🔥 “A BLOOD OATH JUST COMPLETELY SHATTERED THE RULES OF WESTEROS” — Episode 7 of House of the Dragon Season 3 just delivered an absolute shockwave, featuring brutal betrayal, the shocking return of a thought-dead titan, and an unscripted assassination attempt.

Vhagar. Sheepstealer. Caraxes. Tessarion. Vermithrax. Silverwing. Syrax. Seasmoke. Moondancer. Dreamfyre. Sunfyre. The dragons that make “House of the Dragon” what it is constitute a secondary cast of characters.

The show’s creative team understands this. They give the dragons distinct looks and personalities: sinuous, cunning Syrax; plug-ugly, belligerent Sheepstealer; gorgeous Dreamfyre, glimpsed only in one of Helaena’s visions, a dragon fit for a young woman who is most alive in her dreams.

When they suffer, as Sheepstealer suffers when three dragons tear at his scaled flesh, we suffer. When they die, as did Rhaenys Targaryen’s magnificent mount, Meleys, and Luke Velaryon’s tiny beast, Arrax, we mourn.

“You now have many dragons,” Helaena tells Rhaenyra, who protests that her control of such a beast has not changed her. “Are you yourself not altered?” Rhaenyra’s “No!” is the least convincing line in the show’s history. You cannot touch one of these creatures and remain who you were.

Underlining the personal importance of the dragons, this episode lingers on Rhaenyra’s discovery that Baela, her husband Daemon’s daughter, rode Sheepstealer, the dragon that helped kill the queen’s son Jace. In a showstopping showdown in the Vale, Rhaena, Rhaenyra, Daemon and Addam of Hull all converge, dragons roaring, to hash out what happened with Sheepstealer at the Battle of the Gullet — and Rhaenyra learns for the first time that Daemon covered for his oft-neglected daughter, even at the expense of his beleaguered wife.

In the end, no one acts all that rashly. Rhaenyra spares Rhaena and brings her to King’s Landing, where she is treated well. Despite her deepening sense of persecution, Rhaenyra freely admits Daemon and Rhaena were in no conspiracy against her. Daemon was merely a father trying to protect his daughter.

It is Sheepstealer who is made to pay for his rampage. Rhaena could barely control him at the best of times, and she warns her father not to try his luck against a beast she can’t stop from burning people. Nevertheless, it is deeply upsetting to watch its lopsided battle with the other dragons. The camera lingers on Sheepstealer, with his face like a river-bottom fish and his demeanor like an angry drunk, as Caraxes delivers what look to be mortal bites. The battle ends with the poor animal crawling away, crying out in pain.

Something important, something special, something magical has been damaged, maybe destroyed. Just as the writers did with Ser Criston, they know how to shock us by dooming characters, human or dragon, who seemed untouchable.

But dragons are not so easily dispatched. Ask Aegon, whose burned, maimed, partially decomposing dragon Sunfyre returns to rescue him and Tyland Lannister from Rhaenyra’s forces. For once, Ageon stands fast, brave in his resolve to die like a man rather than running and hiding like an animal.

But even as he proclaims himself to his enemies, Sunfyre lurches out of the forest to burn them alive. The cackle Aegon emits as he watches the soldiers burn is a laugh of pure madness. It’s probably a good thing for Larys Strong that he flew the coop before the king and his dragon were reunited.

Some dragon riders prove more pliable than others. Ser Ulf, long discontented with the highhanded behavior of his erstwhile lieges, Rhaenyra and Daemon, takes a meeting with Lord Ormund Hightower. (We learn quickly it isn’t their first meeting.) Ulf accepts Ormund’s offer to turn against Rhaenyra and fly for the Greens. His smile is every bit as bloodthirsty as Aegon’s. Denied his simple comforts and harmless vices, Ulf will now kill until he gets the life he wants.

And what of Addam of Hull, Ulf’s former comrade? He participates in the hunt for Sheepstealer and is instrumental in safely capturing his niece Rhaena. But her sister, Baela, is oblivious when Addam refers to his romantic feelings for her. She believes he is referring to the budding relationship between herself and his brother, Alyn. Rhaenyra’s side can’t afford another disgruntled dragon rider.

In the Riverlands, Rhaenyra’s forces seem to have won the day. Just ask Ser Criston. In last week’s episode, he was one of the series’s leads; this week, he’s a head on a stick, carried by Lord Roderick Dustin. “We march now toward our annihilation,” Criston once told Gwayne, perhaps his only friend. For his own part, he was right.

Meanwhile, the dragon Vhagar is still missing in action. But her rider, Aemond, is keeping very busy. In his secret stronghold, Harrenhal, Aemond’s witch nursemaid turned girlfriend, Alys, has sex with him in the form of his mother, Alicent. It’s just a hallucination … but then the real Alicent appears with a guard in tow, there to assassinate her own son so that her daughter, Helaena, will be spared. Aemond finds this coincidence confusing, as you might expect. (Frankly, so did I.)

But although Aemond kills Alicent’s guard just to be on the safe side, he believes enough in his mother’s love to accept spiced wine from her. The next time we see him, he collapses at Alys’s feet once again, poisoned. “Idiot,” Alys calls him as his mother flees Harrenhal. Whether or not Aemond survives, Harrenhal is no place for Alicent to linger — not when the man she just tried to murder counts a dragon and a witch as his best (OK, only) friends.

Despite controlling the Iron Throne, Rhaenyra is hardly in a better position than Alicent is. She treats Helaena like a human Magic 8 Ball, demanding military and political intel, as though the very pregnant queen’s clairvoyance amounts to a sort of psychic C.I.A. What she really wants to be told is simple: that she will win.

With Corlys in Ormund’s clutches (his severed finger is sent to Rhaenyra as a macabre warning), Mysaria has become Rhaenyra’s right hand. Constantly at cross purposes with her ex-lover Daemon and rejected by the common folk for whom she is a self-styled champion, the former prostitute falls back on the familiar. Just watch Rhaenyra during their last scene together — see how magnetically her gaze, and her desire, is drawn to Mysaria. Even though Rhaenyra knows the White Worm has manipulated her against her own husband, the two fall into bed together. I’m sure it’s a pleasant diversion for Rhaenyra, but make no mistake, it is a diversion.

Only two characters appear truly blameless in this week’ episode, and they’re both Alicent’s children. Daeron continues to chafe against the militaristic madness of Lord Ormund; he tells his uncle Gwayne that “Rhaenyra can keep the crown” as far as he’s concerned. He just wishes he had some way out of the mess he has found himself in. The recurrence of the Battle of the Gullet’s ominous synth hook during the Tumbleton scenes appear to indicate he is unlikely to find one.

Daeron’s sister, Helaena, is similarly sympathetic. Confined to her quarters, she dreams of giving birth to her brother Aegon’s son … and then of herself atop Dreamfyre, her luminous dragon, who erupts in flame with a word from her mistress: “Dracarys!”

Then Helaena pictures herself in a pastoral scene with her children. But the happiness cannot last. Even in this fantasy land, it begins to snow, and the supernatural cold rolls forward like a flood. The song of ice and fire keeps playing, and everyone must dance to its tune.