The thing about House of the Dragon is that pretty much every character on the show is awful in their own little way. Or big way, sometimes. There are devious blond uncles and snotty blond children and schemers in green dresses. This was true before the recent decade-zapping chronological leap forward that took place in the middle of the season, but it is especially true now, today, after all of that happened. It’s just a collection of the worst and most petty people you could ever have the misfortune of meeting all trying to ruin each other through subterfuge or bodily harm, kind of like if Succession had more violence. And dragons. Which would make for a pretty fun next season, actually. Take a few minutes today and picture Roman Roy atop a fire-breathing winged beast. A little treat for you.
The end result in all of this, in addition to making it a surprisingly fun and nasty little show, is a lack of characters to actually root for. Yes, sure, it is just a blast to watch Matt Smith smirk his way through various funerals and tension-soaked formal dinners, but it would also be a blast to see his character get walloped with a mallet once or twice. I thought I kind of liked one of many knights with shoulder-length brown hair but then they cooked him in a house fire. The dragons seem cool, I guess, but they have yet to utter a line of dialogue to confirm this, which is both probably an unreasonable ask on my part and something I really hope happens out of nowhere in the season finale.
Which brings me to King Viserys, my sweet miserable sack of loose bones, who is somehow still alive after the time-jump despite most of his skin falling off of his body and most of his family trying to kill him through a combination of stress and scheming. Here’s how he looked before the time jump, at his daughter’s wedding, just before his daughter and brother started making sex eyes at each other on the dance floor and also before his daughter’s secret boyfriend beat her husband’s secret boyfriend to death in front of everyone.
Cool. Great. Fine.
But we’ve been over that much before, a few weeks ago, in another article I wrote about this miserable lump of stringy hair and regrets, one in which I said “I hope he frowns so hard his whole face slides off his skull.” Let’s check in on him now, 10 years later, with his children and child bride grown up and everyth-
God yes. It’s beautiful. And made better by the fact that some actors — the children, mostly — have been replaced by older ones for the grown versions of their characters, and other ones look like they’ve aged six months at most, and then the show just went ahead and made the king look like he’s seen 1000 years of pain. He’s basically an unshaven skeleton now, just clinking and clanking his bones from chair to chair as everyone around him tries to ruin each other.
Here’s another screencap of him.
Here’s a third one, which might be my favorite if only because he looks kind of like if the Ghost of Christmas Past made Ebenezer Scrooge watch his entire family get murdered.
All in all, it is one of the greatest displays of face-acting I have ever seen. We should be talking about it more. It should be one of the only things we talk about. People should be knocking on Paddy Considine’s door every day to see if he is doing okay. Some of these dudes are serious Method actors who get too deep into their roles. I worry he has forgotten how to smile. Or, if he still remembers, if he can even make the muscles in his face do that anymore after a full season of filming. I picture him trying to grin a little and then wincing in pain as the poor atrophied muscles in his cheeks attempt to inch up his face.
And that’s before we even get to the things his character says, out loud, to other people. That makes it even better. All this dope wants is for his miserable family to get along for one stupid day, just once, even if they are just pretending and don’t actually mean it. And yet!
It’s the best. The man rules a kingdom and has dragons at his disposal and just wants to enjoy any of that for 90 uninterrupted seconds but every time two or more members of his family get within earshot of each other he turns into a grandfather at a Thanksgiving table filled with bickering siblings and cousins. To be fair, he did have a right to be a little upset here, seeing as his wife stabbed his daughter after threatening to cut out his grandson’s eye as punishment for his own son getting his eye sliced out after stealing a dragon, which is… kind of a lot, as far as family dynamics go. Also, his daughter and smirking brother got married after conspiring to fake her first husband’s death and ship him off to live in gay paradise with his lover. That’s another thing that happened on this show. The man has not had a quiet day in his entire adult life.
When you start adding it all up, two things become clear really quick:
- Despite, again, the thing where he is a wealthy monarch who controls a fleet of mythical winged beasts, Viserys is somehow the most relatable character on the show if only for his general vibe of “please leave me alone and let me watch my reruns of Frasier in peace”
- It creates a difficult situation for viewers because he is the only character worth rooting for at all but his continued misery is essential to the show’s entire dynamic
Which explains why he says something like this about once every two or three episodes.
It is my suspicion that he will not survive the first season. I’m surprised he has survived this long, given all the rotting flesh and duplicity and fire-related murder and/or suicide we’ve seen so far. He looks like he’s been dead for about six months anyway. Death might be the first time he finds peace in his entire pathetic life, provided his daughter and wife do not attempt to disembowel each other with his sharpened femur bones during his funeral service. (Too soon to rule this out.) But, until that happens, until he exits the world of the living via dragon or poison or his own body essentially rejecting itself on principle, I will continue to delight in all of it. I love him. I don’t think I want him to be happy, ever, at least not longer than 10 or 15 minutes of real-time edited down to about 45 seconds of screen time, but sure do love watching him mope around his castles.
Long live Viserys, if only for the misery. My relatable and perpetually frowny-faced king.
