I didn't know that he was going to slap my hand away,

and I didn't know that I was going to feel really angry

about him slapping my hand away,

and that that would then become my impulse

for asking Renera for her favor.

You don't know how you're going to be made to feel

until you're in that scene with that person, and it's happening.

— that person and it's happening.

Welcome to another episode of West of Westeros,

Entertainment Weekly's Game of Thrones podcast.

I'm Nick Romano, a senior writer here at EW,

and I'm joined by my wonderful co-host, Lauren Morgan. And Lauren, I just realized we're at the halfway point for season one of House of the Dragon. How are we feeling at this point? That's kind of bananas. I mean, it feels like it just started. But at least we've got five more episodes to go. So we're only going up from here or more chaotic and dangerous and bloody. Well, I can't wait to unpack it all with you. And this week, we have a special guest joining us. Mike Walsh, a staff writer at Nerdist. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. So we're going to be digging into all things episode five of House of the Dragon. But first I wanted to chat with you both about something that's kind of been making the rounds in the news this past week.

House of the Dragon director, Greg Yatanis, and hairstylist and makeup artist, Tania Cooper, shared images of some deleted scenes from the show.

They involved one sequence showing the aftermath of Vissaris announcing his engagement

to Allison and the blow up between these two girls and the other scene involved Rainier

helping Allison into her wedding dress. Who knows, there might have been even more scenes that we

haven't seen in the final cut. These images have since been scrubbed from social media,

understandably. I'm sure HBO was all over

that when they saw it come out. But some folks have been saying, you know, these would have been

really nice to have on the show. What do we think? Does House of the Dragon, especially these

earlier episodes, work better with or without them, in your opinion? Mike, as our special guest,

I'm going to kick things off with you. How do you feel about it? You know, I don't think the show suffered from not having them, but I think they definitely would have been nice to see. I have in mind the time jumps. I think that they've sort of let our imaginations fill in some of those gaps. But I really love these heavily latent scenes where their personalities and their relationships are just seeping through them as much as they try not to. So yeah, it would have been a lot of fun to see. And I wish they had found a way to do it, but I don't think it shows worse for having skipped it. I just think it could have been a little bit better if that makes sense. Yeah. Lauren, what about you? I actually would have really liked to see them because I think that's like there was kind of that big jump between the two where it's like he announces to they're getting married.

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