House Of The Dragon Dropped A Reveal About George R.R. Martin's Lost Targaryen, And Now I'm Nervous For Season 2 Finale
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Spoilers ahead for Episode 7 of House of the Dragon Season 2, called "The Red Sowing."
House of the Dragon is quickly approaching its finale in the 2024 TV schedule, thanks to Season 2 running for two fewer episodes than Season 1. The Blacks have been in disarray for much of the season, with Daemon sulking (and hallucinating) after his arrival at the spooky Harrenhal, Rhaenys dead with Meleys in battle, and Rhaenyra stuck on what course to pursue to defeat the Greens with minimal loss of life to the smallfolk. Well, she made some very significant progress on that front in "The Red Sowing," in a story that surprisingly dropped a reveal about a Targaryen who left the game of thrones in George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood book.
Or to be more specific, a Targaryen who was disinherited from the game of thrones by her father in Fire & Blood! Let's get into what "The Red Sowing" revealed about this lost Targaryen and Hugh from King's Landing. Note: light spoilers are ahead for Fire & Blood but none for the era of the Greens vs. the Blacks.
Hugh's Targaryen Mother
As was foreshadowed earlier in Season 2, the dragonseeds – a.k.a. the bastard children of various Targaryens who spent their nights in low places – have an important part to play. With some help from Mysaria, Rhaenyra realized that these bastards might have enough Targaryen blood to claim dragons... just without the Targaryen status.
And when word spread in King's Landing that the Blacks were on the lookout for smallfolk with Targaryen blood to claim dragons, Hugh and Ulf were among those tempted. In justifying his desire to go to Rhaenyra, Hugh dropped a bombshell on his wife:
I never knew my father. That much is true. But I did know my mother. I hid it from you, and I'm sorry for that. She worked in a pleasure house. She was granted more freedom than most because of who she was. And because rich men paid more to fuck a woman with silver hair. She used to tell me I was no different to her brother's boys. Viserys and Daemon. But I was ashamed of her. I tried to make my way with my own hands.
While Hugh didn't actually name his mother among the women in the Targaryen family tree, there can be no doubt of her identity unless House of the Dragon invented another daughter of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne. In the show's canon, Hugh is the son of Princess Saera, who the younger sister of Baelon and Alyssa, who in turn were the parents of Viserys and Daemon.
Saera's story isn't a happy one in the pages of Fire & Blood, like the stories of most of Jaehaerys and Alysanne's thirteen children. Stubborn and spoiled, she was the ninth child overall and fifth daughter of the king and queen, with Alysanne seeing through Saera more than Jaehaerys did. The princess and two of her friends spent a great deal of time with three men, to the point that Jaehaerys in Fire & Blood eventually demanded:
What have you done? Seven save us, what have you done? Have you given one of these boys your maidenhead? Tell me true.
Saera responded by saying that she "gave it to all three," leading Jaehaerys to say that she was "no longer my daughter." The princess was sent to stay with septas to repent, but ultimately ran away to a "Lysene pleasure garden." Saera was said to become an "infamous" but wealthy woman, and three of her illegitimate sons vied for the Iron Throne at the Great Council that eventually led to Viserys becoming king.
She chose not to return to Westeros to try and press her own claim to become queen because she "had her own kingdom" in Essos. All in all, even with relatively little conveyed in the show about Saera, it does seem that her fate is more tragic in the show as opposed to the book, since George R.R. Martin had her accumulating wealth in her own right.
The timeline is also a little fuzzy if we try too hard to merge book Saera with Hugh's unnamed mother in House of the Dragon, but that has always been the case with this show. There is some irony in the fact that the daughter that Jaehaerys declared was dead to him bore a bastard son who would go on to claim Jaehaerys' own dragon! Vermithor even roasted a bunch of other dragonseeds first.
So, House of the Dragon revealed that the Saera, the lost Targaryen princess, was the mother of one of Fire & Blood's most important dragonseeds, and I'm starting to get nervous about the Season 2 finale.
Why I'm Getting More And More Nervous
Now, Hugh claiming Vermithor and Ulf claiming Silverwing made for a pretty epic sequence in "The Red Sowing," and Aemond turning Vhagar away from Dragonstone when he spotted the two new dragons was a satisfying cliffhanger to lead into the finale. But these dragonseeds getting their dragons gives me an idea of whereabouts House of the Dragon is in adapting the Fire & Blood sequence of events, and... well, some of those are events that I'm pretty confident are going to be stressful for some of my favorites.
Just as I was pretty sure of when Rhaenys was going to die, I think fans should probably steel themselves for what's to come. Even some comments from Hugh's conversation with his wife have me at least a little on edge!
That's not to say that all of the sky is going to be falling in the Season 2 finale on August 4. I'm sure there will be a crisis or two after how Season 1 ended on Luke's death, but none of the twists that I'm particularly dreading are necessarily going to come. I do hope that the upcoming finale addresses the question of Addam's mother. While there has been enough Targaryen/Velaryon weddings in Fire & Blood that even a bastard of just Corlys could conceivably have enough Targaryen blood to claim a dragon, that didn't seem to occur to Corlys in "The Red Sowing."
Only time will tell what House of the Dragon manages to pack into its final episode of the second season, although the finale director opened up about dropping clues earlier in the season. For now, you can just plan on watching the Season 2 finale on Sunday, April 4 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO or streaming with a Max subscription. You can also find every earlier episode of Season 2 and the full first season on the streamer, as well as all eight seasons of Game of Thrones.
