Hello, and welcome to the Nauticast podcast, the one true 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 Manuclear Bomb.

And welcome back to House of the Dragon.

We are covering Season 2 of House of the Dragon.

We're up to Episode 5, Regent, short title this time, for an episode that I think was

maybe less explosive on the whole than last time, but, you know, there was no way it was

ever going to be otherwise.

Yeah, this is almost exactly what I would expect from a follow-up to a big episode.

You know, you take the city of Astipur, and then the next scene is, you know,

baths and wedding arrangements and stuff like that.

So I think this is a very familiar pattern to a lot of the throne seasons where there's usually like an episode four climax.

And then following that, you kind of have to ramp down a little bit just for pacing's sake.

But then some plot lines that were kind of on the back burner or the slow cooker, like say, Damon at Heron Hall, those start to accelerate here.

We also got a little bit more depth with some of the

characters who haven't really had any impact so far, like Hugh Hammer. And then we're also just

kind of probably gearing up for an even bigger climax near the end of the season. So it's about what

I'd expect. But I think they had a lot of good stuff cooking here, especially in the Riverlands.

I really loved like the Amund ascendancy.

I just kind of a little bit, like, I love how they've crafted both him and his brother, and there's just a real kind of,

Amid is slowly starting to hang over the narrative as this kind of like overarching evil threat,

kind of like how Yeron felt in that drowned man chapter, right?

...