Episode 3

No official synopsis was released by HBO.

They gave it away in the preview, but the ep title is referencing

Not having read the source material. I am happy with this so far and I'm so looking forward to where it goes. I'm also ok with the jump in time to further push the story.

Daemon is a nut and badass.

The Stepstones part saved the episode.

Cool sseeing Laenor flying Seasmoke.

Very cool episode but what a waste of a villain.

Who was that dragon rider?

Really entertaining episode. That battle sequence was pretty spectacular. Daemon was pretty badass and I did have to laugh at the Archers being so inept. The dragon taking everyone out was pretty fucking awewsome.

The 3 year time jump was an interesting way to take things. You could see that Rhaenyra has a tremendous amount of jealousy and resentment towards her once BFF and against her father. I think she took a lot of that out on that wild boar. I've never heard of Milly Alcock prior to this series, but she's a tremendous young actress.

The son of the sea snake and Rhaenys Targareon (who they briefly talked of marrying rhaenyra to). You'd be forgiven for not recognizing him from earlier episodes considering just we haven't seen him since before the royal engagement so he went from a kid to a man in that span.

And since Daemon's dragon Caraxes had no one to ride it, they only had that one other dragon? Doesn't Rhaenys ride a dragon too?

I'm sorry, but the stupidity of that last battle took me out of it a little. I get that they choreographed it for the audience but these guys waged war for like 3 years, surviving the dragons by retreating into the caves, but they get lured out by that?

And the marriage options brought before Viserys from episode to episode just get worse and worse... I fully expect that unborn kid to be wed to some 80 year old at this point.

Yeah, she rode the dragon that had belonged to Viserys and Daemon’s mother.

Thanks. I didn’t catch on that was him. Is he older than the King’s 12 year old date from last episode?

Speaking of the time jump, I thought it was really weird that so much was made of King Vasyrs worsening illness in the first two episodes, and how he was possibly going to lose a finger last week. This week we’re three years later and there’s no mention of his illness at all (unless I missed something). Is he cured? Is he worsening? Was his confusion and lack of decorum at the hunt festival a result of being too drunk on wine or is it due to a progression of the illness? That is an important distinction.

Unless they’re making a major change from the book, he’s not sick. The lore is that the Iron Throne judges who sits in it and constantly getting cut by it means the person is judged to be unfit. Maegor, who they reference in the first episode, was found sitting on it with his wrists slit and a blade through his neck, and another nickname for the Mad King was King Scab because he had so many cuts. Joffrey was cut by it also.

I like little blondie, she's feisty. Too bad they are going to change actresses.

in the conversation with Alicent in his study with Viserys, his two fingers are shown to be cut off at the knuckle. At other times, he wears gloves to mask that loss of the two fingers

I missed that.

I am enjoying this far far more than I expected. Do not like that we will lose the Rhaenyra and Allicent actresses. They have both been terrific and Milly is really more like I imagined Daenyrys to be that Emilia Clarke was. Both this and LOTR just look ridiculously good. As silly as it originally sounded redoing the last couple of seasons of GoT is you could have this quality would be interesting. Reality is that this show just points out that B&W should have just been let go and do Seasons 7-10/11 without them in hindsight.

Yeah, they're not terribly clear on what's going on with Viserys, but it's sort of implied that he keeps cutting himself on the Iron Throne.

We saw a lesion on his back and hand, which are both contact points with the throne.

He could be suffering from hemophilia, or some similar Westerosi version of the "Royal Disease" caused by all of the Targaryen incest, that prevents his wounds from healing and becoming infected or septic.

Did anyone else think Viserys was going to get Robert Baratheoned when he was trying to finish off the hunt? I assume that was an intentional callback.

I figure they saw Daemon exposed and thought they could finish off the war right then and there. That was the strategy they were discussing but didn’t know if Daemon would go along with it.

Even the whole getting super drunk and barely being able to stand upright was pure Robert Baratheon. They really upped their game for that hunt though compared to episode 1 of GoT.

Someone elsewhere said in the book that there was a gigantic bounty on Daemon's head. Like you get your own island kind of bounty. I kind of wish they went with that. Because let's say they killed Daemon and all their troops still got devastated, guess what, the other side didn't like Daemon all that much anyway, plus even if you had troops left killing the King's brother is going to have repercussions.

Also this wasn't in the book at all so they came up with this themselves, and you can tell it's basically rushed through: Here's a possible plan but Daemon would never go for it; oh here comes the king's messengers; oh, now Daemon will go with it; oh, look how stupid this guy is sending all his troops out to die, even when he's continually looking up at the sky because he knows dragons can come. But the overall point of it is that Daemon is the conquering hero, risked his life to win this, and didn't need help from his brother, so they got where they needed to go.

I still like the show, but I feel like we've already been cheated out of a few crucial things like seeing Rhaenyra confront Alicent after finding out about her father's plan, seeing Rhaenyra at her father's Royal Wedding and seeing Daemon battle the Crab Feeder to the death. Those felt like big things to kind of yadda-yadda away.

We haven't read the book but my wife and I thought the same thing. She figured the reason he was having all of those conversations in private with his daughter about his intentions to keep her as the heir was foreshadowing him dying without telling anyone else.

He's the Darth Maul of GoT