I love how this episode of hotd was supposed to be so emotional and sad with all the moments between Viserys, Daemon, and Rhaenyra, but none of it hits like it should. I would be more moved by something like Daemon helping Viserys up to the throne if we had seen more of them actually being brothers between their various falling-outs (and if the falling outs themselves had more weight to them, the show really watered those down quite a bit). Even Rhaenyra’s scenes with Viserys, although there were more of them, felt really shallow. Like with Ned and the Stark kids, I got a sense of the unique relationships he had with each of them (except maybe Rickon, I guess lol). I believed all of their grief at his death, because even if they didn’t have a lot of scenes with him, what we got was meaningful for the most part. But in hotd, it just felt like Rhaenyra and Viserys had the same 3 conversations over and over again all season, and none of them felt meaningful. Like you said, the whole show feels repetitive and nothing ever moves forward, even with all these damn time jumps.
The stairs scene annoyed the fuck out of me because I was like I know this is supposed to be a MOMENT but I’m sitting here watching this man try to sit down for three minutes and I don’t. CARE. for multiple reasons
It’s not like the season starts with him being this great king and he’s withering away to nothing and so watching him so emaciated and sick is like holy shit.
Daemon and his relationship isn’t fleshed out nearly enough for this to be moving. This isn’t Kendall and Roman from Succession where their fights and their moments of unity and affection are portrayed with nuance and complexity. Their entire relationship seems to be Viserys is too weak to just kill him and Daemon just does things but nothing big enough to actually create any kind of ripple effect. It’s BORING.
The dinner scene had me like, if this actually felt like a family that was at war with itself then this would mean something but it just seems like a family who don’t talk to each other and everything is low energy.
Like in The Borgias, Lucrezia tried to kill Juan by burning the rope holding up the chandelier over his bed but when it falls it ends up just killing the woman he was having sex with
and he knows that she tried to kill him and she knows he knows it and Cesare knows it but none of them say anything so the dinner the next night is tense because she’s also furious that he killed her lover Paolo (no proof but everyone knows he was the one to kill him) which is why she tried to kill him in the first place
and when he refuses to say he regrets killing Paolo she threatens to go to Spain (where their father is sending him) to kill him
and so he makes a family above all speech
and this is after their father climbs over a table to seize him
and nothing really came from it but it was STILL more tense than the entirety of this blacks vs greens plot line so the dinner being a moment of civility before he dies doesn’t MEAN anything.
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