood. Viseris falling apart quite literally. You and I both really enjoyed the way that he could not cut his chicken. And the King, it should be said, looks very ill.

Failing at dinner, as Jamie Lannister once said.

The King, it should be said, looks very ill, likely won't last much longer. Episode 6. The Princess and the Queen. Oh. Dim jump. Dime jump.

Ten years. It's been 10 years. I'm going to guess your items before you do them. Here they are. Number one, Sarah's just walking in with an arm missing. Number two, meeting Talia. Number three, Egan going full Roman Roy, jacking it from his bedroom window. Are those your three?

I didn't make room for any of those, but I was really tempted by the last two. Talia, I wish I had made room for you.

Oh, boy.

Here's what I have. User at Hightower Hottingass, am I the asshole for making my former best friend, now as my stepdaughter, walk her still bleeding from childhood self through a castle so I can inspect her baby and make snied racially tinge comments about its parentage? Obviously, Allison did not demand that Reniera walk through. She just wanted the baby, but Reniera, being her stubborn self, took that long walk. We love a long walk. Allison did one in a dress. Reniera did one trailing literal blood through a castle. And Viseras will do so in our favorite moment of the whole season. So yeah, Allison and Reniera and the long bloody walk.

My first one is very much related to this. It's three strong boys, part one. Do keep trying, or sooner, late. You make it one who looks like you. Allison. The way that Allison is unrelenting in how she lays into Viseris across this episode. To have one child, that is a mistake. To have three is a mistake. An insult. You're alluding to our actual, I think, shared favorite moment from the season in episode 8, which we'll talk about when we get there with Viseris's long walk. But on the three strong boys front, we must talk about the training yard, and we must talk about maybe on the bit front, at least, our favorite moment of the season. This is the stuff, Lionel.

This is yours, and I give it to you freely and lovingly. I love it. And I I will claim the bees. The buzzing of the bees is my favorite, obviously. But I'll give you Viserius and Lionel.

This is just this absolutely kills me every time. The way he is just with joy in his heart watching absolute carnage unfold below him. They will certainly form a lifelong bond. Wouldn't you agree?

His kids hate each other. Viserus.

The Kristen Harwin baiting and very one-sided intentionally brawl that unfolds here. The Harwin Lionel people have eyes. A conversation that Reniera overhears Lionel's attempt to resign his hand that Viseris does not accept. Reniera's appeal to Allison at the small council table. Got a Petrothel suggestion for you. Allison's just like, Rhauneera, you're leaking milk milk at the small council table. Got a Petrothel suggestion for you. Allison's just like, Reniera, you're leaking milk at the small council table. Jace asking Rhauneera if he's a bastard. The parentage question could not be more central in this episode, and obviously will be deeply crucial moving forward across the rest of the season. So it is, in fact, the stuff. It is, Lionel. It is, in fact, the stuff.

Here's some other stuff.

My Lord of straw.

What Allison said. Yeah. Gee, I sure wish my dad, Otto Hightar, were still Hand of the King, so I felt I had more support in the castle. What Laris heard, start a fire in your family home, burn your father, Hand of the King, and your brother, the father of her near his children alive. Simple, basic corporate miscommunication, really. This is the stuff, Lionel.

As Laris is ready to point out, there's a curse we could just blame it on.

The Queen made a wish, so I don't know.

Very handy. Everyone's always talking about these ghosts there and all.

It's burnt already. It's pre baked. I don't know what to tell you.

My second one is, You are the challenge. Essential scene between Allison and Egan. Shout out, Ty Tenet, now and always.

Wonderful.

Our fave.

Bring him back. Different wig.

Yeah, exactly. The way that Allison says to Egan here, You are the challenge. You are the challenge, Egon, simply by living and breathing, and basically is, a decade later, the one who is spousing these harbangers and these warnings that her father left her with just one episode prior. Just fascinating to see how that evolution has set in. And on that front, we get these fascinating Allison Laris conversations across the episode about parents and children. There's the dinner chat, the way that Laris pauses when Talia comes into the room.

He's no notes. He's on it. He is on it. Long before the rest of us, Laris is like, Listen.

Oh, man. I see. It's true. And that conversation is important because that's where not only, like you said, Allison is like, Is anyone going to side with me? But that's where Laris is like, it's a willful blindness when talking about parents of children and says, You truly suffer the same affliction if it came to her. She says, I would not. And then that's in our mind as we watch how she responds in response to the horrible things that her children do, some of her children.

I mean, I should say she knows that Egan is a piece of shit. She knows that. You're the challenge, right? She at least has some awareness. She's not blind to what they do. She'll just protect them in it.

Even though she's saying here, she wouldn't. So the hypocrisy. Delicious. Joe, what are children but a weakness, a folly, a futility?

Paris. You Absolutely.

Not sure if you've heard, but love stays the hand.

Yeah.

It's a downfall. My third one is Dragon Stuff. Just Dragon Stuff. Great episode for Dragon Stuff. Pink Dread.

Yeah.

Shout out the Pink Dread. Allison's response to the Pink Dread prank always feels so key to me when she says to Amen, your obsession with those beast goes beyond understanding and has build and evolve from that real misread of how important that would be for a Targarian, both symbolically but also practically, into, let me tell you how Egan's coronation is going to go.

Well, and I think what's important, she understands the symbolism state and stuff like that, but it's just important, again, the underlying as we did before, that Otto and Alicent, as politically canny as they are capable of being and do become and how instrumental they are in pushing things things one way or another, are fundamentally ill-equipped to understand what a Tarkarian Civil War is. They just fundamentally cannot understand it. Here's my last bullet point. We can go back to more dragon stuff if you want, but I will just say this really quickly. In a move that certainly won't haunt her for the rest of her life, Reniera Muth was left of her family, three kiddos, her nice gay husband and his nice gay boyfriend, to Dragon Stone. The king, it should be said, looks very ill and Hopefully, it won't last much longer.

You know, it is amazing. An absolute marvel that for Sarah's makes it to the end of episode 8.

Incredible. Spoiler. He does.

Frankly, astonishing. Oh, Viseris. Patty, what a joy. What a treasure he was to watch.

A real treat.

I love that Dragon Stone Bridge, man. It's always great. It's always great to see someone strolling up that bridge. Never goes well, but it's always great.

Shout out the volume.

On the dragon stuff front, the other things quickly, we get some dragon keeper training, which is always interesting to watch. You know that once they're fully bound to you, they will refuse to take instruction from any other lesson that Jace receives as he's preparing to give a command to Vermax. Damon, this is the Damon, Lena, Bayla, Reina, Pentos episode. And so Well, crucially, it is the first real time with Vágar, which is Vágar, thrilling. But Damon positioned as this figure who's in his library, reading the histories, soaking up the lore. It's just like, us. Soak it up the lore.

Just a book guy and a girl bad.

But then it's the very sad aspect of that where we see him tutoring Bayla, who is a writer, and then Reina's like, Dad doesn't give a shit about me because I'm not a writer. Heartbreaking. And the lesson that Lena imparts to Reina is a really cool part of that episode. You ever heard a road, but Bayla's dragon was born to her, but if you wish to be a writer, you must claim that right. That idea of claiming that right. And then, of course, this is the episode where Lena asks Vágar to burn her alive so that she will have a dragon rider's death. Very intense. So it's a big... It's not as big as the next one on the dragon front, but it's a big dragon lore episode, actually. There's a lot sprinkled in that one.

I cheated a little.

Some Helena prophecy. He'll have to close an eye. You love a Helena prophecy.

I do, and I love bug stuff, as you know. You do.

Should we have a joke, Mark?

