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House of the Dragon’s Blood and Cheese Moment Should Have Been Nastier
Without the source material’s Sophie’s Choice torment, it’s just another scene of violence in a show full of scenes of violence.
For all of HOTD ’s explicitness — crabs and crows feasting on corpses, fully nude sex scenes, age-gap incest, that time we saw the decayed half of King Viserys’s face — it’s been steadfastly subdued when it comes to violence involving children. House of the Dragon ’s adaptation, while effective in its use of limited perspective (we only hear Blood and Cheese sawing off Jaehaerys’s head, a nightmarish squelching sound design), doesn’t hit as much emotionally as it does visually and aurally. Alicent and Cole’s oath-breaking relationship serves as another gaffe HOTD is weaving into its tapestry of accidental conflict escalation, but the mistake the show makes is diminishing the details that elucidate Blood and Cheese’s viciousness, and the deliberate calculations of the man who sent them.
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