This post contains spoilers from House of the Dragon ‘s Season 2 finale. Proceed accordingly.
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With the program, Daemon now is.
Sunday’s House of the Dragon season finale included a scene that was a long time coming: Rhaenyra and Daemon coming face-to-face after spending nearly the entire season apart. Geeta Vasant Patel, who directed the episode (as well as the Season 1 finale and Episode 3 of the show’s sophomore run), says that the reunion owes a lot to something that happened A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away… but we’ll get to that in a minute.
You’ll recall that Daemon left Dragonstone in a huff in Episode 2 , when Rhaenyra (correctly) accused her husband of wanting to sit the Iron Throne himself rather than support her efforts. He rode Caraxes to Harrenhal, the decrepit seat of House Strong, and spent the season there as he built an army, oversaw the castle’s renovation and seemed like he was maybe losing his mind .
In the finale, Ser Simon Strong sent Rhaenyra a raven when he feared that Daemon and Ser Alfred Broome, one of her less-than-supportive black council members, might be colluding against her. So the black queen flew to Harrenhal to confront her king consort, unaware that he’d had a come-to-The-Seven moment the night before.
In a vision or dream, Alys Rivers led Daemon through a series of images that foretold everything that Game of Thrones showed us will happen in Westeros’ future: the three-eyed raven, the Night King, Daenerys’ surviving Khal Drogo’s funeral pyre with her dragon hatchlings, etc. The experience so thoroughly shook Daemon that by the time Rhaenyra shows up at Harrenhal, he realizes that he’s got to back her if the Realm is to survive. So he does, publicly, then rallies the army he’s raised to do so, as well. ( Read a full finale recap .)
Patel tells TVLine that she had two objectives for the scene. “One was, we wanted to make sure that Daemon didn’t come across as a weak person all of a sudden, like someone we didn’t recognize.” After a lot of conversations with showrunner Ryan Condal, writer Sara Hess and Matt Smith, who plays Daemon, they decided that the king consort’s troubling premonition needed to stay at the center of the big reunion.
“The vision Ryan had was, this thing that Daemon experiences in Harrenhal convinces him that there is something bigger than him. Daemon is someone who always thinks about himself, and here, he is being asked to think about the bigger picture,” she says. What’s more: “That vision convinces him that Rhaenyra is meant to be on that throne.”
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She chuckles. “And that is a very, very high bar that we had to, somehow, reach. So I definitely felt the pressure, and the wonderful challenge, of that.”
Patel says she considered how Smith’s character tends to handle his emotions, and how he reacts when he isn’t under attack. “Daemon is someone who is profound and is actually quite thoughtful underneath the way that he expresses his fear and anger, which is violence,” she explains.
And here’s where Star Wars enters the picture.
“Something that I told myself, thinking about how to direct this, was, ‘I see Daemon as more of a Yoda that has just realized he’s Yoda,'” Patel says. “He is the spiritual leader. He’s not someone who’s becoming subservient. He’s not someone who’s stepping back. He’s someone who’s stepping into his role, and I thought Matt did that beautifully.”
(In case you don’t know who Yoda is: Educate yourself, man .)
She adds: “Where he says, ‘You are the chosen one, you can do this,’ it’s not a man talking to a woman. This is someone who has become a hero’s journey mentor, and the hero is Rhaenyra.”
What did you think of Daemon and Rhaenyra’s reunion? Let us know in the comments!
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