Can shock deaths in the Game of Thrones universe still really shock us?

This is an article about character deaths in House of the Dragon, and is therefore packed to the gills with spoilers. If you’re not up to speed with the series, then consider this your final warning.

This week, House of the Dragon thinned its enormous cast a little. The final third of the most recent episode, The Red Dragon and the Gold, took the form of a vast dragon-on-dragon-on-dragon battle that ended with what seemed like the deaths of two key characters. Rhaenys, played by Eve Best, died when her dragon crashed to the ground with her on its back (also, dragons explode on impact. Who knew?), while Aegon seemed to suffer a similar fate.

Now, anyone who rushed to Wikipedia after the episode will know that Aegon survived his brush with death and will lumber on for quite some time. But Rhaenys, canonically, is toast. This is a shame, because the character was an oasis of level-headed calm in a desert of absolute prannies, and also because Eve Best was little short of spectacular in the role. Nevertheless, her final scene represented yet another surprise death in a universe full of them.

It’s a trick that the Game of Thrones universe has refined ever since the first season of the original show, when Ned Stark – the character whose face graced almost the entirety of the show’s promotional material – got his head lopped off. For all the shocks and surprises that subsequent seasons and shows have ambushed us with, nothing will quite replicate the impact of Ned’s beheading. Although Game of Thrones didn’t invent the surprise death, viewers had nevertheless long been conditioned to assume that a show’s main character was all but indestructible, able to implausibly worm their way out of any life-threatening scrape thanks to the superpower of the multi-year contract. By yanking away that safety net, Game of Thrones could up the stakes by confidently signalling that nobody was safe. Unless, you know, you’d read the books.

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This was only reinforced by the season three episode The Rains of Castamere, which was less a traditional episode of television and more the sort of mass layoff that destroys entire communities. The Red Wedding portion of the episode saw the end of Catelyn Stark, Robb Stark, Talisa Stark, Robb and Talisa’s unborn child, their pet wolf and just about everyone else you felt any affection for on the show.

This tactic has carried over to House of the Dragon, where we’ve been told to root for various characters only to have them perish in all manner of upsetting ways. Aemma Erryn didn’t even make it out of the first episode before she died during childbirth. Laena Velaryon – Rhaenys’s daughter, remember – also died during childbirth, but only because she told her dragon to set her on fire. Her uncle had his head cut off. Lucerys, who looked like he was shaping up to be a main character, got eaten by a dragon. And then a couple of episodes ago a pair of twins died in a grisly sort of murder-suicide.

That said, perhaps one of House of the Dragon’s niftiest tricks came last season, when it gave us what might just qualify as the least surprising death in all of television history. The premise of the entire show is the epic, dynasty-destroying war that took place following the death of Paddy Considine’s King Viserys, and yet season one revolved around his desperate refusal to die. In episode after episode, Viserys grew ever more frail. His voice weakened. His hair thinned. Bits of him started falling off all over the place. It feels terribly wrong to get impatient about someone’s death, and yet that’s what House of the Dragon made us do. Still, after being ambushed by one sudden death after another, it was quite nice to have a little advance warning for once.

In truth, none of the surprise deaths on House of the Dragon have had quite the same impact as their earlier counterparts. This is partly because the trick is so overdone that we’ve come to expect people to die as much as we expected Ned Stark to live, but mainly because it just makes the show so much easier to follow. House of the Dragon is, after all, a show about a million identical-looking people with identical names (George RR Martin wrote 10 – 11 if you count Jon Snow – characters called Aegon Targaryen), so if anything it’s a kindness that the show is so brisk at getting rid of them.

That said, the show is still young, and the potential for even more shocking surprise deaths is ripe. Which is probably a good thing, since – final spoiler alert – longtime readers will know that things aren’t exactly going to end well for anyone at all.