I'm going to ooze a bullet point from episode 6 into episode 7. Oh, it's wonderful. It's just to set the stage and to say this. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one wife may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness. After murdering, question mark, question mark, his first wife. What do you mean? Damon has lost his second to childbirth/self-imulation. Lena Lee is behind two daughters and one very large, very unclaimed dragon. That's where we are on DriftMark.

That builds nicely into my first one, which is Amen. Unsurprisingly, my first one is Amen claiming Vegar and giving us an eye for an eye, one of the most iconic sequences in the show and the story. The oldest largest dragon in the realm, the fight that the kids have. The sequence of the claiming is a thrill. If you're a fantasy lover and you love magical creatures, that's great. That was wonderful. I adored it. The intensity of what follows is just exceptional television. The fight with the kids. The sound that it makes when Luke slice the up, it's an uppercut with the slide. The technique, the blade technique, it's It's fascinating to watch. I always love when Sir Harold shows up and he's like, God's be good. What's in Amen's face? Tough one. But then that builds to the fight. Everybody's gathered, everybody's assembled. The service is irate. The bastard whispers. Damon's leaning, of course. Veneera showing up late, being like, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't see air.

I definitely wasn't fucking my uncle at his dead life's funeral. Shaking the sand out of her skirt.

Oh, Quick injection of bullet point here, too.

User @targarientart asks, Am I the asshole for propositioning and then fucking my uncle under a pile of driftwood at his second wife's funeral, faking my gay husband's death, and then marrying my uncle at a seaside hippie occult dragon ceremony?

That's a good smuggle. There's a lot in that one. Love that one. Wonderful stuff. I could picture you slicing a lip to draw runes in your own blood. As you read that to me.

Yeah, that's the thing that I definitely do when I do our notes. A hundred %. Occult blood stuff. What was the...

When we were picking house tomorrow, wasn't there a Was it Blood Sisters?

Blood Sisters. Yeah.

Blood Sisters would gain some traction.

People really wanted that one.

Oh, man.

I don't see that one tearing up the charts on iTunes anytime soon. No. No? No.

We do have some Blood Sisters action in this episode because Allison slices Renier's arm open with the Dagger Prophecy. Woops. Joe, great news. It's a clean cut. This is not actually one of my items, but this just makes me think of it when Lena And Raniar comes back late and everybody's wounds are being tended to, and he's like, Is everyone okay? And then the camera pants to Luke. It's like...

A little Luke.

A pummeled face. Anyway, back Allison to Reniera, one of the scenes of the season, right? This is the... Even that, you've been titled Allison Lament, and the Reniera, exhausting, wasn't it? Hiding beneath the cloak of your own righteousness, but now they see you as you are fight. And it builds toward Allison being ashamed, which is an important thing for us to see. She leaves this with regret. I asked for a child's eye in front of everyone, and then I slice open the air in the Iron Throne's arms. What, dad? I feel like I made a mistake, and if the César's is mad at me. And Otto's response is like, I never thought you had it in you until right now. It's just wild insight into their dynamic.

Not my favorite moment of parenting from Otto.

I think this is my favorite Otto line of the season, though, in that conversation with Allison. What that rogue Amand has done in winning Vágar to our side. The boy was right. It's worth a thousand times the price he paid. You love dragon math.

You love dragon math.

I love dragon math. I do. My second item is Damon and Renier finally fucking, which you already hit.

Listen, we need to go back, though, to that Allison and Reniera, because remember when we talked about them just being girls and pals when they were kids? Where's duty, where's sacrifice is trampled under your pretty little foot? It's just a normal thing that you say to an old friend of yours.

More or less normal than leaning into your uncle and saying it felt good to be desired, and then whispering, I want you. I want you. When you put your hands on his chest.

I want you.

Oh, man. My final one is the Lena or not dead reveal, as entwined with this marriage pact for Renier and Damon, both because of what Renier is saying to Damon, and Damon is saying to Renier that we've always been meant to burn together idea, the way they talk about fire, the way they talk about the sea. It's so interesting to contrast how they view, even while the pitfalls and perils, these symbols of Targarian might with how Viserus fears them and the way that they are actively cultivating in a way that we still have questions about, honestly, this they will fear what else we might be capable of response. The Leonor not actually being dead thing was just not only interesting in terms of the story, the Coralis and Renis dynamic, right? So many of the great Coralis lines, like what is this brief mortal life, if not the pursuit of legacy, and the Renis attacks about his insatiable pride in this episode. Of course, it opens questions for us heading into season 2 now. Still, there's a moment in season 1 where Renier is like, I wasn't a part of that. But she's not like, By the way, your son is actually alive.

We're still wondering if that is coming because in the book, this was a shock to us. In the book, it's like, Lena's dead. Lena's dead? So not only what this means inside of the flow of the story of the show, but this was, I thought, a really big... I mean, there are a ton of adaptive changes. Actually, this is something we had a lot of fun talking with her Brian Condle about more broadly, but this was one where we were like, we genuinely can't be sure we know what is going to happen. So that just felt really seismic.

You already covered it, but I'm just going to read my final bullet point anyway and say, In a move that certainly won't haunt him for the rest of his short life, Luke's Dagger finds a home in Amen's eye. Amen loses an eye but gains a giant fucking dragon. And as far as dragon math goes, that's him coming out way ahead. The King, it should be said. Luke's Very ill. And likely, it won't last much longer.

That was just an absolutely savage bit of evisceration tracker. Sarah's saying the gods can be cruel because he's basically offering his sympathies to his brother who he has not seen in some time. And David replying, It seems they've been especially cruel to you as he takes in his brother's festering state. Great. Honestly, great stuff. I chuckle.

I can't think of a single phrase that would better take us into episode 8 than festering state.

The Lord of the Tides. What do you got? I just want to add- Are we in a six-year time jump?

I just want to add, thoughts and schemes, signs of portence, a new one from you, Perils and pitfalls. Just putting it on the list.

Perils and pitfalls.

With a name for it. Pitfalls and perils. Okay. The Kings?

Yeah, I'm going to need you to... Sorry, I'm going to need you to pause and reset your Zoom background because I'm still seeing some dragon orgies, and I need you to update No, it's all- The Targarian heraldry needs to go.

It's time for some seven-pointed stars. It's all seven-pointed stars. Yeah, it's just green. It's just green.

We're on episode eight.

Okay, Lord of the Ties. The King's limbs, teeth, and probably organs are dropping like flies. But no worries. He's got a gold phantom of the opera mask to disguise it all, and he makes a long, very long, very slow, very long walk to the throne, Joanna and Mallory cry as the Where Vercera drops his crown, and Damon picks it up. Come on.

I couldn't love this more.

I was thinking of this so much when Ryan is going to talk about the complication, the contradiction that is Damon Targaryen, and this is just one of those very key moments.

Absolutely fantastic sequence. We get to see this, like, reunion between this gravely ailing Vercera and Damon and Reniera. The way he wheezes Damon's name when he realized he said, Damon. When he's introduced to Egan and Viserus, and he's like, Oh, a name fit for a king. Just heartbreaking. And then Reniera going to him in the dead of night. Like, defend me and my children asking if he really believes that the Song of Ice and Fire is true and asking him to stand for her. And then the way he does. And on that long walk, in terms of just the cinematography and the direction, the contrast between the looks and how Allison and Otto are framed, and then the way that the camera positions Reniera as Viseras looks over at her, almost in this angelic light. Yeah. It's just so fascinating. I just absolutely... I will sit the throne today, and then Otto has to bow away. I just love it. That was my first one, too, obviously. It's just fantastic. Couldn't be better.

