‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Recap, Episode 4: Fire in the Sky

The same can’t be said for Daemon, who spends this episode battling hallucinations brought on either by the curse of Harrenhal or the magic of Alys Rivers, its resident witch. His time in these dank, dilapidated halls is delightfully gothic, and full of nods to other such landmarks. In his visions, Daemon follows a doppelganger of himself and decapitates a young Rhaenyra, much like Luke Skywalker decapitated Darth Vader to see his own face in “The Empire Strikes Back.” He sees himself with bloody hands like Lady Macbeth. It starts when he sees a black goat, who might as well be a Black Phillip from Robert Eggers’ horror film “The Witch.” That’s not the kind of steady mind you need leading your army.

Neither Aemond nor Criston, the bloodthirsty leaders of the Greens, nor Aegon, who is simply trying to catch up with his brother and his Hand, would have hesitated to burn their rivals. For all their faults, the Black and Green Queens are the best bulwarks in the Seven Kingdoms against widespread slaughter.

At least, until now. Alicent may have understood that her late husband, Viserys, had no intention of handing the Iron Throne to their son Aegon. But she also understood that it didn’t matter. “The importance of Viserys’ intentions died with him,” she tells Larys the Clubfoot, her son’s new Master of Whisperers. “Yes, it is,” he agrees. As another HBO show put it: “If it’s a lie, then we fight over that lie. But we must fight.”

For her part, Rhaenyra realizes that Alicent can no longer be reasoned with. Her resolve to go into battle immediately shocks her advisors, most of whom seem to have mistaken her pity or her gender for weakness. She assures them that she was simply trying to make sure there was no other solution before unleashing the dragonfire.

This episode feels like America’s answer to last year’s melancholy, soulful creature feature, “Godzilla Minus One,” the first Godzilla movie to win an Oscar (for best visual effects). Director Takashi Yamazaki, who also wrote and supervised the visual effects, followed in the footsteps of Ishiro Honda’s original “Godzilla” (1954) and Hideaki Anno’s nightmarish “Shin Godzilla” (2016) by presenting the King of the Monsters as a walking radioactive primal scream — against war, against cruelty, against stupidity, against civilization’s ongoing assault on the people who make it up. The dragons’ death is a stand-in for our own world on fire.