Unlike its predecessor, House of the Dragon has the benefit of not needing to stay too close to the source material. A Song of Ice and Fire constructs an unimpeachable narrative, but Fire & Blood is a little different.
George R.R. Martin’s tome is essentially a telling of Targaryen histories but from two different sources in Westeros. This makes the versions up for interpretation, allowing the Max series to do with the book what they will. However, it was one of the biggest moments from Fire & Blood that gave viewers pause when it cropped up in the season 2 premiere, “A Son For A Son.” The quote from Daemon (Matt Smith) is arguably one of the most famous from the book and though uttered in the episode, still veers away from the content that fans know from the book.
What happens with Blood and Cheese in the book?
When season 2 opens, the story is already at a different place. In the book, Daemon promises to give Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) a “son for a son,” though he is already at Harrenhaal, strengthening her hold on Westeros. This promise culminates in a sequence that was altered in a variety of ways. The book depicts the assault on Helaena’s children (Phia Saban) from her perspective, getting to the meat of the story.
There is no ominous stalking through the castle from Blood and Cheese’s perspective. Instead, Helaena is confronted with a choice no mother should make. At the time in Fire & Blood, the young queen is a mother to 3 children, not 2. Her eldest are twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera — a boy and a girl. She later gives birth to another boy named Maelor.
When Blood and Cheese arrive in her quarters, they demand that Helaena choose which of her sons should die. Thinking that the kinder option is to kill Maelor since he is so young, she points him out. In an act of vicious cruelty, the assassins kill Jaehaerys instead and taunt the young child that his mother wants him dead. Showrunner Ryan Condal spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about why these changes were made.
“The period of history season one covered, it was still a compressed time period — the book covered 30-plus years, and we crunched it down to 20. One of the side effects is you have: Rhaenyra and Daemon’s children are much younger than they were in the book, as are Helaena and Aegon’s children. They haven’t been together long enough to have two generations of kids. So Maelor does not yet exist, and we only have the twins. So working from that place, we just wanted to try to make Blood and Cheese a visceral television sequence.”
Visceral is the correct word for this event. Viewers do not see the act itself as the camera pulls away, but what is more frightening is what you don’t see. As Helaena grabs Jaehaera and attempts to escape, there is no masking what Blood and Cheese are doing to the prince. The vicious stabs and sound effects are enough to demonstrate how much the assassins are mutilating the body.
Condal also notes the other key difference of the scene.
“We decided to tell it from their point of view and make it like a heist gone wrong. Whereas in the book, it’s depicted purely from Helaena and Alicent’s perspective. Blood and Cheese come upon Helaena, and she’s sort of the third act of their story. The idea was to build suspense and dread as they’re looking for Aemond, whom Daemon names as the target, and then you put two criminals into a situation with gold in front of their faces and things can go wrong.”
Alicent (Olivia Cooke) is present during the murderous act, though not as much in the series. After Helaena grabs her surviving child, she runs to her mother’s quarters, who is in flagrante with Knight of the Kingsguard, Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel). This change also makes the scene more visceral, though for different reasons. Cole’s hypocrisy of flip-flopping between the 2 queens is not noted in Fire & Blood, and not even noted by Helaena who witnesses the act.
Cole’s previous relationship is only the subject of rumor in Martin’s book, while the show takes a far more direct approach in explaining why Cole turned from the Targaryen princess to the dowager queen. Despite the different adaptation, the result is the same. The death of Helaena’s son will have supreme repercussions when season 2, episode 2 premieres on Max.