Shout out, and we haven't yet, but please shout out to Olivia Cooke's frustrated, disgusted face, which she shows so many times. One of my favorite is when... But Sarah starts talking to her about it's the stallion, right? He was like, This is the stallion. And she's What are you talking about? Olivia Cooke's face is just like- Did you witness the act? The flaring of the nostrils in her eyes. She's just like, Jesus Christ, man. Okay.

I love the body language and the look when she's like, I don't need the blanket. Earlier, I was still sensation. Great stuff. What's your next one?

What Vissara said, quote, Something, something, milk of the poppy, something, something, egg on, mumble wheeze, dying dead. What Allison heard, do anything up to and including letting my dead body rot in a room for several days in order to put our shitty, irresponsible rapist son, Egan, not my long-standing heir, Reniera, on the throne.

Yeah. I summed this up. This was my third one as Stop Naming all your kids, Egan. Yeah. Which is just still so fascinating to me, the way a misunderstanding plays such a crucial role in this war and the backdrop inside of the prior episodes, too, but this episode in particular of Allison and Egan's relationship, the way that everything unfolds with Diana, the way that Allison goes to him and says, You're no son of mine, and then the misinterpretation of Serus's final words before he reaches out with his rotting hand and calls out for his love and leaves this mortal quill many episodes after we thought he might, based on the state of his failing body.

My guy, you made it so far, way further than you should have.

He really did. He really did. And Joe, I went out of order, but my second one was three strong boys redux because-Dinner party from hell. Before everything falls apart, if Viserus gives this stirring speech at this last family supper, The Crown cannot stand strong if the house of the Dragon remains divided. And Allison and Reniera, first Reniera, then Allison. They toast each other. It feels for a second, for an instant. Viseris certainly thinks so as he looks out.

I did it. So I'll get it all in. He's like, remember an episode where I solved misogyny? Now I have also solved.

Everything will be fine.

Take me to bed. This long-standing conflict between my family. I'm ready to drift off.

I'm sure I won't say anything confusing in my final breaths and moments. Everything's fine. And then there's everything with Egan and Jace and Bayla, the poking and the prodding, the prodding and the poking. And then Luke's laughter, the smirk at the pig when the pig is brought out to the table. Eamonn's response, the three strong boys toast. It just all falls apart so quickly.

What would have happened if they served lamb instead of pig? That's probably a question I asked when we podcast about that before.

Okay. Maybe everything would be fine. Maybe everything would be completely fine.

Here's how I bullet pointed that. Dinner Party From Hell, starring Allison's mean blonde children plus sweet Helena and Reniera's sweet children plus her mean husband, Damon. Things do not go well.

It's a great scene for Helena. Let me share my thoughts on marriage.

Ps, neither of us talked about Damon cutting a man's head in half. Sorry, Damon.

Sorry, Damon. But yeah, for Damon at that point, it's like, yeah, of course that's what Damon did.

He could keep his tongue. All right.

Panel ultimate episode.

The Green Council. Here's the first and most important bullet point. Are you ready?

Is it about Kristen's hat?

Lord Lyman Beesbury takes one for the team, and by one, I mean a small council ball to the eye. And for the team, I mean team Black, because he's the only one on the small council sticking up for Niera during a full-blown coup. Bees.

Rip. Dear me.

God's be good indeed. God's be good to you, sir, forever.

Via small ball. You have to really think about... I mean, Kristen is strong, and the balls are They're firm, but... They're not pointy. He just shoved him down and his skull just just scintillated.

I do want to shout out. I love his final stand.

Like, this is Seizure. It is theft. It is treason.

He did try. He's a good guy.

Yeah. Great showing for bees.

We remember God's be Good, we remember Dear Me, we remember all of that. I do want to go back to the wedding banquet and shout out of Beesbury for just high tailing it the fuck out of there as soon as things get dicey. He's like, Oh, and me? I'm leaving. Bye. There's like a diamond Beesbury-shaped hole in the wall as he's so quick to get out of there. Anyway. He has some great little moments.

I like seeing him take the bats. He's just working as a bookie at the air's torny in the premiere. My first one is a related one. It's the Riffs Among the Greens, because this entire episode is Team Green, and it's as anybody who listened to our podcast in a real-time, we'll surely recall, this was not our favorite episode of the season, and we were actually confounded by whether the dramatic tension inside of this episode was compelling or for us, too inert. But this particular aspect of Allison learning that the rest of the small council had been plotting in secret, important. The team Allison versus team Otto race to find Egan, still very strange to me to this day because they both want to install him as king, and the distinction is simply negligible. About what decision they'll make regarding Reniera and the other thing, of course.

Yeah, it's a little confusing. I do like the framing of like, Allison doesn't want Reniera to die. Otto would happily kill her. So that's important. Absolutely. But like... Yes. Yeah. Let me just hit a quick bullet point and say, Two indistinguishable twins, a murder cloaked Aymen, and Kristen Cole on a stupid had, go looking for Prince Agon in the bowels of a pleasure dead. They don't find him there, but they keep looking.

Eric and Eric.

Eric and Eric, actually.

Eric and Eric. What an astonishing amount of time we spent with them in the penultimate episode of Season 1. I'm grateful for Kristen's dumb hat. It gave us so much joy. Just We got to see if Eamonn says to him, he said, Time to get it wet, while recounting Egan taking him to the street of silk when he was 13, and Kristen said, Every woman has an image of mother to be spoken of with reverence without wearing the stupid hat. It wouldn't have been the same. But he had the stupid hat on when he said it. The other thing I want to highlight inside of this, the rift among the Greens and this competing chase to find egg on first, is what Eamond expresses about his brother and himself, and that whole, It is I, the younger brother's speech we get as he builds toward it is I who should be... It stops just shy of saying king, but then says, I'm next in line. Should they come looking for me? I intend to be found. So that's a really notable thing inside of that episode.

Great stuff. Eamond's like, I speak nine languages. I've got a huge dragon. I've got a I have a sapphire in my eye. I'm ready to go. Let's go. Let's do it.

Sure does. Oh, man. Joe, our hearts were never one. I see that now, but Eamonn does have a sapphire in his eye. He's got one of those, so that's great. Good stuff. The High Towers. What's your second one?

It's actually my last. During Eagons coronation. Rhaenies breaks out of captivity on Dragonback, killing a ton of small folk. But for some reason declining to torch anyone in the royal family because it's, quote, unquote, not her war. But who gives a shit about the small folk? This is on my list as well.

This is the beast beneath the boards. Another little Helena colonel.

Helena, you're genius.

Bearing fruit here. This is just extremely extremely strange. Extremely strange.

It will never make sense. It's extremely odd.

Oh, man. We did get the good Renice Allison scene earlier in the episode that we loved the, You desire not to be free, but to make a window in the wall of your prison. But Renice and Maley's crashing through the floor of the dragon pit, murdering legions of small folk, and then being like, This isn't my war to start in the next episode, in terms of not wanting to inflict violence on the greens. Quite odd. My last one is Footstuff.

Yes. Thank you.

Foot stuff. Interesting Laris episode in a few respects. He's got the little finger energy when he goes to auto and is like, There's no reason those hours that I've been spending with your daughter can't in the end benefit you. Playing every side, working every relationship. And speaking of angles, this is the episode where we learn that he likes to wank it to Allison's feet. Got the initial glimpse, and then, No, I need you to lift them all all the way up onto the chase so I can see in full as he is revealing the information about the spy network.

