The eighth episode of ‘The house of the dragon’ was the best so far of this wonderful prequel to ‘Game of Thrones’, also marking a point of no return. It is true that ‘The Lord of the Tides’ was full of great moments, but there are a sceneprobably the best of the chapter, which it was improvised and also forced to change something that happened later.
Beware of spoilers for the eighth episode of ‘The house of the dragon’ from here.
The inflection point
Those who have already been able to see the episode will remember that Viserys (Paddy Considine) appears unexpectedly at a certain point and makes his way towards the Iron Throne with great difficulty. In a certain way a guard tries to help him but he insists on going alone, but the crown falls off and he ends up being helped by his brother Daemon (matt smith), who upon sitting on the throne crowns him again. Well, the scene was not like that initially the director Geeta Patel in EW:
When we were shooting that – I think rehearsal again, the first day – the crown fell off Paddy’s head and Matt picked it up and we moved on. We don’t stop rolling. That moment was discovered. So the three of us got together and said, “We feel this. This felt like the turning point in our relationship.” It is just a moment of silence.
The initial idea was not that and they had a big moment focused on the relationship between Viserys and Daemon reserved for the later dinner in which Viserys asks his family to put their quarrels aside. However, Patel recalls that they decided to at least have a chance to use that fallen crown idea:
We decided to shoot it both ways, with the crown falling off and the crown not falling off. Every time the crown fell, we all gasped and at the same time thought, “Will we have somewhere to go when we get to dinner?” And interestingly, in the montage we discovered that the moment was actually the fall of the crown, at least in my mind.
Patel herself also recalls that “I was very grateful that this accident happened, that the crown fell off, because it turned out to be, at least for me, a rather heavy moment and a turning point for a story that had begun in the pilot: Hey, I want your crown and at the end here I’m going to put the crown back on your head and I’m going to help you get to your throne.“, thus allowing to lighten the dinner scenewell “there are almost too many people in the room for this to be the emotional moment“which they had fixed by then.
In Espinof: “Each dragon has its own personality.” ‘The house of the dragon’ and all the dragons there have been and will have in the amazing prequel to ‘Game of Thrones’