Daemon’s Harrenhal imaginative and prescient in ‘Home of the Dragon’ Season 2, episode 3, defined

As of Home of the Dragon Season 2, episode 3, Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) formally holds Harrenhal. That may imply just one factor: The present is about to get a complete lot spookier.

Harrenhal is not simply the biggest fortress in Westeros — it is also probably the most cursed. Lengthy earlier than the occasions of Home of the Dragon, Harren Hoare, King of the Islands and the Riverlands, oversaw Harrenhal’s 40-year-long development. Hundreds of laborers died in the course of the course of, and Harren’s armies even reduce down swaths of sacred weirwood bushes to furnish the fortress. But Harren’s large monument to himself (and his personal greed) proved no match for the fiery breath of Aegon the Conqueror’s dragon Balerion, which snuffed out Home Hoare for good.

Since then, Harrenhal is claimed to be cursed, as each Home that has held it since has gone extinct or suffered nice misfortune. Now that Daemon’s accountable for the fortress, he is about to witness the consequences of that curse firsthand.

We get teases of Harrenhal’s creepiness all through Daemon’s first evening within the fortress in episode 3. As if Harrenhal’s leaking, craggy ruins weren’t sufficient, Daemon additionally has to take care of an unknown power rattling at his bed room door, and with Alys Rivers’ (Gayle Rankin) mysterious assertion that he will die on this place. Most memorable, nonetheless, is a imaginative and prescient Daemon has of younger Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock, reprising her position from the primary half of Season 1) stitching Prince Jaehaerys’s decapitated head again onto his physique.

“Always coming and going, aren’t you?” Rhaenyra reprimands him. “And I have to clean up afterwards.”

What does Daemon’s imaginative and prescient of younger Rhaenyra imply?

For episode 3 director Geeta Vasant Patel, this imaginative and prescient and adolescent Rhaenyra’s position in it offered a wealthy alternative for Daemon to reckon with the occasions of the previous two episodes, beginning along with his falling-out with Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) in episode 2.

“The most important thing about Rhaenyra in this scene was that she knows him,” Patel instructed Mashable. “He just got rejected by older Rhaenyra, who he feels he doesn’t know any more. The Rhaenyra he really knows is the young Rhaenyra, who he fell in love with and who worshiped him. So when he goes into that room and young Rhaenyra looks at him with judgment and with critique, that is a sword through his trust. That’s where his fear lies, that the one person he’s let down his guard with actually doesn’t believe in him and thinks he’s a monster.”

There’s additionally the Blood and Cheese of all of it, as Daemon is confronted with a bodily reminder of his position in orchestrating Jaehaerys’s homicide. “When Rhaenyra tells him, ‘you just killed a kid,’ that’s the first time he’s processing,” Patel defined. “A lot of times none of us change, unless we care about someone and they make us change. And to me, that’s what that scene was about.”

Patel continued: “When Matt did the scene over and over again, and we kept going deeper and deeper into it, there was one moment where I saw his entire face shake with pain, because he was realizing what he did. He was that connected to Daemon. We all had tears in our eyes in that moment.”

That is simply the beginning of Daemon’s Harrenhal visions.

Matt Smith in “House of the Dragon.”
Credit score: Theo Whitman / HBO

With Daemon remaining at Harrenhal as he raises a military for Rhaenyra, you possibly can guess we’ll see extra visions. And provided that episode 3 kicks off the presence of those goals, Patel, showrunner Ryan Condal, and the remainder of the present’s workforce had many conversations about what these visions ought to seem like.

“Many fantasy shows have visions that are processed in so many ways. They have a lot of sound, maybe different lenses. There’s different levels you can go,” Patel mentioned. Fashion-wise, Patel pushed for the visions to mirror on a regular basis life.

“When it comes to House of the Dragon, in my opinion, the vision is a dream,” she defined. “When we dream, it’s so real. That’s what’s frightening about a dream. You don’t know if you’re dreaming.”

Due to this, Smith and the actors he interacts with in numerous visions have been inspired to maintain their performances grounded in actuality. However as we see in episode 3, that enhances the uncanniness of the goals. The picture of Rhaenyra buzzing whereas stitching Jaehaerys’ head in place is very chilling, an introduction to Harrenhal as a haunted home that has solely simply begun to sink its claws into Daemon.

New episodes of Home of the Dragon air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.