It's disgusting and upsetting, and I'm really sorry that Allison feels that she needs to do this. But again, this is like Allison Team Allison, that she has amassed here. Chris and Cole, who sucks, Laris, who rules but also sucks, her shitty children, all of that. And Reneera has Damon. She doesn't even have Reneera on her team because Rhaenis is like, I'm not even involved in this war. I'm not going to do it. Reneera.

Does that take us to the finale? The Black Queen. The Black Queen. Episode 10. How many of your items are about Boris Barathe and not knowing how to In my heart, all of them.

In actuality, none of them. Rhaenier gets her own crown. And in a move that certainly won't haunt her for the rest of her life, she sends her young son's Jason Luke to round up some allies.

Great stuff. A remarkable commitment to the bit today. I love it. Sensational. Sensational. Reniera's coronation is my first one as well. Eric, bringing Viseris his crown. Not Eric. Swath about the Queen.

Don't make the mistake. It was not Eric. As Mallory said, it was clearly said it was Eric. Not Eric, Eric. It was Eric, not Eric. Okay? Just be very clear about that.

In the armor here, so there's no longer a delicate pipe on a bit of common clothing to track.

We were just looking at the photo of these twins at the London premiere where they're wearing- Exquisite. Identical, beautiful, very Alain Delon, like in the Riviera outfit. But one of them has a top knot and the other doesn't. And one of them is covered in tattoos. The tattoos would obviously be extremely helpful to us. But barring that, why didn't give one a top knot and one knot? I will never to this day now.

Oh, man, the Cargill twins. The funeral turning into the coronation. Not only the mirror, it was obviously very sad, this little bundle mirroring the funeral and the premiere, but this idea of fire and rebirth for the Targarian's death into life, but also how inescapable loss feels for these characters. And of course, as part of the coronation, Damon placing the crown on her head.

And that's it. And they're a strong unit for the The rest of time always.

My second thing is just Damon versus Reniera, and there are like 5,000 things we could talk about.

Reniera tells Damon about the prophecy, which pushes him off, actually. Well, actually, I'm going to say the last part of that bullet point. Because the big thing that happens this episode, obviously, is Luke runs into his cousin, old Eamonn One-Eye, and his giant fuck-off dragon, Vagar, and poor little Luke, and poor little Airex, get chomped in midair.

Very sad. You owe me a debt. Incredible sequence. The shot of... So the Vagar and Eamonn versus Luke and Airex was my third one as well, obviously. The shot of...

Vagar.

A little tiny, little fluttering Airex and giant Vegar up above. That was incredible.

Before that, before that, Vegar rising up in the night in the rain.

Like, Godzilla.

It's just incredible.

The Bookend in that episode.

Or from the start, like Jace and Raini's on their totally normal-sized Dragons, and then little like Airex just trying to keep up. We'll flutter. We'll flutter, bud. For Maximilies are like, This is fine.

Very, very sad.

Little fluttering baby.

The way it air-reacts with the plume of flame into Vegar's face. Vegar, obviously, just ignoring everything that Amen says, the way that both Luke and Amen are shouting, serve me. We get this stretch of no, no, no, no's from Amen. That bookend to Viserish's warning from episode one about the hubris of control and how central that theme is here. And this just the moment where Reniera turns to the camera after learning what has happened and the look on Reniera's face.

I'm going to fuck everyone up for this.

What a note for the next season. Back on the Reniera and Damon front, which was the number two, there's a lot to hit inside of that. They're not on the same page. They've got a lot to work through. And there's a lot of arguing in front of the War Council. Not ideal?

No. Not ideal?

No. Sending Ravens without her leave. Jace is like, Nothing's supposed to happen without my mom's sign off. And he's like, Let me take you to this little dragon intimidation session. I have planned for the Nights of the Queensgard. The dragon math from Damon in this episode is crucial and important. He runs through, Dragon Stone has 13 to Therefore, and then he's Let me remind you, I also, Kareen, down into the dragonmot to find some eggs. So they're establishing, they're drawing attention to what the dragonmath is at that point in the story. But they have very different reads on how to proceed. I love that moment when Reniera says, If you could take the Iron Throne without putting Otto Hightauer's head on a spike, would you? Because, as you noted in your item about Rhauneera mentioning this larger responsibility and burden to protect the realm, and Damon's like, I don't know what you're talking about. She is thinking in a completely different way about what really is her charge, what she has to pursue and why. And Damon is like, I'm going to go sing to Vermathor. They're in such different places with how they're assessing this.

But the way that Damon says, after obviously the incredibly horrifying stretch where he chokes her, dreams didn't make us kings, Dragons did. And this divide between Damon and Viserus that now emerges here and what that might mean moving forward. It's just a really harrowing note in this episode.

What I really love about this is when you think of the triangulation, I mean, it's harrowing, yes. I don't mean to gloss over that. But when you think of the triangulation between Reniera, Damon, and Viserus, it's like if right is doing more dragon stuff and left is doing... They were both right of Viserus. So when Viserus is there as a comp, they're like, We both agree more dragon stuff than what Viserus wants to do. But once Viserus is gone, Damon's like, Oh, no, I'm way further right than you are. Oh, no, we are not at all aligned. We thought we were in comparison to Viserus, but without that reference point, we find ourselves scattered on this spectrum of warmongering, bloodthirstiness, whatever the case may be, power hunger, etc. Here comes season 2, where I'm sure that miscommunication and not on the same page as this will not come home to roost. Season 1.

There you go.

We did it. I just want to say, I love and adore you, and I just think you did an incredible job with all the research and all the quotes and everything that you did. Absolutely wonderful. And I'm sorry that I interpreted the prompt a little goofier than you did, but here we are at the end of the day.

I thought it was an absolute joy and a thrill to revisit a season that we share together in real-time, and we're going to get to do it again. But before we watch Season 2, we get to chat with House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal.

Should we go to that conversation? Let's do it.

Okay, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today. We are absolutely thrilled, and I am going to shock all of our listeners by opening with a question about magical creatures. For me, one of the great delights of House of the Dragons Season 1 was its active embrace of the fantasy elements of the tale, from dragon dreams to dragon claiming in writing. We get to see Amen claim Vegar. We get to watch Damon sing a lullaby to Vermathor. Wondering a couple of things here. Does your own fandom make examining and centering these elements of the lore more exciting and more crucial to you? And then how do you think about finding the marriage of mythology and theme? Because that was one of our favorite parts of the first season, too. I think my favorite example from season one would be Viseras' warning to Reniera in the first episode, the idea that we control the Dragons as an illusion, building toward Vagar disobeying Amund as she eats or acts like a fun-sized Halloween candy. Starting the dance. Tough one for all involved.

Yeah. I think I bring my love of weird fiction into this. It's inseparable, I think, from being a fan of a song of a Fire. And what I love about the original books and the way George introduced the fantasy was after he hits you in the face with it, with the prolog of the first book where you meet the white walkers beyond the wall and the undead. But clearly in that meeting, that's all new news. So all those the rangers, Weymar Reuys, and all those guys that are out there. So you know that it's not this It's not an everyday event for them either. It seems like for them, it's like a boogie monster coming to life. And then after that, there really is nothing or very little. Maybe it's hinted at, and it seems like maybe Varus had... There was some magic done earlier in his life, but you're constantly questioning yourself, does magic exist in this world? Or does it not? As he turns the genre on its ear. Then three books later, you have dire wolves, warging, you have face-changing assassins, fire magic, shadow babies, dragons are reborn. But all these things, they're slowly and very methodically introduced, and there's a cost to all of them.

