The post In House of the Dragon Season 2, It’s Not Just War — It’s Nuclear War appeared first on Consequence.
Near the beginning of a long press day with the cast and co-creator of House of the Dragon, the second season’s most important allegory comes into focus: Talking with a small group of journalists, showrunner Ryan Condal says that when trying to find optimism and hope in the dark HBO fantasy drama, he hopes audiences hook into “these characters that we know love each other, and maybe have been separated by the war. Seeing them come back together — I think those are the things we’ll look forward to, to try to find some light in the darkness of a nuclear war.”
Condal’s offhand mention of the show’s conflicts as essentially nuclear war makes a shocking amount of sense in that moment, and during the rest of the day’s interviews it keeps coming up. For, while the series takes place in a fictional kingdom where superstition and the sword rule, the presence of dragons — many dragons, ridden by many characters into battle — does make the metaphor work. When both sides of a war have the ability to rain down unfathomable destruction, how does that change the field of play?
“This is why fantasy is so brilliant, because it’s discussing something incredibly serious about the world in a way that’s palatable and interesting,” co-star Matthew Needham says. “What would the world be like if you had dragons? It would be like this, it would be hellish. Whoever has the bomb has the power — it’s scary times we’re in.”
Adds Needham, “I don’t think it’s one of those finger-wagging shows, going ‘Look at all the parallels between modern life [and the series]. It just is like, ‘The world is scary and awful, and there are no winners in war.’ And that’s just unfortunately a universal truth. But yeah, I love that they’re nuclear weapons — it’s scary.”
It’s a metaphor that has helped Eve Best play the role of Princess Rhaenys from the beginning, she says. “The first time we rehearsed with the Black Council, and we were talking about dragons, the whole conversation was, ‘Should we send in the dragons?’ And I said to Ryan, ‘What’s our context for this? How can we make this real for us in some way?’ And he said, ‘Nuclear war.'”
The idea also makes sense to co-star Steve Toussaint, “because [dragons] are the ultimate sanction in Westeros. As I think someone says in one of the episodes, once you unleash the dragons, you can’t call them back. You drop a nuclear bomb, it’s over. The movie Oppenheimer, he makes this thing and then he regrets it for the rest of his life, ‘Look what I’ve done.’ And I think that’s the same kind of equivalent. Should anybody have that kind of power? Should anybody have the power to destroy mankind, ultimately?'”
That, if nothing else, is part of why Toussaint thinks that his character doesn’t trust dragons. “The power’s too much.”
Best agrees, noting that “the crucial thing, what Rhaenys is trying all the way through the season to steer them towards, is that when you have that kind of power, you have this enormous responsibility and the responsibility to choose a peaceful way.”
House of the Dragon (HBO)
Unfortunately, the younger characters aren’t all that interested in peace. Tom Glynn-Carney, who plays the freshly crowned King Aegon II in the series, says that the Westeros depicted in the show “feels volatile and ready to blow at any moment. We’re on the brink of complete collapse. And I think [Aegon II] sees it as a challenge and he sees it as his opportunity now — he’s been the person watching other people press all the buttons for a long time, and now he’s the one with the remote control in his hand and he gets to play the game. He’s enjoying it, for the first few moments we see him. He’s really relishing that opportunity to do so.”
As a new king, not to mention a very young man with no experience of war, Glynn-Carney feels that Aegon II is so driven by the possibility of conflict because “he’s never experienced purpose in general. He’s never had a focus of any sort, which has been why he’s been so led astray by his own desires. So I think it’s good for Aegon to have something to focus on, regardless of whether the fact that it’s war.” He laughs. “He has a routine of sorts.”
Ewan Mitchell, who plays Aegon’s younger brother Aemond, knows that his character is not just “a scary young man of vision and ambition — he recognizes that he possesses a power that no one else in the family does in Vhagar, the largest, baddest dragon in the known world. She’s named after the old Valerian God of war, and she was bred for conquest, but when there was nothing left to to conquer in Westeros, she was kind of deemed superfluous. She was deemed irrelevant. She was pushed to the outside of the dragon keep — though she’s so enormous she can’t fit in there anyway.”
That’s the dragon Aemond, with his eyepatch and anger towards the world, rides. And as Mitchell observes, “She’s getting itchy feet, and sooner or later, she’s going to get hungry. For [Aemond], to possess that singular power, he sees it as a call to do things that no one else can do. To etch his name into the history books by hook or by crook, and write his name large enough for the whole world to see.”
House of the Dragon (HBO)
The attitudes of the younger characters make for a sharp contrast to the older ones: Something Toussaint brings to his performance as Lord Corlys is an awareness that while at the beginning of the series, the younger generation has no experience with battle, he and those of his age “have seen what real war is. And servicemen who have actually seen real combat often say, ‘If you’ve actually seen it, you don’t want it.'”
As he continues, “Our world tends to be an awful lot of older men ordering young men into battle because the older men, they’re going to stay at home. They’re not having to deal with it. But if you’ve seen it, you know it’s the last resort. That’s one of the things that ran through my mind all the time.”
Generations that have known war, Best agrees, “are programmed not to want that level of destruction again, or to witness it.” And in Season 2, she and Toussaint are “the only two characters left in the series who have actually experienced that firsthand.”
It’s why, at the end of Season 1, Best feels that Rhaenys “chooses not to nuke all the greens, which she could do. It’s precisely [because] she understands the potential weight of what she could be unleashing. And in the end, also, it’s the compassionate choice. It’s the choice of the mother and the woman who knows that there’s, you know, a better way forward.”
The bad news is that the characters of House of the Dragon may not be able to avoid war much longer. The good news is that in our reality, nuclear weapons don’t get hungry.
House of the Dragon Season 2 premieres Sunday, June 16 on HBO and Max.
In House of the Dragon Season 2, It’s Not Just War — It’s Nuclear War
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