House of the Dragon Episode 6 Review: Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke Win Over the Time Jump as the Stakes Turn Game of Thrones

House of the Dragon episode six jumped ten years ahead and handed Rhaenyra and Alicent to new actresses, and I thought the recast worked beautifully. Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke were both great, and the episode pushed the show into the kind of territory where nobody can be guaranteed safe anymore.

Before anything else, I am not a book reader. I am a casual fan, so I am not going through this in strict episode order; I am going through the things that stood out, and a lot stood out in this one.

Emma D'Arcy earns her place as Rhaenyra from the very first shot

The first thing everybody was talking about was the recasting. Emily Carey had been young Alicent and Milly Alcock had played Princess Rhaenyra. They were replaced by Emma D'Arcy as the older Rhaenyra and Olivia Cooke as Alicent. Right away there was a lot to compare them to, and I wondered how the show would pull it off. They did it so well.

The opening tracking shot was a great way to introduce Emma D'Arcy. Rhaenyra has just given birth, we do not yet know it is ten years later, and we do not know what is going on. We just know it is her. The child is healthy, then word comes that the queen wants to see the baby, and rather than sit there and do nothing, Rhaenyra walks herself over. That shows you the strength she has.

Some people complained that she lacks the childlike spirit she had ten years earlier. My answer is that it is ten years later and things are going badly. A lot of people get beaten down by life in five years, never mind ten, so I bought it. I was not very familiar with Emma D'Arcy's work and did not know if I would like her as much as Milly Alcock, but I thought what she did here was phenomenal. I understood a lot of what Rhaenyra was going through, and the idea of that friendship with Alicent now gone really landed.

Rhaenyra's children belong to Harwin Strong, and Alicent knows it

We understand why the queen wants to see the child: the baby is not Rhaenyra's husband's. These are illegitimate children, and she is having them one after another. From the way it was alluded to at first, I wondered whether Daemon was the father of all of them, but none of them had Targaryen hair, so I thought maybe not. It turns out the father is Ser Harwin Strong.

I was confused at first, because when I went back to the flashback, it is Larys who talks to Harwin about what it means when that banner goes up, the call to war and all that. Which brings me to Larys.

Larys Strong is Littlefinger times a thousand

Ser Larys is a scumbag. To me he is Littlefinger times a thousand. He is a menace on the loose, but he is doing it right, at least as far as what he is doing goes. I do not approve of his methods.

Then there is the creepy kid. He looks a little like one of the boys from Stranger Things, but with the blonde hair, and he is simply disgusting. People say he is going to be like Joffrey, and my response is: sure, if Joffrey was up on a windowsill committing lewd acts aimed at pigeons and rats below. His attitude seems to be that he has a dragon, so what does he care. And yet he is next in line. He is also cruel to his brother, which comes up later.

One of my major problems: Criston Cole does not look ten years older

This is one of the major problems I had with the episode, though I think I can get over it. They recast three actresses. The one they absolutely had to recast was the girl who was around 12 before, who became Daemon's wife. It is very hard for a 12 year old to play 22. I do think Milly Alcock could have played older if they had aged her up, but I understand why they recast, and I also understand the Olivia Cooke recast.

But if you are going to recast, you have to do one of two things with everyone else. I love Ser Criston and I love the actor playing him, but you either recast him or give him a fuller beard to make him look older, because he looks exactly the same. As I put it, "he does not look 10 years older here." He is the only one where that bothered me, and otherwise I thought he was as great as he had been in the previous five episodes.

Criston is bitter, loyal to Alicent, and there to expose Harwin

Criston is bitter now and loyal to Alicent after everything we saw. Alicent knows the children are Harwin's, and she tells Criston as much. His response amounts to: I will call it out, I will be as nasty as I need to be to Rhaenyra's children, and I will protect your children, because protecting you is what I do now. We have seen that from him before. When he is on your side, he is loyal, and I thought this was consistent with the character, plus he is angry and jaded.

Some people asked why he was not fighting back. He was not there to fight back, and the show said as much in the behind the scenes segment afterward. When I went back over it, it was clear he was there to expose Harwin, and that is exactly what he did. Harwin showed his hand, the proud father unable to hide himself.

