With the start of a brand new season of the Game of Thrones spinoff, there has already been a murder—a quite horrifying one, at that fact. House of the Dragon‘s first episode of the second season shows off new characters Blood (Sam C. Wilson) and Cheese(Mark Stobbart) who are recruited to kill Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) as part of a revenge plot.
Season two picks up right after Rhaenyra’s son Luke’s death. Aemond chased off Luke on his dragon at the end of season one which ultimately ended in his demise. After Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) vows revenge, her husband/cousin Daemon (Matt Smith) recruits a former and murderous City Watch guard and a ratcatcher with knowledge of the Red Keep’s many tunnels and secret passages to kill Aemond. The two don’t end up finding Aemond himself, but another heir. What followed was a squelching murder that involved cutting off Aegon’s son’s head—which for those of you who have read the books, leads down to more conflict in the Dance of the Dragons.
How are Blood & Cheese’s murder different from the books?
In the book, Blood and Cheese still murder Jaehaerys. However, a notable character is missing in the process. The two murderers barge into Alicent’s room and tie and gag her. Helaena and her three children, twins Jaeharys and Jaehaera, and a younger son named Maelor enter the room for their nightly good night but are intercepted. Blood threatens Helaena (Phia Saban) by pointing a knife at her throat and demands to know who’s the heir to the throne. Helaena chooses Maelor, but Blood kills Jaeharys after telling Maelor, “You hear that, little boy? Your momma wants you dead.”
The murder is essentially the same in the HBO series, but Maelor doesn’t exist yet. When Helaena chose which of her children to be murdered, the duo asked her who’s the boy. Helaena chose correctly and what followed was a gruesome death that’s shown offscreen where Jaeharys is beheaded by Blood. The two escape with the little boy’s head in a knapsack so that they can collect their bounty. Meanwhile, Helaena runs off to Alicent’s room as she’s having sex with Criston Cole. When Alicent asks what happened, Helaena responds, “They killed the boy.”
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According to showrunner Ryan Condal to TV Insider, making Maelor’s character nonexistent was deliberate. “In this timeline, Maelor hasn’t been born yet. We had to compress history in the first season in order to make it producible,” Condal told the outlet. “Really, 30 years passed between Rhaenyra’s childhood and her being named heir and then the beginning of the Dance of the Dragons. It’s a very long time. And if we had done it true to that, it would’ve just required much more recasting and I think it would’ve been more unbalancing for the audience. So, we stuck with this 20-year plan, which was great, and it worked. It just means that the youngest kids are younger, so Aegon and Viserys, Rhaenyra and Daemon’s children, are younger, and then Jaehaerys and Jaehaerya are younger, and thus Maelor is not yet around in the story.”
Despite the changes, Cordel claims “the core of what Blood and Cheese is about” is still in the episode. It’s “this horrible counter-attack and punishment, vengeance for the murder of Luke over Storm’s End, Daemon sending the queen’s justice in for the green side, and it resulting in the murder of Jaehaerys and Helaena bearing eyewitness to [the murder of] the most innocent person on either side of this conflict,” he said. “To us, those were the core dramatic points of this and that felt like the truest-in-spirit adaptation of that source material.”
Newer episodes might tell the fate of Blood and Cheese. The books account that Blood was captured and tortured for more than 13 days straight. He later succumbed to his wounds. Cheese might have eluded his capture even when King Aegon II rounded up and hung every rat catcher in the city.
Related: See how all the Targaryens are related in House of the Dragon here.
