'House of Dragon' Has Finally Got My Attention Again

I have not been able to muster a lot of enthusiasm for House of the Dragon since Paddy Considine’s Viserys shuffled off. It’s not entirely the show’s fault. House of the Dragon lost the one character I cared about and actually understood (thanks in large part to Considine’s performance), and what it replaced him with was a huge roster of Targaryens and Hightowers and Velaryons and a guy named Ulf who likes to drink in a tavern, half of whom I could not tell you the allegiance of without a chart, and a gap between seasons long enough that by the time Season 3 started I’d forgotten not just who was on which side but why any of them cared.

Some of this is my fault. My brain has a hard time wrapping itself around fantasy. But a lot of it isn’t. I think this is a story designed to resist a rooting interest — the whole idea is that both claims are legitimate and that nobody can accept the other’s reasonable position. It’s a real problem for a television show that expects you to remember, twenty-four months later, that Alicent wore a green dress to a tournament once and that’s why thousands of people are on fire.

And then James Norton walked in as Lord Ormund Hightower, and I stood at attention for the first time in two years.

Here’s what makes the character work, and it’s a cool magic trick the show pulled off over the last two episodes. Ormund’s first appearance suggested a grown-up: Here’s a man who declined to fight dragons because fighting dragons is a dumb idea. He received the news of King Aegon II’s death with a shrug and got on with his business. In a series populated entirely by people who scream and stab and set things on fire, his restraint was kind of refreshing. I thought, briefly, that we’d finally found the reasonable one.

Y’all! He is not the reasonable one, and thank God for it. He is a man who is simply better at math than everyone around him, and who has no moral commitments underneath that competence whatsoever. Episode 4 revealed the real Ormund: he has occupied Tumbleton and effectively taken the smallfolk hostage, so that Rhaenyra cannot burn his army without burning thousands of innocents along with it. Smart! He receives the local nobility while naked in a bathtub and promises his men will behave — a promise that survives for an entire scene. And when a peasant strikes a Hightower soldier who was attempting to rape his sister, Ormund has the man dragged before him and orders sixteen-year-old Daeron Targaryen to run him through with Vigilance personally. That’s the evil we know and love!

He is a power-tripping sociopath with an extremely sensitive nose and a fondness for screaming the C-word, and James Norton is doing masterful work! Someone on Reddit put the head of Dennis Reynolds from It’s Always Sunny on Hightower’s body and that is exactly right.

I haven’t read the books. I wouldn’t even know how. But I love that he isn’t fighting for Aegon II’s claim. He isn’t even fighting for Aemond’s. He wants to crown Daeron — the spare tire’s spare tire — and he knows perfectly well that Aegon and Aemond are maybe still alive, and he does not care. He wants a king raised in the light of the Seven, taught in the ways of the Hightowers rather than the Targaryens. He wants a king with brown hair, by damn!

Ormund was never the family’s loyal sword in the Reach. He was running Oldtown any old way he pleased, waiting for the court branch of the family to run itself into the ground so he could step in with fifteen thousand men and a teenager on a dragon.

And, finally, House of the Dragon gives me the thing this show has never given me outside of, briefly, Aemond: Someone to root against.

It’s not because I like Rhaenyra. She currently has the throne and she is a sh**show in the making. She is going to be a disaster. Everyone in this story is going to be a disaster.

But I don’t need a hero. I needed a villain, and specifically I needed one whose villainy I could follow without an Excel spreadsheet. Ormund Hightower is clearly defined in a way nothing else in this show has been for two seasons. He wants control, he is unbothered by atrocity, he cannot abide a bad smell, and he is going to make a child murder a stranger in front of him to prove a point about hierarchy. That’s what I’m talking about!

House of the Dragon spent two years asking me to care about 25 characters and succession crisis. It turns out all I wanted was a naked guy in a bathtub I could hate.

(And if you like James Norton and haven’t seen it yet, do watch House of Guinness.