Hello and welcome to the Nauticast 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 Manucleer Bomb.

And welcome back to our coverage of House of the Dragon.

Today we're talking about

season one, episode eight, the Lord of the Tides. And it's kind of become a running joke that I've just

been saying each episode is the best one as we go. So I'll just, I'll say it a little differently

this time. I think this episode was the most emotionally devastating. Do you think that's fair? Yeah, I would say it's easily the most emotional.

Like last week where I said I jumped up and clapped at the ending for Lainor, this one was the one

that really brought tears to my eyes for the first time in the entire series, and that's not a

knock on the emotional beats before, but I found the work they've done with some of these

characters, specifically say Vassarisis and Damon, really paid off

emotionally this episode.

And then when you come back to it, after the tears have dried, you can look a little, I think,

a little closer at the structure of it.

Because I knew going into this episode that we would have the Vaman plot of fighting over

the succession at Driftmark, and I knew we would have more conflict between the princess

and the Queen factions.

But I kind of assumed they would just run parallel, like an A plot and a B plot would cut back and forth, and it was really smart writing to tie them together instead, that they used the

Drift Mark succession as a way to instigate the Greens versus Blacks Showdown, like plucking

out a stray thread until you've unraveled an entire sweater. And that way, the Driftmark succession doesn't just seem like background detail,

and you really get a sense of how the fight over the Iron Throne bleeds into everything.

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