Daemon the Disappointing

HOTD doesn’t know what to do with the Prince Who Pouts. Photo: HBO

Have a heart for Daemon Targaryen, the Prince Who Pouts. All he wants to do is accrue power, crush fools, and be taken seriously, but the poor guy keeps getting slighted at every turn. Viserys, his brother, deemed him too volatile to be allowed anywhere near the throne, so when a male heir initially eluded the king, he passed the line of succession on to his daughter Rhaenyra. Now that Rhaenyra, Daemon’s niece-wife, is battling her half-brother and the rest of Team Green for the throne, she’s starting to view Daemon in a similar light. The father and daughter aren’t wrong, of course. Nobody is a true planner on House of the Dragon (save, perhaps, good ol’ Otto Hightower), but even in this grand cast of impetuous actors, Daemon sits at the tippy top of the list. He’s brash. He’s reckless. He seems chill with beheading a toddler? Yikes. Still, show some empathy — the guy is suffering from full-blown existential constipation, and House of the Dragon hasn’t figured out how to comfortably fit his whole thing into the rest of the series.

Daemon has been a bitchy bundle of contradictions from the start: both insider and outsider, half in and half out of Rhaenyra’s cause, a sufferer of Main-Character Syndrome perpetually doomed to side quests. He’s principally defined by having no clear place to be, which can be rich territory for psychological texture — or a narrative morass that bogs everything down. Although House of the Dragon improves significantly in its second season, finally playing the chessboard it labored to set up throughout the first, Daemon is once again doing his own thing in a little spinoff universe. For much of the past three episodes, the petulant prince has been chilling at Harrenhal, where he trundled off in the name of raising an army after a quarrel with Rhaenyra. The new setting suits Daemon. His storming into the castle only to learn that the fort is in disarray is a fun turn, and the show gets to extract bone-dry humor from the scenario by making good use of Matt Smith’s talent for deadpan quips. Never has Daemon’s penchant for condescension felt funnier — or more pathetic — than when deployed against Simon Strong, Oscar Tully, or any other unfortunate soul ambling through the busted corridors of Harrenhal.

House of the Dragon is clearly spending Daemon’s getaway laying the groundwork for a greater mess to come. He’s overtly trying to amass an army under his own banner, validating Rhaenyra’s worries that he’s more invested in his claim to the throne than supporting hers. But even atop his dragon, he fails to intimidate potential comrades into submission, causing him to question his mojo. He’s also going through a spooky bout of mystical introspection, plagued by dreams (or hauntings), featuring the welcome return of Milly Alcock as young Rhaenyra, that literalize his complicated feelings for his niece-wife. Daemon’s love for her feels genuine but perhaps not as strong as his love for power. He sincerely seems to desire to be what she needs, but he also resents her being in the driver’s seat. The witchy Alys Rivers foretells his death in the supposedly cursed castle and later gives him a hallucination-enhancing potion that causes him to dream about eating out his mom. (Bro.) All this makes for a compelling character conundrum, but the Harrenhal sequences are marked by a listlessness compared to the rest of House of the Dragon’s machinations. A viewer unfamiliar with the source material (like me!) might wonder why we’re wasting time here. To be fair, the vibe matches the guy’s frame of mind, but it also means that every time the show cuts back to Daemon, its momentum stops dead in its tracks.

The Daemon problem felt like less of a nuisance in the first season, when it was ironically obscured by the overarching structural weaknesses of House of the Dragon’s opening run. The constant fast-forwarding between episodes muddled the storytelling, but it also meant we were dropping in on characters during pivotal moments of action. The early episode “Second of His Name,� for example, mostly takes place during a big hunt in which multiple characters come into focus. First, the future Master of Whispers (and foot dude), Larys Strong, who will soon become an essential player in Alicent’s circle, is introduced as part of Westeros’s crippled, bastard, and broken things contingent. Second, a romance begins to blossom between young Rhaenyra and Ser Criston Cole, which sets the stage for the latter’s heel turn to come. Elsewhere, Daemon basks in his moment of glory when he seizes the Stepstones from the Crabfeeder, capping off a multi-episode arc that played out far beyond the walls of King’s Landing. All these developments take place independently from each other, and because of the season’s drop-in, drop-out shape, Daemon’s isolated adventures felt in sync with the patchwork storytelling.

With the real story picking up in the second season, the challenge for House of the Dragon lies in ensuring that the drama in the margins remains as interesting as the drama at the center. This was something Game of Thrones did exceedingly well. You came to care about Brienne, Tormund, or even Bronn almost as swiftly and easily as you did any of the Starks. But House of the Dragon struggles to replicate a similar equality of emotional investment across its cast. It’s one thing if we’ve yet to fully explore the face-serving Jacaerys, who’s understandably left outside the conflict given his youth, but it’s a whole other thing when it comes to Daemon, who has been positioned as a main character from the very beginning.

This is not for a lack of trying on Smith’s part — his performance as Daemon is consistently compelling despite the circumstances. The actor’s naturally leonine qualities match the character’s Siamese-cat energy: moderately indecipherable, slippery, chaotic, unreliable, totally needy but coveting independence. He even manages a modicum of cool on occasion. “How deep your debts?� he asks the ratcatcher Cheese when courting him for the Aemond assassination, whipping out a pouch of coins like a le Carré fixer. But you can feel Smith’s performance raging against his confines. There’s simply not much for the actor to do. Daemon wants more from his lot in life, but the show struggles to challenge him, resulting in a character who’s starting to feel repetitive and, frankly, boring.

Daemon’s ultimate purpose on House of the Dragon is clear. The show is developing him for much bigger things later on — perhaps even the endgame, especially given his standing as an experienced warrior responsible for the creation of the Gold Cloaks in King’s Landing. As the ease with which he enters the city and conscripts Blood, a Gold Cloak, into his assassination plot in “A Son for a Son� indicates, he continues to hold sway among the elite unit now theoretically under Aegon’s command. Other lingering plot points could come into play, too: his ill treatment of the information-broker Mysaria, which could come back to bite him in the ass; his children, whom he doesn’t seem to care that much about; and whatever he ends up walking away with from Harrenhal, spiritually or materially. All those things are going to factor into his story, and the broader House of the Dragon narrative, somehow. Whether the show is able to make every step of Daemon’s journey feel like it matters, however, is a whole other question.