House of the Dragon’s festering wounds are on the verge of being torn open

polygon.com:

A missing eye, a rotten tooth, a razor-thin scar standing out livid against pale skin. So much of “The Lord of the Tides” is structured around the injuries House of the Dragon’s cast have accrued throughout their troubled lives. Even the titular incident, a succession crisis within House Velaryon, is prompted by Lord Corlys (Steve Toussaint) suffering a grave wound in battle. We never see the wound; in fact, Lord Corlys doesn’t appear on screen at all, but knowledge of it sets into motion a struggle for power that costs a man his life and sets the royal family once more at each other’s throats. Think of it like Laura Palmer’s absence in Twin Peaks, the kind of vacancy that creates an entire story just in the negative space it leaves behind when it disappears.

This is a family that can’t stop hurting itself, and nobody has suffered more in that regard than King Viserys (Paddy Considine). However wrong he is to cling to the hope of an impossible status quo, however deluded he is as to his power to make the people he loves accept peace, it’s agonizing to see him so diminished, his body skeletal and sunken, covered in open sores, his mind addled by the opium tincture known as milk of the poppy. Even drawing breath, he’s as much a wound in the fabric of the kingdom as Lord Corlys.

The emotional wounds dealt back and forth across the divide between the two courtly camps are as present as the physical. When Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) first sees Alicent (Olivia Cooke) upon returning to King’s Landing after a six-year absence, her hand flies at once to the scar on her forearm, mirroring a later scene in which she and Alicent clasp hands with apparently unfeigned warmth. Alicent rubs Rhaenyra’s arm and wrist as though in apology, and