It’s not that I didn’t watch much TV this week, but I didn’t finish anything, and my new weekly show drops are slowing down. I promise, guys, I’m still spending time rotting on the couch in front of the idiot box. For you.

Let’s watch TV!

It’s funny. This was the first episode of the season that I’ve really looked forward to watching. Given that the two main characters were decapitated in the final moments of episode 6, I was eager to see what happened next.

The answer is, a lot of talking, a Talamasca-ex-machina, and … well, yeah.

This episode leaked early — even earlier than Australian TV gets it, which is about 16 hours ahead of the US. AppleTV dropped it a full 24 hours early, and I managed to avoid spoilers, but I knew the initial buzz was a bit … “meh”. But since I’m not exactly in tune with the fandom, I hoped it would hit different for me.

Alas. There were a lot of things I really enjoyed in this episode, but ALSO a lot of dialogue I simply could not hear over the music and cross-talk and accents. So I think there was a lot of character nuance that I missed because I genuinely could not make out anything Armand said most of the time. There may have been a pun on “Armends”, I’m not sure.

What’s important is that Sam Reid got a nine-minute monologue and he absolutely smashed it. And his hair looked amazing. Genuinely, I want to take a picture of Lestat to my hairdresser and go, “Okay, can we get this colour?” (I used to have that colour naturally, but alas, the passage of time.)

I actually admire this series for its willingness to take big swings, even when they seem silly. Daniel peering through the ceiling: should not have worked, and also? Did not work. The repetition of “the soul!” in Lestat’s dinner-party-turned-tribunal had powerful student theatre vibes. Whatever they pay Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, it needs to be tripled, because they are the only reason this show works.

If my take on seasons 1 and 2 was “it’s good, but not for me,” season 3 really never quite settled on “good”. It had moments of brilliance, but overall, my feeling is that it was incoherent. And not just on an audibility level.

However. In an era when so much entertainment media is sanded down into blandness, I really appreciate that TLV is willing to take big, bold, inaudible swings. Lestat ultimately concludes that trying to create something and failing is better than not trying at all, even if the attempt accidentally brings about the end of the world. And I respect that.

Okay. I have decided that, unless something dramatically changes, I’m not going to cover Silo week to week any longer. I have very little to say about it, and there are only so many times I can repeat that I enjoy Rebecca Ferguson’s face and bad American accent before you all get bored. Much like me, watching Silo. It has become a show I watch to pass the time, rather than something I enjoy or have any feelings about.

Let’s all spare a thought for Helaena Targaryen. First she’s born into The Worst Family Ever, then married off to her shitty brother. One of her children is murdered, and her sole act as queen is to surrender the keep. She doesn’t even get to escape — she’s captured and has to live in genteel captivity. She’s sharing a room with her mum.

All she wants is to keep chickens and, it turns out, raise the baby with which she is pregnant. I assume. She’s quite keen on having the child, but given that I had totally forgotten until this week that she still had a living daughter, I’m not convinced she’s all that hands-on as a mother. Like, yes she wants to escape with her daughter now, but where was that energy a few weeks ago? (Is it possible that the writers … also forgot about the daughter?)

Alicent has some legitimate concerns about Helaena’s pregnancy, mostly around the strong likelihood that, if it’s a boy, it will be raised as a hostage at best. If he gets to grow up at all, if you know what I mean? Alicent is all, “abortion is healthcare!” while Helaena is like, “my body, my choice.” Which is fair, except it could end up being her body, Rhaenyra’s choice, and maybe a reluctant abortion is better than infanticide? Not that Helaena gets to decide, in the end, because Mysaria knows all about the birth control potions being brought to the queens.

What Helaena deserves is freedom to go off and be a weird autistic natural scientist with full reproductive autonomy and access to quality healthcare.

What she gets is, as of the closing credits, being entrapped with Alicent inside one of the Red Keep’s secret passages. I’m not saying the cats lured her in there, but I am saying that we don’t know who the cats are working for. (Okay, we do: they are working for themselves. More on that in a moment.)

I do not believe the series is going to let Alicent and her daughter starve to death in a secret passage, but I am seeing potential for shenanigans. A sort of Phantom of the Red Keep situation.

Speaking of shenanigans, I have a theory about where the kingdom’s gold has ended up. I mean, Ormund is passing out shiny coins stamped with Prince Daeron’s face, and there’s not that much gold lying around Westeros.

And now one of those coins has wound up in Daemon’s hands. Which is probably gonna go badly for Daeron, even though he remains a very nice child who is doing his best in a difficult situation.

Someone has been murdering the gold cloaks of King’s Landing, and it turns out they’re in Ormund’s pay. Which is kind of a shame, I was hoping for some sort of people’s uprising. AGCAB. Instead, it’s Ormund, and honestly I feel like Rhaenyra didn’t need a fresh reason to feel paranoid and abandoned by the gods.

SPEAKING OF ABANDONMENT, we check in with both of Alicent’s sons this week, and they’re both whinging, separately, about how good the other has it, and how the other is the favourite, and blah, blah, blah. Both Alys and Larys (huh, they rhyme) seem well and truly over it. Larys’s little “you see what I have to deal with?” gesture as Aegon stabs a dude was truly a highlight.

Also a highlight: Criston Cole preparing to lead his men to the slaughter. If the overarching theme of House of the Dragon is, Misogyny: It’s Bad, then Criston is the misogynist-in-chief. Not the most powerful, but absolutely the most dedicated. I cannot wait for him to die.

Finally, this episode gives us a fresh mystery: where is Aemond’s dragon? No one has seen Vhagar in a while, and I assumed she was hanging out at Harrenhal … but no! Even he doesn’t know!

And here’s my theory: she’s off joyriding with a bunch of cats on her back. They’ve infiltrated the Red Keep, they have a dragon, the feline ascendancy is almost here.

If anything bad happens to a single cat in this series, I swear to God, I will burn HBO to the ground.