House of the Dragon’s sixth entry is a tough one to summarize—in that it’s basically a summary of itself. We jump ahead a decade and get a good three episodes-worth of melodrama dealing with people we barely know or care about, all shoehorned into a single hour. We even get two excruciating birth scenes for the price of one! Your HBO Max subscription price just became a real bargain.
The episode opens on—what else?—an excruciating birth. Queenie really got off easy in the last time jump, where she’d already had her boy for a couple years off-screen. Not so lucky for Rhaenyra here. She just caught the window of having her on-screen birth painfully broadcast, and here it is.
So Rhaenyra pops this kid out, and before they can even give the kid his dragon-spanking or whatever weird, outmoded thing this family does to their newborns, Queenie sends word that she wishes to see that MF-er ASAP.
Further escalating the conflict that we have to assume former friends Rhaenyra and Queenie have been stewing in for the last ten years, Rhaenyra rightly makes a whole show of it: “Look, I just gave birth, but fine! I’ll drag my ass there myself with my infant son! And I guess my gay husband will help me—because I’m so weak!”
Nonetheless, Rhaenyra finally delivers her new son to the king and queen, and Queenie is clearly like, “Christ, another brown-hair. This is mental.” Hair color is inexplicably far too relevant in Game of Thrones things, and here she uses that to cleverly discern that the brown-haired white boys Rhaenyra keeps birthing are probably not from the gay, white-haired, biracial husband.
It’s true, though!
But are the kids from Rhaenyra’s old dreamboat lover, Ben Barnesn’t? They are not! We’re soon to learn they’re actually from this other guy whose name is exceptionally not worth learning. He’s likewise a knight or guard or something.
Anyway, despite what all these parents may think or who the parents may be, their kids are acting like kids. King Paddy’s eldest, Aegon, and whoever this eldest brown-haired boy of Rhaenyra is, are doing what older siblings and cousins will so often cruelly do: bully the younger one.
It seems that Aegon’s younger brother, Aemond (honestly, George R.R. Martin’s entire contribution to Elden Ring was continuing with these incessantly similar relative names that aren’t helping anyone), is the white-haired black sheep, mocked by his teenage brother and nephew for not having bonded with a dragon—so much so that they offer to set him up with a pig. (Not really playing it very close to the vest as a virginity analogue, are they?) But there’s also a big, rowdy dragon no one can tame in the basement, so it’s pretty inevitable those two outcasts will hook up eventually.
In the king’s chambers/model room, the queen reiterates that it is, again, fucking mental how brazenly the princess is popping out these crap-haired boys like the baby-making factory she swore to never become.
Meanwhile, Junior is jacking off out a window. Looks like someone got the anal sex alternatives leaflet Ricky Gervais keeps going on about!
Queenie bursts in on the boy’s airborne assault and starts lecturing Jackoff about how, if he keeps fucking about with such frivolous things—as, say, yanking it to live cityscapes—he is going to lose the crown to his older sister.
This teenage boy responds that he could not give a shit about running a kingdom. He just wants to sit in his room jacking off in a fucked up way. He is the best, most truthfully-written character in the entire show.
Off in Pentos—stupidly not pronounced like Mentos—Doctor Who and his wife whose name you truly do not need to worry about is having a meeting with the ruler there. This guy is like, “How about this? You two, your family, and your dragons defend this place, and we’ll just really hook you guys up. Cool pad, riches, the whole bit. We’ll pay the moving costs. Whattya say?”
As often happens when one has kids, the Doctor’s big-time career ambitions of being king have lessened now that he’s a family man. This simple, stable job offer sounds pretty good to him. But his wife is not having it. Don’t worry about her concerns any more than her name, though, because that will be sorted soon enough.
Back at the Red Keep, Ben Barnesn’t is training the royal kids in the art of swordsmanship. It’s been like a decade since he effed Rhaenyra, but he’s apparently still huffy about it. He starts going real hard on the eldest brown-haired boy, pitting him against the larger, older Jackoff.
So this knight or whatever who everyone knows is this kid’s father starts being a Sports Dad, angrily intervening when his boy inevitably gets his shit rocked. Coach Barnesn’t is like, “Wow, weird you’re being such an angry Sports Dad. It’s almost as if… he was your son?”
This inevitably sets Sports Dad off, and he starts pounding Barnesn’t’s face with his gauntleted fist. Dude sort of deserves it after last episode, though, huh?
Meanwhile, Rhaenyra is off having a chat with her husband. He’s drunk, and playing it like they did in the community theater episode of Party Down. He wants to head over to fight with his boys in a war with a cooler queer scene, where someone is said to have a purple beard and wear dresses. She is not having it. FOR NOW.
Yada yada, there’s some more chatter, the queen and princess get contentious, and ultimately, Rhaenyra proposes that her eldest son marries her own half-sister as the latest incestuous offering. She’ll even toss in a dragon egg! Unfortunately, she also starts lactating through her shirt at that point, so they’ll have to circle back on that next week.
Shortly after, the Hand shows up to the king’s private hobby lobby to offer up his resignation: “Look, while it was not all that apparent that Sports Dad is my son, it is incredibly apparent that these brown-headed bastards are his, so I should probably quit.”
King Paddy rejects his resignation, but he does allow that the Hand can at least escort his son back to their family castle so that the constant impregnating from this horny Sports Dad may end.
Following that, Queenie has a private meetup with the Hand’s other son, Goth Theatre Kid. The camp villain has an arch little chat with the queen before moving on to enacting his latest devious little plan: he gets some death row criminals, cuts out their tongues, and sends them off to play arsonists in a second-hand act of both patricide and fratricide.
This fucking guy.
Well, with her Sports Dad lover leaving with his pops, Rhaenyra decides she may as well fuck off too. She tells her husband that she’s reconsidered, and they can indeed head off to the coast. And, she adds, even if she’s been forced away from her boy-toy, he may as well bring his.
While they head off to make a new home of Doctor Who’s old haunt, the team of tongueless inmates prove that just a couple convicts is somehow enough to burn the hell out of a whole guarded castle. And the fire they set appears to have done away with all Hands and Sports Dads.
Back at the Red Keep, Goth Theatre Kid tells the queen that he’s responsible. He even asks for a later reward, this Waluigi-ass motherfucker plucking a red flower from a nearby vase.
This fucking guy.
But there’s yet one more sudden, burning death to be completely uninvested in emotionally.
Over in Pentos, Doctor Who’s wife is rehashing episode one, in labor with complications that mean choosing her life or that of her possibly-unviable fetus. The Doctor, having matured so much in ten years, tells the actual doctor not to perform the primitive c-section. Then, in the weirdest, worst case imaginable of a “my body, my choice” scenario, Mrs. Who, who was moments ago in labor, just somehow strolls out of the castle by herself and makes the choice to have her dragon incinerate her. At first, it sort of seems like, oh, so she’ll horribly sacrifice herself so her fire-impervious child may survive in the ashes? But, nah, it looks like they’re both toast.
This is why you don’t try pulling “cast fireball” trickery in a serious D&D campaign.
