By The second season of HBO’s hot series House of the Dragon is finally here and as usual, here come the weekly episode discussions and comments from the cast and crew on how they did certain scenes and why. This week the biggest topic will undoubdetly be the infamous Blood & Cheese scene towards the end of the premiere episode. It saw some changes from the source material and showrunner Ryan Condal has some comments.
Book and show spoilers ahead
Where is Maelor?
One of the big changes is that during the scene, in the books Helaena has three children: Jaehaerys, Jaehaera and Maelor. Two sons, one daughter. Blood and Cheese force Helaena to choose between the two sons. Once Helaena chooses Maelor because he’s too young to understand, Blood kill Jaehaerys.
Showrunner Ryan Condal explains why there was no Maelor to Entertainment Weekly: “Maelor does not yet exist on this timeline because 30 years is compressed into 20 years.“
Condal didn’t provide further elaboration on that part, but he did speak about working with child actors. Perhaps that was a factor as well.
“We knew that we would be challenged to get performances out of children that young — as a person who has kids around these ages, I’m intimately familiar with all of that. Then there are things that you can and cannot expose children to on a movie set. If you were to try to perform a faithful rendering of that story, you’d be challenged from all angles in terms of getting a performance out of a child. A lot of times it seems like the kid is going through that, but you’re using clever cutaways and insert shots.“
“A crime of incompetence”
But beyond that, Condal also commented on the narrative reasons for how Blood and Cheese played out in the show: “What we wanted to do was make a visceral sequence that satisfied the beat in the book, but also played in a reality that worked for our television audience, many of whom would not have read the book. We wanted it to play a bit as a dark Cohen Brothers heist sequence that takes a terrible twist at the end of it.“
Blood actor Sam C. Wilson also added during the EW interviews: “It was always about losing control and then being in a position where we have no choice but to do what we set out to do because there was no escape. It ends up being a crime of incompetence on the show, and I think that’s where it differentiates from the book. It ends up being two utterly incompetent hitmen.“
Season 2 of House of the Dragon has started and we have 7 more episodes of weekly discussions with the show already renewed for Season 3. Stay tuned!
