The premium cable network has successfully stretched a single stage of human bereavement across yet another fiscal quarter, plunging the Targaryen matriarch back into a state of profound melancholy. Viewers and fictional peasants alike must now suffer the consequences of a woman looking somberly at a painted tapestry.
In Throne of Blood, the second episode of the third season, audiences are once again invited to witness a durational exercise in misery that recalls the structural lethargy of Bela Tarr’s Satantango; though, naturally, the Hungarian auteur lacked the narrative luxury of a winged, fire-breathing reptile to externalize his characters' deep existential brooding. Not since the second act of Hamlet has a protagonist been so fundamentally defined by their inability to move past a familial homicide, yet the showrunners insist on elevating this narrative stagnation to the level of high art, requiring us to watch the grieving queen process her trauma in real time while wearing increasingly heavy, metaphorical velvet.
The fate of the realm, we are breathlessly assured by the marketing materials, hangs precariously on whether Rhaenyra can successfully transition from the denial phase of her grief into the fiery aerial bombardment phase; a delicate geopolitical balancing act that mirrors the nuanced automotive diplomacy found in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, wherein familial bonds are similarly tested by loud machinery and terrible decision-making. You, the lay viewer, perhaps expected a swift resolution to this emotional devastation, a desire that merely betrays your own pedestrian craving for plot over atmosphere; you remain, as ever, entirely unable to comprehend the textural richness of a monarch sighing heavily near a dimly lit hearth.
We felt it was vital to the human experience that Rhaenyra’s sorrow be allowed to breathe, which is why we dedicated a full twelve minutes of Sunday's broadcast to her tracing the rim of a goblet while dissociating.
True art demands that we wallow in the immobility of grief until the next dragon confrontation is adequately rendered by the visual effects department, a digital alchemy that, much like the mourning period itself, takes exactly as long as the corporate scheduling apparatus dictates. Until that blessed release, we must content ourselves with the profound, devastating silence of a woman who has realized she is contractually obligated to be sad for another four years; a tragedy that eclipses even the fictional civil war unfolding outside her window.