Hello and welcome to the Navaicast podcast, the podcast that usually goes through a song of ice and fire, but not here.

I'm one of your hosts Emmett, also known as Poor Quentin.

And I'm Manu, also known as Manu, also known as Manuclear Bomb.

And welcome back to our coverage of House of the Dragon. We're talking

today about season one, episode seven drift mark. And like I said, I think we'll probably do just an

official episode ranking at the end of the season. But I think this is a strong candidate for

best episodes so far this season. What do you you think this is an episode that like got my

blood running like no other one really has so far the show has thrown a couple curveballs at us

but i think this is one that it had me striking out swinging like i was like completely taken by

surprise by this one so right now it is definitely in my ranking i've kind of liked the episodes more and more as the season has gone on after, I think a strong pilot, but I think the last few episodes have generally been my favorite. But I think this one, this one is the one that got me out of my seat, which is only to its compliment.

It's a sign of a strong show that each episode is building so well on the previous one, but also just this one and the last one, the princess and the queen have been the most ambitious one so far. And I think there are, if not flaws, at least, you know, missed opportunities you can point to along the way or it's easy to game out how things could have gone differently with the time jumps. But they've stuck the landing on two episodes that I think would have been very, very easy to do poorly,

which is always kind of my standard for a great episode of television is how easy it is to

imagine the worst version of this episode. And then you can just congratulate everyone involved

for avoiding that. And this is one of those cases where I didn't realize until I was watching

the behind the scene stuff that this was the first episode they shot, at least for the most part.

And that also was a calculated risk to get everyone together and these big, ragged, dramatic moments together on one location.

And this could have worked poorly. Like how in the Lord of the Rings, wasn't it one of the earliest scenes they shot was like the end was the Grey Havens

with Gandalf saying goodbye to these actors he didn't know yet.

So that's how it goes with filming, but it shows a confidence in the actors in the material, I think.

Yeah, the fact that Rainira, or rather Emma Darcy and Matt Smith have to play these characters

as if they live the relationship we've already seen.

And I view this in the last episode as almost the thinkless episodes.

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