It's not this world of free magic and very, very high fantasy. It just reminded me of very much of Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian, which is a favorite of mine from way back in the day when I was reading Tolkien and everything as a high school kid. So, yes, I wanted to imbue this world with that. It's In a way, it's a bit more challenging because everyone laughs when I say this, but House of the Dragon does not happen in as accessibly a fantasy world or readily a fantasy world as the original Game of Thrones does, because we don't have the undead and skin changers in fire magic. We have dragons. We have 17 dragons, and that is the big magic in the world. But all that magic exists. And we know from the original books that dragons leaving the world meant that magic largely left the world. So in theory, in this time, magic is even stronger than it was in Daenerus and John Snow's time. I wanted to figure out ways to bring that in, but also make it feel like it did in my first experience of reading the books.

I think a good example of that is what we did with the dragon dreams and the prophecy and the white heart story in episode three. Look, what do you believe? They just saw a white deer, or whether that's magical and mystical I think it's part of the fun of this world. It is not ever totally spelled out for you, the magic elements. Anyway, those are the things that I love about this and makes this... That's That's what makes this not just another Tudor's series of a bunch of people with British accents fighting over a throne. That's what makes this world unique, and I want to lean into that.

I wanted to ask you a bit about pushing that even further in season 2, because there was a lot of talk of dreams, but not a lot of talk of... Not a lot of surreality in the first season. Things we love about the original Thrones are the sequence of the house of the Undying, this idea of dreams and surreality. I know that Matt has been talking in interviews about the odd or shape of the season for his storyline. I don't know if you could talk about that at all, about the idea of where you draw the line in terms of how magical to go.

Yeah, I think you're walking in constant balance because you don't ever want it to feel like it's everywhere and all the time. And I think one of the good rules to follow is that when you introduce something like that, the way to make it feel special and unique, even within this world, where characters, I think, generally accept that some level of magic does exist or things that is supernatural that they cannot explain. When it's happening to them and they're freaked out by it, then And I think you're saying, just like the example with the white walkers from the prolog of a Game of Thrones, those characters were freaked out about that, and it made it feel special and unique, even with a world where we're accepting that magic exists. So I want to let everybody have a pure experience and read of the season. But yes, I think we've done a good job of texturing and layering this world with some more of those elements while also staying true to the accepted, I would say, magic systems, for lack of a better word, that George has already established.

So, Joanna's dream is to become a witch, as you might have gleaned. Great. It's true. Our shared dream is to spend time thinking about the stories that we love and what we would build if we got to play in these well-tended and well-loved sandboxes. So, of course, we have to ask you about getting to adapt a George R. Martin text. And part of what has been so fun and interesting for us as book readers is that we actually don't know what's going to happen because, of course, Fireblood is full of these competing tales from unreliable narrators. So when you're going from page to screen, how are you deciding which little colonel to make a meal out of, which offhand mention can become a real plot driver, when maybe an assumed historical fact in the texts like, say, Leonor's death in fire and blood, will be revealed as something else entirely, a secret escape on the open sea. And then, most crucially, how do you decide whether to align your canon with Mush, Eustass, Munkin, or none at all? Is there an unreliable narrator's account that you're inclined to put the most stock into?

I don't think there's a... I'll just answer the last question first. No, I don't so. I think we just try to find our way through the narrative in the most... I think the most interesting way possible, simply put. And now that we've spent a lot of time with these individual characters and the characters, as we write and spend time with them, tend to evolve. I think we use the characters as guidance for how to get through the history. So it's a lot of times it's playing on, well, we know our show version of Allison, say. What would show Allison do most likely in this situation. Then we look at the history and see how the history interpreted it and try to play with that. So we're trying to walk you through this history in a way where people can interact with the book written history and say, Oh, I can see how a historian writing about this event 20 years after it happened with the court records would be able to put it back together in this way. But I can see how the thing that I just watched happen in live real time could get interpreted that way 20 years on.

And I think some things are just exactly as they're written in the book. And that's the fun of it is, as with, I imagine, real medieval history, some things we have right and other things we are totally way off on. And until we invent time travel and can go back there like in Michael Crichton's timeline, we won't have an accurate retelling of the history. And that's what we really want as writers. Sarah Hess and I, my writing partner, we really want this show to be not just a didactic retelling of the history. We want it to be accurate and faithful, but we want it to be a companion piece to the book so that even people that have read the book can be satisfied in the experience of watching the show and saying, Oh, that's interesting how they've taken this accepted event and then spun it. But I can see how the history was accurate, or it was mostly accurate, but this little element was off, or they got it totally wrong. But this thing that happens three moves down the road still happens because all the other events lined up. And if you look at these three guys as trying...

Mushroom is very much his own case.

Yeah, my favorite.

We're team Mushroom over here.

Very good. I've said I want to see- Mushroom who was not there.

Yeah.

I want to see the later spin off of the show that's a very adult animated series where they just do the mushroom version of everything through this entire history. We're ready.

Absolutely. No nos.

But But like Justus and Munkin, they're trying to put this thing back together. And then, Gildane, on top of it is the poor guy that's sifting through all these things, trying to write this history. And we also imagine that in some way, even if there's not a naked agenda, there is an agenda in the writing of this history. And it feels, if you read the pages, is this underlying take on this where you could say that there are these Again, mushroom aside, there are these two men who wrote these accounts and a third man who are all in service of a more orderly world that's outside of the Targarian Empire that are trying to make sense of and place blame for the war that ended all wars in Westeros, this world-changing war that took all the dragons off the table. If you read it with that bent, and I'll let people people interpret what that means, it opens up an entirely new and interesting interpretation of what goes on in Fire and Blood. And that's what we love about the book and what we think is so brilliant about it, is it really is a very unique piece of material to adapt.

Because if you take a novel, you can't... You're either adapting the novel or you're doing your own version of it, you're taking another direction. I think there's variations on how faithful an adaptation to a novel, and we know changes are made for all different reasons. Whereas there's this, I don't know, there's this living conversation between the show and the book. And I hope that... I've always said that I hope that people who read the book that come to the show, it can deepen their enjoyment of both and vice versa. If you've read, if you've watched the show and then you go back and read the book, hopefully it deepens your enjoyment of reading the book and shows you new layers of the show that maybe you wouldn't have seen unless you'd read the book. That's my hope. Lofty goals.

No, I completely agree. I think you're leaving it open to interpretation. So I will say my interpretation of part of what you're talking about is this three men pinning the blame for this war on two women. That's part of it. There's a lot of other factors involved that's part of it. I think the smartest adaptive choice that you and your writers made in the first season was the friendship between Renier and Allison and how that burbles underneath everything, which is completely different from the account that we get in the book. I was wondering if that is your favorite adaptive change or if you have a different adaptive change that you're proudest of.

Yeah, I mean, that one was, I think, pretty readily apparent in the early days as we were trying to figure out how to create a dynamic between Allison and Ronira that would lead to surprise instead of just... If they hated each other right out of the gate, it doesn't give you many places to run. But it started with, well, hey, what if they were a little more contemporary in age? Because in the book, I think Allison, her age is listed as a bit older than Ronira. Not that that really matters. And we also meet Ronira at this point in the timeline when she's older versus being literally a child, which makes her have more agency and direction in life and driving her parents more crazy than she would probably as an eight-year-old. So that That was something that was, I think, apparent as you get into the material. If we're going to frame the show around these two women, how do we make it dynamic and interesting? So we're definitely very proud of that. I think the take on Viseras as a character, which, again, a direct reading of Viseras in the book, the show is completely faithful to that because all of the elements of Viseras that escape the history are the contradictory elements about him and the things that would not be in the court record.

