‘House of the Dragon’ Changes Books in Shocking and Controversial Murder in ‘Blood and Cheese’

They served blood and cheese.

Spoilers below for the season 2 premiere of “House of the Dragon.”

The second season premiere of the “Game of Thrones” spinoff, “House of the Dragon,” covered an infamous and controversial murder, known to fans of the books as “Blood and Cheese.”

At the start of Season 2, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, but her half-brother, Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), and his followers have usurped her, and now the two sides are at war. on whether Rhaenyra or Aegon should be monarch.

Season 1 ended with Aegon’s mercurial brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) killing Rhaenyra’s son. In the first episode of season 2, Rhaenyra’s husband Daemon (Matt Smith) hires rat catchers in the castle (known as “Blood and Cheese”) to retaliate by killing Aemond.

As the episode title suggests, “A Son for a Son” is Daemon’s planned revenge.

However, this plot goes awry and turns into tragedy. The assassins end up not killing Aemond, but killing his nephew, a child: Aegon’s son with their sister, Heleana (Phia Saban).

The horrific act is not shown on screen, but the struggling child can be heard, along with the sounds of a knife.

Heleana grabs her last child, runs away in terror, and rushes to her mother’s room, where Alicent (Olivia Cooke) is having sex with Criston Cole (Fabien Frankle) – a scandalous affair, since Criston is a member of the Kingsguard and is supposed to do it. to be single.

It’s a crazy writing choice for the show to throw a sex scene into this moment – ​​really, now?!

But they went there.

Although Alicent seems mortified that her daughter caught her, Heleana is so traumatized that she barely seems to register the handkerchief playing in front of her, stammering, “They killed the boy” at the end of the episode. .

“House of the Dragon” is based on the book “Fire & Blood” by George RR Martin. Unlike the novels on which “Game of Thrones” is based, it is written as a fictional history textbook – so it reads more like a Wikipedia entry than a novel with fleshed-out characters. It is also written by fictional academics who have conflicting accounts of “what happened.”

That leaves the showroom to make changes, and there are some big curveballs in “Blood and Cheese.” As gruesome as it is on screen, it’s toned down considerably compared to what was on the page.

In the book, it is never clear that Daemon did not deliberately target a child. The series leaves some room for ambiguity – Blood and Cheese ask Daemon what they should do if they fail to find and kill Aemond. The scene ends there, intentionally leaving Daemon’s response unknown.

But, on screen, Daemon’s main orders are to kill Aemond – a dangerous young man who killed his stepson – not an innocent child. This makes him seem less of a monster for this atrocity than in the book.

The whole sequence is also more of an ordeal in the book, with Blood and Cheese holding Alicent and her handmaidens hostage and lying in wait for Heleana. In the series, the assassins stumble upon Helena by chance and talk their way into this atrocious act, continuing the series’ trend of “atrocities happen by accident” (since season 1 also softened the son’s murder of Rhaenyra by Aemond as being accidental, where the book did not make this clear. Season 1 also toned down Alicent’s support for her son’s coup to a “misunderstanding” of her son’s final wishes. husband, rather than a deliberate takeover).

Blood and Cheese isn’t very smart: as one of them grabs Helena on screen and holds a knife to her throat, the other man points out that Daemon’s instructions were: “A son for a son “. Exasperated, he said to his colleague: “Does she look like a fucking son to you?

So the murder in the show results from their incompetence, not from the fact that they planned it that way and waited to execute their evil plan, as it happens on the page.

In the book, they also give Heleana a terrible choice about which child she wants them to spare. In the series, they always point out a child to him, but they tell him to tell him which one is Aegon’s heir. So it’s clear that these men are up to no good, but their heinous intentions are not as explicitly declared to Heleana.

The book also doesn’t make him flee the scene, but instead stumbles upon his mother making out with Criston. This wild part of the sequence was entirely a creation for show only.

Season 2 of “House of the Dragon” airs Sunday evenings on HBO (9 p.m.) and streams on Max.