I never in a million years thought I would be a soccer dad, but my kids play soccer now, and I caught myself yelling from the sidelines that a kid was shoving, learning the jargon without meaning to. I can only imagine if my daughter were sword fighting in front of me and I could not say she was mine. So Harwin flips out, Criston gets him to reveal his relationship with Rhaenyra, and all the politics underneath it are wild.

The Hand of the King got a raw deal from start to finish

Then there is the Hand of the King, whom I love, and who got done dirty all the way around. He is just trying to do his job. One son is fathering children with the princess, and his other son, Larys, is the worst person on the show so far, and I mean that in the best way possible as far as scumbags go. He has a good kid and a bad kid: the good one cannot control himself and has all these children, and the bad one wants to kill everybody.

So he tells the king he is out. The king refuses to let him go, and asks him to explain why he must leave, with the queen sitting right there. I loved his loyalty, both to his children and in general. The king offers to let him go if he just says the reason, and he refuses because he knows the repercussions that would follow. There was so much detail in all of this.

Rhaenyra's deal with her husband, and a desperate marriage offer

It was a great way to introduce both Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke. You put them in the situation, show us where they are, show Rhaenyra's relationship with her husband, and show the turmoil between these former friends, which I thought was done really well, along with how much Alicent knows. It goes back to the deal Rhaenyra struck with her husband: she marries him, they produce heirs, he can be with his companion and she can be with her guards. They did not stick to the deal entirely, because she is having children with someone else.

I loved the moment where he says he wants to go back and fight, because he is a fighter, and she tells him he is staying with her. After Alicent calls Rhaenyra out in front of the king, who by the way looks like one of the zombies from The Walking Dead, poor man, Rhaenyra makes an offer. Alicent's other child has been having a rough time with the eggs, so Rhaenyra proposes marrying her son off to Alicent's daughter and calling it a day. Alicent is not having it. Rhaenyra was desperate, and once everyone sees that, she decides to leave for Dragonstone.

Before they go, there is a lovely moment where she tells her husband to take his companion with him, because they need all the hands they can get. It felt like an understanding between two people who get each other rather than a strange relationship. Also, some of the dragon CGI was not great in this one. And what is hilarious is that Alicent has a major problem with Rhaenyra producing children of questionable parentage with a guard, when in reality she should be having children with her cousin. The logic in this town is backwards.

Larys turns the episode into real Game of Thrones

Then comes what Larys does when he visits the prisoners. This is when it gets real Game of Thrones. I was talking about this beforehand: "nobody's safe anymore." You cannot guarantee anybody, because the Hand of the King is killed, and so is his son, and the way it is done by his other son is "very Shakespearean," Othello and Iago type material.

Larys has the prisoners' tongues cut out rather than killing them, so they cannot say anything. I guess they cannot write either, which I never thought about; maybe they simply cannot write, who knows. Either way, no tongues, and everybody inside that castle dies. Those children lose their father after some sweet moments with him.

A subdued Daemon and the most heartbreaking moment of the episode

I really liked the subdued Daemon we got here. I will probably mess up her name, but his wife was the character they definitely had to recast, the one the king was once supposed to marry, and Daemon ended up marrying her. They have children, and she wants to get back out there and fight like a Targaryen rather than sit in this state. I liked their rapport. He respects her and cares about her. He is still Daemon, so he still acts the way he acts and sticks to what he wants, but you can see that he cares. I think Matt Smith is giving a brilliant performance.

Then comes a moment that echoes the first episode, when the king's wife was in labour and the choice was put to him. This time Daemon does not make that call. She does. She gets up and goes to her dragon, the most powerful dragon, and screams dracarys at it. This was the most heartbreaking moment of the episode for me. She is begging it to do it, and finally it does. She asked for it, but still. Afterward Daemon walks away from his children, and I do not know how he is going to handle this. I do not think he stays; I think he leaves.

My verdict: a true second pilot, with two great new leads

I think they did a great job maneuvering the stakes. The showrunners said at the end that this is essentially a second pilot, and it felt that way, because it moved us into the new stakes ten years later.

"I love the episode I thought it was great." I went in open minded, unsure how both actresses would do in their roles, and they were both great. I loved what the previous two did, I love what these two are doing, and I am very invested.

Did the time jump and the new Rhaenyra and Alicent win you over, or did Criston Cole's unchanged look pull you out of it?