It would just be like, Oh, it's this guy that likes the attorneys and feasts, and he tries not to rock the boat too much when he's making choices. But then when you hear him in these private bed chamber conversations with Reniera and then later with Allison as his wife, you see how conflicted this guy is because he's carrying the secret around. And it really deeply nuances the decisions that he's making and this promise that he made, that almost to a detriment to himself in the realm, to keep the realm at peace, he's taking it on like this millstone about his neck. So he won't even, in many ways, won't even discipline his own daughter or properly deal with his insane brother and the chaotic force that he has within his reign. So I mean, those are the two things that leap out to me. My hope is that we're not making radical changes in the books. I mean, I think everybody is going to come to this with their own interpretation of what that word means in terms of an adaptation. But the fun for us is trying to render a very faithful adaptation of this story with surprising twists and variations on it that hopefully make the show another layer, an interesting layer of this storyline, and gives people that are so familiar with the book, in the end, surprises to find as you go on, and a reward for spending all this time on their couch engaging with our show.

Building off of Allison and Reniera, who were obviously such a dynamic and magnetic scene pair in Season 1, the Dragons are dancing, which means that many of the characters who played off of each other in Season One are now forced apart by the story, either because of a fixture like Viserus, who were just chatting about, and his rotting limbs, and his golden face mask are no longer in the mix, or because the ratcheting up of the war of succession just definitionally separates people who used to share a room in season one. Allison and Roniera are figureheads of the opposing sides. Damon and Reniera are both team Black, but Damon ends season one by declaring his intention to go seek out a toehold in the Riverlands. So did you meet this structural reality that is present and inextricable, really, from the nature of the story as a chance to just keep season after season unearthing new, fresh magic between newer character pairings? Or does this feel like a real challenge that you have to try to creatively solve against, or both? Or are those things not mutually exclusive?

I think part of the gift that I think the expanding narrative of both Game of Thrones books give you, meaning the original series and Fire and Blood, is that you start with everybody under one roof in times of general peace, and then a hand grenade dropped into the mix and scatters everybody in the form of war kicking off. We meet all the Starks living together under the same roof in the original books, and then we get to know this family and care about each one of them, and then we follow them as they go on their various adventures. Some of them will encounter each other again when they're different people, and others will never see each other again, very sadly, in the future narrative. I think we use that as a... That's a great storytelling mode because it makes you realize how precious this time is that these characters that you love have together, and you don't know whether they're going to see each other again. One could march off and die, or just the circumstances of the war could mean that it doesn't bring them back together, or it doesn't bring them back together within the book-ended narrative of our show.

So I think we lean into that. And sending characters on their diaspora in the story is part of the way you introduce new characters, because when Damon goes to a new play, we care about Damon. We know Damon, so we're in his point of view. So we're interested in the people that he's going to meet and encounter along the way. And that's how you engage with this new layer of characters. And I think, again, Thrones did the same thing in the original series. Every series that came along, every season that followed the first, you would meet more and more new characters, but you would usually meet them, at least starting in the POV of a character that you already knew and followed and cared about. So it's this clever way that all these little dots are connected. And the end, you have this really rich tapestry of people that then you start to have to kill off in order to have a manageable narrative to tell and bring it back around to the end. But very simply, part of the fun of a Game of Thrones narrative is taking these characters, meeting them together, loving them and loving their relationship, blowing them apart through the circumstances of the world, sending them on their various adventures, and then wanting or willing them to find their way back to each other.

And sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn't.

Speaking of new characters, Mallory and I are huge Slow Horses fans, huge fans of the great. So we are thrilled that Freddie Fox is in the cast this season. My guy. I'm a huge Tom Bennett fan. Love and friendship. I think he's one of the funniest people alive. I was wondering if- Tom. I was wondering if the introduction of these more comedically gifted actors, Freddie Fox as Gwayne Hightower, Tom Bennett as Ulf-White, is intentional as the war ramps up and things get naturally more horrific, more bloodthirsty, so like that. Are you like, let's lighten the tone a little by bringing, not that season one didn't have its own laughs, but bringing people like Freddie and Tom into the mix.

For sure. I think a lot of the inherent humor in the original books and in Game of Thrones is by finding these cultural clashes and then putting them together. Bronn and Tyrian is a great example, Sander Clegan and anybody in the world. And that is where you extract humor. And as the world gets darker, the opportunity for Gallo's humor just increases. So I think, yes, we are definitely... We want to find those moments of levity in the show, but it's about earning them. So it doesn't feel like you're winking into the camera or breaking the bond that you have with the audience and the agreement that everybody in this show doesn't know that they're in a Game of Thrones show. For them, this is very real, and they're not able to make quips about dragon puns as the dragon is descending and trying to burn their army. It's just That's not the tone of our show. It's finding gifted actors like Tom, like Freddie, and bringing them into the mix because those culture... In Gwaine Hightower, who's that we cast as a man of great privilege, you grew up at whatever the equivalent of boarding school would have been at Old Town.

Then you thrust him into a world where he has to salute a guy like Kristen Cole, who he regards as the help who got promoted up to Lord Commander of the Kingsgard. There are really fun dynamics that come from those relationships. Tom Bennett in any situation is just funny. So, yeah, more of that. Damon will continue to have very acid things to say to people and not particularly care about their responses to it. I think we landed some good funny this season. Tom Glencarny is hilarious. I don't know if anybody is prepared for how how funny he is and how he can take an expected thing and spin it. But yeah, I mean, as the stakes get higher, it's almost easier to make a joke out of it because It's just a way of releasing the tension out of a very tense situation.

You mentioned Damon.

Let's build from laughter to Blackhearts here.

You have spoken in other interviews about the surprise that you felt in season one regarding Damon's just embrace by the viewing public as the internet's bad boyfriend. This podcast is one where Damon is a patron saint of the problematic fave. And so we really wanted to ask you about this because for us, he is not a hero. He is this deeply flawed character who often gravely airs and dismays us, but we find ourselves so drawn to him and pulled in to watch every decision that he makes and everything he does, just find him so utterly compelling. In the wake of season one, you almost seemed dismayed that some slices of the fandom viewed him less as this gray, messy magnet, and more as just outright hero. How top of mind was that and mining and examining and centering the elements of Damon's character that you consider essential and true, as you said about structuring and writing season 2?

To be clear, just to clear the record, I'm in no way surprised that people are fascinated by Damon. I mean, it's a fascinating character with many layers and twisted corners to explore. Matt Smith's performance is incredibly charismatic and magnetic. I mean, Matt just beams charisma. It's hard not to be glued to Damon when he's on the screen, when Matt is performing him. I totally understand that. There was a subsect of followers that seem to see Damon as this patron saint of this world and infallible, and everything that he did, including putting his hands on his own wife/niece, was justified or somehow a way of trying to, I don't know, diminish him as a character, when the real answer is no, he's a deeply broken person. And while he can be fascinating and capable of moments of great honor and heroism, he's also capable of moments of great monstrosity. And I don't think he's a straight... He's not a straight villain character. To me, he's the classic anti-hero in this world. He's deeply conflicted and layered. You can, in one episode, go through an experience where you're rooting for Damon to kill everybody in the room, and then at the end, going like, What have I done?

Who have I sided with? Where am I? That's the experience that we want people to go through with a lot of the characters in this show. We don't want anybody to portray a pure hero or a pure villain. I mean, of course, there are people that trend in either direction. But George always talks about this is There's a world of archetypes where you make great characters. You take the expected archetype, the way Jamie Lanister was the Lancelot archetype, and then you turn it on its ear, and you make it a surprising character. We start with Jamie being fascinated and loving him, and then he throws a child out the window and you're like, Well, that's it. How can I ever like this guy? He's the great villain of the series. Then he gets his hand chopped off. He gets his great skill taken away from him. Two books later, he's one of the most purely empathic characters in the book. And that's the experience that we want, not necessarily with Damon, but we want to take people on in these character arcs in the show. You're going to be watching these characters over multiple seasons.

