House of the Dragon has returned for its third season and there is one scene that everyone is talking about – Prince Aemond Targaryen kissing his mother Alicent directly on the lips.
The clips made their way all over X and fans were either amazed and labeled the moment “absolute cinema” or deeply unsettled by it.
A post sharing Olivia Cooke’s later comments on the scene picked up nearly 50,000 views within hours of going live, writes Film News Blitz’s Phoebe Pang.
Not in the books
This scene does not appear in George R.R. Martin’s original work, Fire & Blood, so the writers of the show added it to the TV adaptation on purpose.
Since it aired, showrunner Ryan Condal discussed his reasoning with Entertainment Weekly.
He said that the incident related to trauma that Aemond endured earlier in the season, when his brother dragged him to a brothel as a young boy.
Apparently, Ameond has always lacked the capacity to distinguish between types of affection and the kiss is not so much romantic as it is indicative of a character who “doesn’t have the well-adjusted underpinnings” which most people grow up with.
Actor Ewan Mitchell, who plays Aemond, says his character is someone with a very skewered idea of what affection is and he has had very strange life experiences.
Maybe there is a drop of an Oedipus complex in there.
Actress Cooke, who plays Alicent, called the scene “weird” during an interview and revealed her character will have to tread a delicate balance with a son who is actually quite scary now.
Why shows reach for moments like this?
Whatever the in-universe explanation, the scene’s online afterlife says something about how television gets discussed now.
A single moment that makes people stop and rewatch travels further on social media than several episodes of slower, quieter writing even could.
A show going into its third season, two years after the last one aired, arguably needs exactly that kind of re-entry point to pull casual viewers back in.
It also is not really out of step with the rest of the shoe’s tenure, either.
From the beginning, House of the Dragon has done a good deal of its business in the area of Targaryen awkwardness and unpleasantness, so a scene in which that occurs makes sense within that context.
The larger question
Reviews of the season so far are mostly, broadly very good – and the Rotten Tomatoes score right now is 97%.
But the question this particular moment leaves the viewer with is a good one.
Will the stunt win a show point overall in the long run, or just the loud, brief flash-mob online discourse for one week while we collectively move onto whether the scene was justified by the writing itself?
Seven episodes remain, House of the Dragon has time to answer that in itself.
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