How Superman & Lois Puts a New Twist on The Death of Superman

The Death of Superman is a popular story that has been told and retold since it first began in Action Comics #684 as part of the Doomsday arc. Superman dies, often at the hands of Doomsday, and typically comes back to life one way or another. Since 1992, it’s been almost like a rite of […]

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This article contains major spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 2 episode 7: The red sowing.

It’s been many a month and year since this writer has had the pleasure of reviewing an hour set in the twisted world of A Song of Ice and Fire. But with your trusted Lord Commander of the Sunday Night’s Watch, Alec Bojalad, out of town this week, it’s fortunate to come back for what is handily the best episode of House of the Dragon this season.

The second cycle of House of the Dragon has indeed been as occasionally frustrating as it is often spectacular. A show with a laser-like focus on deconstructing and dismantling the seductive mythology the Targaryen family has built, the Game of Thrones prequel reveals a subtle sophistication for finding the rot hidden beneath all that dragonfire and glory.

Sometimes, though, you need to let a dragon be a dragon. And in House of the Dragon Season 2 episode 7, “The Red Sowing,” Rhaenyra Targaryen finally unfurls her wings in a sequence that is a wonderous horror to behold.

That’s a Nice Dragon You Got There

We get there first by way of the most cinematic moment we’ve witnessed since Meleys met Vhagar above the skies of Rook’s Rest. Upon a lonely sliver of sand and sea, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, first of her name, greets the first good news she’s had in weeks: a baseborn bastard of the shipyards beneath Dragonstone, the humbly named Addam of Hull, has done what poor Ser Steffon Darklyn could never. He has claimed the dragon Seasmoke as his mount and proven his Valyrian heritage.

Rhaenyra is at first rightly wary while entreating with this stranger. But after hearing his sincere oath of fealty, Emma D’Arcy’s face beams its first rays of sunshine since Rhaenyra’s father was seen still shuffling around the Red Keep. “You have done something, I feared impossible, Addam of Hull, ” Rhaenyra says with a deep sigh of relief. “I am glad of it.”

We should all welcome such happy tidings. On the most basic level, despite the truncated eight-episode nature of season 2, this year’s House of the Dragon has moved at a strangely listless pace, especially after the lightning-swift gait of the show’s first season. It is difficult to put a finger on the cause given that, technically, a lot has happened this year: the heinous murder committed by Blood and Cheese, Aegon II’s rash and swiftly curtailed reign, and of course Rook’s Rest. Nonetheless, it sometimes seems like the show is struggling to create drama between the high points which George R.R. Martin’s faux-historical text, Fire & Blood, lay out for the series.

So here, with the irrefutable evidence of a bastard bending a dragon to his will, there is a genuine game-changing storm that can be exploited for its dramatic weight as news of the deed ripples across the Crownlands. In the moment where Rhaenyra and Addam come to an understanding, we have an image, courtesy of director Loni Peristere, worthy of the tapestries that adorn the season 2 opening titles. But we also have a proverbial bomb going off that upsets the feudal order of the world that Westeros was founded on. And how e