Hello, and welcome to the NataCast podcast, the one through chapter-by-chapter 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 Nuclear Bomb.

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

two continues with episode two, which we eventually found out was called Rainier of the Cruel.

They definitely slow roll us on this one when it came up was just episode two on my, on Max.

And I was like, huh, what an avant-garde title. It's like towards the end of Thrones when they

weren't really trying with

the episode titles anymore it's just the long night winter fail you get what we're doing here

yeah yeah um and it's a little bit provocative as well um maybe a little bit of anti-black propaganda

or at least uh kind of putting high tower write this episode well he might have because he gets to star

in it uh prominently above all the rest of the cast. Good point. That's my theory now.

So this episode was written by Sarah Hess and directed by Claire Kilner. I think it was an exceptionally directed episode. Specifically, I think there were a lot of arresting visuals in this episode with Helena during the funeral, Allison in the bathtub,

a lot of great set design that we're going to get into.

This very, very well-directed, well-written episode.

And I kind of wanted to start there because I really think on top of the writing, the performances

in this episode really stood out.

It felt like that old school

Thrones feel when it was mostly just two to three very well-established actors on a small

set, just bouncing off each other. And I think Risa Fons, as Otto Hightower, kind of stole the

show this episode, especially in his excellent scene with Tom Glincarney and Fabian Finkel as he was losing his

handship and it going over to Kristen Cole. Smart move all around by everyone involved.

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