House Of The Dragon Season 2 Episode 7 Review

The penultimate episode of Season 2 is House Of The Dragon on Sunday night. Before another agonizingly long wait while they create Season 3, we have one last episode left.

At this moment they will be cooking with dragon flame. Enough dragons have arrived to battle and make war among one another, then die. We are seeing the reason no dragons survived when Game Of Thrones first began. It was named The Dance of Dragons. What a sad little jig this is.
You will be aware from following my Season 2 recaps that few weeks ago I connected with Rhaelyx, my own dragon. (Googling “Rhaelyx House of the Dragon” will provide my recaps including last week’s that contain our red-and- black winged wyrm). This was a very elegant event. I understood precisely why the dragon landed outside my office—a garden shed in my backyard. One required a rider to record all these Westerosi wheelings and interactions. All the dragons will die sometime, but Rhaelyx will survive long after Drogon dies from human memory as Rhaelyx is a storyteller rather than a participant. That’s a safer bet, as any decent writer would know.

In any event, while Ulf the White and Hugh Hammer came out on top in the end, for better or worse, the same cannot be said of the Dragonseeds in tonight’s dramatic episode—despite my bonding with the she-dragon going really well.

Seasmoke tracked Addam of Hull down last week. Rhaenyra approaches Addam at the introduction of this Sunday’s show and discovers he only wants a hug and has no bloody clue what’s going on. Something like that instead. Serving her excites him even more because his deadbeat dad, Corlys Velaryon, acknowledges him. So is his brother Alyn of Hull, who boldly declares his father “I am of salt and sea, I yearn for nothing more,” only to get a half-hearted nod. Addam gets nothing better from his father; “Well done,,” the Sea Snake says sharply.

Ulf the White follows a rather different strategy in meanwhile. Hugh might be courageous and strong, but Ulf is a coward—as shown by his reluctance to even visit Dragonstone in the first place, a choice motivated more by peer pressure than anything else—but as he runs from Vermithor’s cavern of death, he steps straight into his own pile of dragon dung, and Silverwing’s loving embrace.

One more dragon is about to join Team Black—a wild winged beast rising in the Vale, where Rhaena is now. This evening, we only see her momentarily when a harsh Lady Jeyne Arryn sends her and Rhaenyra’s little boys away from the Eyrie.

(Briefly: Amanda Collin and Alyn of Hull are Jeyne; Abubakar Salim, the actors portraying Mother and Father in the wonderful—and sadly canceled—HBO series Raised By Wolves. You might classify that kind of knowledge as both “fun” and “terrible sad.”

Rhaena will be a somewhat significant but quite logical divergence from the text if she mounts the wild dragon known as Sheepstealer because it takes sheep!

We’ll simply have to foot it; then, because Rhaelyx is choosing to visit the neighboring hot springs—seriously, Harrenhal has the absolute greatest hot springs in Westeros!


Up until now, Daemon’s effort to bring the Riverlands together has been something of a flop. Fortunately, old Grover Tully is dead; his grandson, Oscar Tully, is in control (yes, it’s a Sesame Street joke due to George R.R. Martin who also includes an Elmo Tully as well as a Bert and Ernie combo in Fire & Blood).

Oscar was rather shy when we originally met him, but he is all brass balls now, essentially telling the Riverlords that while Daemon is a huge jerk with a ridiculous jerk face, his grandfather did sign an oath, hence Riverlords are not oathbreakers.

Great, young Oscar. You startled me in a positive sense. You came really close to earning this week’s MVP.