You have to go through peaks and valleys with them. So my only surprise was how there were a not insignificant percentage of the audience that was willing to make an excuse for anything that Damon had did to justify his heroism. That, to me, felt surprising.

We do love a character on an Ark.

We love a character on an Ark, Joe. We do. We both have paintings in our respective homes of Jamie, Nighting, Brian. That's true. What painting of Damon will we end up with? Who can say? Who can say? We'll find out.

There's so many.

Speaking of our favorite sickos, I was listening to your interview with our pals over on the history of Westeros podcast, and you were describing Laris as detached from human emotions, which I consider you doing me a favor in opening up a door for me to talk about foot stuff. My question to you about Laris, who I love, is if he is someone who is detached from human emotion, is his exchanges are his exchanges with Allison about power and control, something more directly connected to his own physiology, or is there actual desire in the mix there?

I think it's a complicated spectrum of things, but I think that situation in season one was definitely about power and control. I mean, that's what that scene was supposed to be. It was supposed to be, I think, not on the nose about it, but I think it was supposed to be knowing what we knew about Laris and where Allison was at her point in the story, which at her zenith of power, that should have read to most people, I think, as a power move. That is Laris showing his power to somebody who everybody else in the story and the world regards as incredibly powerful.

I love him.

What a- He's a delight. Matt Needham is just wonderful. We have many of these actors on the show, but he's just one of those actors that you can give a breakfast menu to, and he can make a Shakespearean plot out of it.

We are very excited to spend more time with Laris in Season 2. We're very excited to travel elsewhere in Season 2, beyond the Red Keep, beyond Dragon Stone. Laris might be sad to discover that it's cold up north, a lot of boots and stockings on the feet, not as much visible flesh. But we did want to ask you about the widening of the world in the north in particular. In Season 1, Reniera and her war council are sketching out their plans to recruit new allies, and they're doing so while standing over the painted table, which, by the way, looked just dynamite, eliminated in Season 1. It's absolutely incredible. So this is not only, of course, a reminder of this burden that Reniera has inherited to protect the realm, but just felt like a nice wink to us as viewers about how much bigger the story was about to get in season 2. So Jace's mission is to head to the Erie and then head to Winterfell. The trailers have given us these precious little glimpses of the wall in the north. Joanna and I flicked out when we got to see the ice and the pommels.

Wonderful. We've seen Brackens and Blackwoods in the trailer. We've done a lot of sigil spotting. We're having fun. So in addition to the literal battles and showdowns that just traversing Westeros during the dance will, of course, spawn. What did widening the scope of the map beyond King's Landing and Dragonstone to include not only more locations and houses, but also small folk, people outside of a seat of power, unlock for you and your team from a storytelling perspective? And then in particular, what was it like to write material for the Starks and the North, given Game of Thrones fans and viewers, just deeply entrenched emotional attachment to that slice of the world?

Yeah, I think everybody will see fairly quickly in this season that the scope and scale of the world expands rather quickly. We've had at the end of the first season, a king died, a throne was stolen, and a dragon ate another dragon. So the dominoes have started falling in a big way, which means that everybody has to scramble to their corners and start trying to raise armies and alliances in their favor, which means that we get to very naturally broaden out the world, again, through characters that we've already met in season one, which I think is always the best way to do it, the most natural, organic way to do it. So it's a thrill. I mean, it's such a deeply realized world that it's great fun to both take people, I think, back to places that they might recognize from the prior series, and then take them to new places where maybe you touched on or were mentioned or weren't mentioned at all in the original series and introduced these new worlds, which they're all their own characters. The people who populate them are very different based on what region they come from and what gods they salute and all those things.

Then, as I mentioned before, the differences in the social strata as we talked about and having those cultures clash. It actually presents an opportunity to do all those things, which I'm very excited about because I think you will feel as soon as a few episodes into the season, you will feel, oh, this is a much bigger tapestry than we were playing on season one when everybody was landlocked to King's Landing or Driftmark or Dragonstone or one of the three. So we've expanded. We've done it organically. Yes, one of the places we go is in the north. I'm excited for people to see that. It was great fun. I mean, it's a moment where you can do a nice moment of fan service for all of the many millions of fans that very kindly followed our show. Thank you for all of that. But also do it in an organic way that honors what's in the book and also propels the story forward. And those are always things that I'm a fan of doing. I worry about things like terms like fan service, Easter eggs, those things all make me feel icky a bit as a writer.

But when there are opportunities to do it that feel satisfying, not just on a visceral level, but satisfying on a deep dramatic resonant level, then I'm all about them. And I think going up north was a great example of that.

I know that it's not your job to put together the ad campaign for any given season. Season of your show. But we've been having a lot of fun talking about this team Black versus team Green ad campaign that HBO has put together for this season. Because the question a lot of people have is, how do you root for team Green? Does it bother you at all? Do you care how much easier it is, at least so far in the story, to root for team Black? Does it matter to you if the sympathies are balanced between the both sides? How do you feel about that?

Yeah. I mean, thank you. Yes. Thankfully, they don't ask me to do the marketing because I don't know that I'd be very good at selling my own show. And it's one responsibility that's taken off my plate in the making of this, which I'm grateful for. No, look, I get the reason why they did it. It's a brilliant campaign because it really does activate engagement and all those things that they're looking for. It's a clear message, black and green, and it's unique to the show, all those things that is going for it. I think we, as dramatists, are looking for a more nuanced reading of of the conflict where... I mean, hopefully, if we've done our job, hopefully it's hard to find one side to throw all in with because of the complexities on either side of the equation. I think there are people on both sides that you would say, Oh, yeah, I think they would make a good sovereign. And then there are people on both sides where you're like, I don't want them anywhere near the throne. And that's the fun of it, is finding individuals to root for and making it complicated for you to throw all in and say, Yeah, I don't know that I totally want Reniera to take the throne because that means that Damon is at her side.

And what does that mean for the realm? And what does that mean for Reniera? Is he purely seeking to put her on the throne to to put her on the throne, or so that he can be close to it or try to snatch back what he feels Viseras took from him? And I think those feelings can change as the story evolves. And the same with Egon. I mean, you'll see him in episode one, like trying to be king. And doing a job of trying to learn the job on the job. He might not be suited right out of the box, but I think Tom and his great Tom Glencarny and his great portrayal of him makes for this very empathetic character. I think it will complicate people's feelings about where they stand in all this. I think that's what makes for a long running television series that's engaging and causes a lot of online debates and podcasts and all those things that we want to happen about the show. We're not looking for the pure Justice League versus the team of Baddies reading of this. If that happens, I think we're not doing our job.

We'd like to thank the marketing team for allowing us to do a two and a half hour dueling trailer breakdown after the-Thank you for that. Black trailers were released.Thank you.Bless you guys.Thank you.

We have to be ourselves. We can only be us. We do.

Much like the characters in your story, we can only us. Maybe your answer to this question is going to be team Green. Maybe your answer to this question is going to be team Black. Maybe it's going to be team gray. But did you have a favorite character to write for this season? This season in particular, maybe it's the same as your answer overall when you're thinking about the story. But is there one character who you were most enticed by and pulled toward?

