House of the Dragon episode 7 masks its true violence behind royal rituals

polygon.com:

Laena Velaryon, her brother Laenor, and a man whose name we never learn. While House of the Dragon’s seventh episode does a great deal to show Westeros sliding uncontrollably toward what will surely prove a calamitously bloody war, its own body count is comparatively modest by the series’ standards.

Its single on-screen death, that of the nameless man whose neck is broken as part of a complicated gambit to fake Ser Laenor’s (John Macmillan) death, is a case study in the episode’s preoccupation with social rituals as a means of concealing and revealing truth. Laena’s funeral provides her uncle with a chance to launch a veiled barb at Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) over the parentage of her sons. Rhaenyra’s secret marriage to her uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) serves to inflate her reputation as a ruthless power player, and sir Laenor’s duel with his lover Qarl (Arty Froushan) provides cover for their bittersweet escape from the bloody power games of the royal court. Everywhere we turn, the rituals and ceremonies which bind the people of Westeros into a society are being subverted by personal agendas.

That the episode keeps so many plates in the air at once while also managing to slow down after the breakneck pace of last week’s installment is something of a minor miracle, but director Miguel Sapochnik and writer Sara Hess pull it off with aplomb. From the somber but politically charged opening funeral scene to the darkly majestic and disturbing claiming of the dragon Vhagar by the young prince Aemond (Leo Ashton), “Driftmark” moves at an effortless clip. Its setting, the maritime seat of House Velaryon where the royal family has gathered to mourn, gives the whole affair a sense of the Gothic, as does the return of gaunt, cadaverous