There’s always a lot goin’ on in the GOT universe, a reflection of the 4,000-plus page count for George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire book series, and this has been especially engrossing with Season 3 of HBO‘s House of the Dragon. Because now that the dragons are having their dance, it’s as if every character action or even random proper noun mentioned simply must accrue against this world’s grand destruction. Inside Episode 5, the narrative flywheel turns toward some who have been on the peripheral. But their moves are growing significant.  

Alys and Aemond, sitting in a weirwood tree. Finally! Book knowers will cheer. But let’s watch this unlikely meet-cute evolve. We saw the one-eyed prince fly off to Harrenhal, fuck it up with Vhagar, and fall wounded at the feet of the castle’s tender. We also saw Alys Rivers hide him away. And now, as sellswords stalk H-Hal’s drippy corridors, hoping to collect on Rhaenyra’s “Aemond Kinslayer” bounty, Alys does some funny crowd work with these guys before scaring them right off. Her patient awakens from terrible dreams. Helaena’s visions of his death at the Gods Eye, his brother Aegon taunting him, his face on fire. And he crawls like a child into the witch’s bosom. Again with the “Mother…” stuff. But they’re realizing a powerful connection, and Aemond, famously arrogant, a champion who requires no one, seems comfortable being humbled in Alys’s presence. Dare we say they look good together?   

And while Alys and Aemond get closer at Harrenhal, amid his frenzied sibling nightmares, Aegon is driving Larys Strong up a wall with his tantrums (“constant whinging”) and blame toward his brother. Larys ticks off all the ways Aegon shit on his own advantages, and a sullen, unresponsive, still crippled and helpless usurper knows he’s right. They end up back in the squalid camp, back to the original Larys plan. A boat to Essos, wait out the war. But wait! The glimmer twins’ gruesome road trip has fueled an HOTD twist! It’s Tyland Lannister, emerging cloaked from the rabble. Admiral Lohar pushed him overboard at the Gullet. But he’s back, still on Team Green, and this lord, once Aegon’s Master of Coin, knows where he hid all the King’s Landing cash.

We also get an extended check-in with the dicey situation in the Riverlands, where Criston Cole’s guerrilla band was wreaking havoc on the army of Rivermen’s southern progress. Two can play at that game, though, as young Oscar Tully — already made older by war — and Roddy the Ruin sow spiny caltrops in the wet and leech-y forest, forcing Cole and Gwayne off their maimed horses. The Greens contingent is low on supplies and morale when their intended stand at Stoney Sept is dashed. The Rivermen are now ahead, and they burned the bridge behind them. Cole stews while Gwayne prepares to depart. While a nobleman can always repair to silks and a warm fire, a glorious death in battle is Cole’s solitary directive. “I am the realm’s greatest warrior, and I will die as such.” The singers will write odes to his valor, “and Queen Alicent herself will hear them.” Good luck, bro.  

The flywheel turns again, and now we’re in Tumbleton, where it really seems like Ormund “Smell-O-Vision” Hightower is grooming Daeron Targaryen. Their conversation, frontloaded with historic lore, involves Dornish ruler Meria Martell’s vicious defense of her country from a combined Targaryen-Hightower host. But when Daeron wonders if her tactics made Martell a hero or villain, he knows immediately it was the wrong thing to say. He tenses as Ormund puts his hands on his shoulders. Daeron has been made willing, but he still fears this man, his temper, and perhaps his own role in Hightower’s queen-toppling scheme. But wow, look how happy Ormund is with the coins he had minted, which feature Daeron as king. 

Episode 5 also reveals Ormund, Mr. “Now We Begin,” as the brains behind the sabotage of Rhaenyra’s hearts and minds campaign. It’s his agents in King’s Landing tagging the anti-crown graffiti, stoking sentiment against the “Queen of Bastards.” Not that Rhaenyra’s impulsive orders to Luthor Largent and his gold cloaks made anything better; those guys took their cue from Daemon and applied force without reason. The smallfolk will remember. And in the meantime, Ormund has assassins dismembering GC soldiers in the streets. As the cunning Hightower lord fortifies Tumbleton for battle, he is displacing Rhaenyra’s support in King’s Landing.     

For all the tense and meaningful and dangerous and bloody moments in this season of House of the Dragon, it remains also quite funny. Like, everything Alys Rivers says is a meme. But get a load too of this sequence in the thousand-candle Grand Sept, as Daemon chuckles at Rhaenyra praying, and she’s like “Don’t!” Their relationship! So often it’s heads thrown on tables and dragonflights and what they also discuss here, in High Valyrian, as something nefarious stirs against Rhaenyra’s rule. But every now and again, HOTD finds time to highlight the voices they use with each other, and Emma D’Arcy and Matt Smith make it come alive.

But the bad shit still goes on. Daemon and Luthor uncovered a smallfolk conspirator, and under torture he burps up a Daeron Targaryen king coin. So the Red Keep is closer to knowing the reach of Ormund’s arm. But Rhaenyra’s right, they are still blind. They have no intel on Aemond at Harrenhal, even less on Aegon’s whereabouts, and are beset with financial woe and unhappy constituents. Little fires everywhere turning into an inferno. When Daemon tosses the coin onto Rhaenyra’s desk, he says they should have burned Daeron when they had the chance.       

The entirety of Episode 5 comes to fore with Ser Criston Cole delivering a speech to his damned. As he declares all who stand with him will die for his last shot at legend status, we see Alicent and a definitely pregnant Helaena try to escape the Red Keep. At first thwarted by the Queen Whisperer — will Mysaria keep the secret of a potential new heir from Rhaenyra? — they discover a secret passage in their house arrest chamber. Into the walls they go, Alicent and her dearest, only to find the exit bricked over. Their lantern falls, and they are stuck in the dark interior.  

Cole’s voice is still heard, seeming to gather all the peripheral moments into strength as this season’s narrative drives forward with haste. And Daemon, almost gloating over his Daeron Coin discovery, is knocked back in terror. “Luthor!” he calls in the gold cloak chamber. But there is no answer. The City Watch commander and his men have been murdered in a tableau of the Last Supper. “A feast for traitors” is scrawled in their blood.

Hot D’s for House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 5 “Unbowed and Unbent”: 

• Are Baela Targaryen and Ser Addam of Hull a thing? While she laments becoming persona non grata with Rhaenyra after the Gullet and Jace’s death, Addam says he’d follow her anywhere, and they’d make a new future together.

• The crown is a weight that crushes. Rhaenyra can’t even bring herself to greet her little son and heir Joffrey Velaryon (Oscar Eskinazi), who has been returned to the Keep from the Vale. It is as if she cannot face what he represents to her own fretting over legitimacy.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.