I mean, as I always say, it's picking a favorite child. But everybody has a favorite child. It's difficult. Don't they? Do they? Valar. I mean, I don't have kids. I mean, it's a cliché answer. I mean, we really do like writing for everybody. I mean, the thing is with the dynamics that we set up in season one, I mean, everybody does present an interesting way into this world. I will say in season two, I'm most excited for the fans to get to enjoy the next generation, the kids, so to speak. When I say kids, I mean, the teenagers and young 20 somethings that are now responsible for prosecuting this war that their parents and grandparents started. But we've known Egan, and Eamonn, and Helena, and Jay and Bayla and Reina as characters and also as wonderful people and wonderful young talented actors for a long time now. Now that we barely got to write for them in season one and the tantalizing experience of writing for them in an episode and a half each and seeing what they can do on screen really excited us and really drove the writing, I think, in season two in a great way.

So I'm excited to be able to see all the great things that we were able to do in season two when you got this little teaser of them in season one. You're like, oh, that's fantastic. And then just being able to write these three-dimensional stories for each of those characters, that was deeply satisfying. And also a new wrinkle, a new layer. I mean, everybody loves writing a great acid quip for Damon, but writing for Egon this year and writing more stories for Helena and for Amand and for Jace, who plays a major, major role this year. And then also Bayla and Reina, that stuff was all really, really satisfying. So how's that for an answer? Is that all right?

But in season one, your answer would have been Beesbury, right?

Oh, so Bill Patterson. We love. Legend.

We love. Johanna's absolute favorite. Yeah. He's a boy. We have a A lot of Beesbury lines on our soundboard. Our house floor soundboard is just. It's just the bees all the way up and down the board.

We love Beesbury. Very good.

He was so fun to write for and so fun to have on the show.

How do you reference The Force when you were talking about Star Wars and the Force, when you were talking about the idea of the different degrees of strength of connection between a dragon rider and dragon. I was curious if you had some other... I mean, you already mentioned Konan as foundational text for you. But if you have other classic, this is like a classic Riggerverse question, like classic sci-fi or fantasy stories that are top of mind to you. You mentioned Tolkien, too, a favorite of ours, obviously. Professors are always welcome. When you're processing House of the Dragon, what are some of the other big mythologies that you're thinking of when you're making sense of this story?

I think I've always been interested in Arthurian mythology, generally. Not any one specific writer or scholar take on it, but just Arthurian mythology as a whole. Certainly, Joseph Campbell, the hero of a thousand faces or 10,000 faces. How many thousand faces is 10,000? It's 10,000. Yeah, I mean, classic literature. I mean, I was a student of Dune certainly growing up. Just in all the faves here. Not that that necessarily impacts on this. But yeah, I mean, look, I read all the same things that I think a lot of science fiction and fantasy literature fans did growing up and finding my way through. And also it led me to reading a lot of medieval history because I just became fascinated with the allegories that George was using in the writing of The Song of Ice and Fire. So I would go back and I would read a book about the War of the Roses. I read a book about the Anarchy and the Making of the Show, which is all... That stuff is all deeply fascinating. But yeah, I mean, look, I've spent a long for a long time with my nose buried in a book and also buried in movies and things like that.

And I think you end up drawing from all places. But the nice thing about being immersed in all of this is that I think once you are a student of it, you can start turning things on their ear and running against the grain of expectation. And the reason that so many images from Tolkien, for instance, become cliché in the way that they've been turned around and spun so many times is because Tolkien was so singularly great, and so many people were inspired and drew off of that. But I think you have to be able to take that thing and turn it on. I mean, one of the things I We're laughing out loud when reading a Game of Thrones for the first time and being lulled in and thinking it was a fantasy book, and then you read a bunch of chapters that just seems to be like a Tudor's palace intrigue. Story. Then suddenly, George introduces a dwarf character, and you're like, Oh, this is fascinating. Then you realize in the reading of the chapter, it's like, no, he literally means a little person, but he's playing with your, I'm reading a fantasy book, and this is how I'm reading this as, Oh, a take on Gimli.

But then you realize, oh, Thierryn is actually burdened by his stature, literal and figurative in this world because of the way people look at people that don't fit the normative picture of a person and how it's inspired him to have to use his brain and his mind. You realize in the reading of that one chapter, how he has taken this Gimli trope and just created a timeless, fast fascinating character in one chapter has done that. And those are the things that I think just steeping yourself in these worlds can lead you to inspiration, hopefully like that.

Amazing. I love it. Okay, if you have two more minutes, we want to end with a lightning round. Just a couple rapid fire. Two questions. Okay, cool. Joe, you go first. I don't know which one I want to ask yet.

Okay. If you were to get merch with one house sigil on it, I mean, I'm sure you have plenty you have merch at your fingertips, but if you were to get merch with one house sigil on it and you can't pick the Targarians, which house do you choose?

I like the Valarians. I'm fascinated with them as a house just because in this period, they're so powerful. And then in the original books, they're a footnote. And by the time we got to the world of Robert Barathean, and you see how great houses can rise and fall. We spent a lot of time writing for the Valerians in the show, and I love their whole story. I love the story of the Sea Snake, this guy that comes in and takes this house that should be great because they have this Valerian history and maybe fell a bit into, I don't know, decadence or acceptance of the status quo. Then he put the world on his back and had these nine voyages and then built a castle with his own strength and money. I really like that particular character in this world. I would say in our period, Valarian.

Do you have an affinity-Lovely color scheme as well.

I was going to say do an affinity for him because he, like you, has his treasure planted around.

Oh, absolutely. That was entirely inspired by my life.

By your merch collection? Yes.

I love it. I'm going to keep a close eye out for some Lego assortment. Oh, yeah.

There's that, too. There actually was a cone and sword buried in the Sea Snakes collection. It just never made it to screen. But the art department set decorator did that as a nod to me. So it was wonderful. As if he had gone out to sea and found and met Conan and killed him and then brought home his sword as a trophy.

I love this. Okay, speaking of swords, for my lightning around, a little bit of fun here, I'm going to do a classic house of our smuggle. Here we go. You knew I was going to, Joe. Couldn't help it.

Iconic.

Dark Sister or Blackfire? Dark Sister. Viserus's Crown or Agon's Crown?

Agon's.

Dragon Orgy tapestries or seven pointed stars?

Oh, Orgy tapestry, of course. Okay. All right.

Perfect.

Thank you for joining us today.

We We ended on Dragon Orgies, and that's exactly where we wanted to end.

Thank you. Mission accomplished. Thank you, Ryan. This was awesome. We really enjoyed chatting, and thank you so much for the time. We're hype for season 2.

Thank you, guys. This was great. Great discussion.

All right. We revisited season one. We had a wonderful chat with Ryan Condal. We placed our pot upon the Iron Throne as the Bells of the Grand Sep told. And all the Dragons were-The Bells?

Not No, not the...

Joe, that's a wrap on today's pod. Time for thank you. Thank you to our small council, Steve Allman, for producing this episode. Arjuna Ramga Pal for his additional production work on this episode, and Jomy and Dan are on for his work on the social for this episode. Quick reminders. Two Midnight Boys episodes coming your way on the RingerVerse feed. New RingerVerse YouTube channel. This week, The Accolight instant reaction on Wednesday, The Boys season premiere, instant reaction on Thursday. Joe and I will be with you on The House of Our on Thursday for our Ackleight episode 3 deep dive. We will be here with Chris Ryan on Sunday night right after The House of the Dragon premiere for our first episode of the season of Talk the Thrones. In all of that, you will be able to find in video form on Spotify and on the new RingerVerse YouTube channel. If you just want to listen, you'll be able to do that as usual wherever you get your podcasts. Grab your tickets to Talk the Thrones live as well. Ringer. Com/events. Join us June 25th at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. I think that's it.

This is the stuff.

Dear me. Bye.