This story contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 3, episode 6.
One character was raring to end his time on House of the Dragon last week. He looked around at all the carnage, saw that he was the only one left really fighting for anything, and decided that he would spend his every breath waging war on fate itself.
“I have been a servant all my life,” Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) told his sidekick, Gwayne Hightower. “I have defined myself by oaths, through unyielding devotion, and the highborn have made much of me while it pleased them to do so. But I will not let them dimmish me now… I am the realm’s greatest warrior, and I will die as such.”
I can’t blame him, even though these on-the-ground moments below a war of dragons in the sky were antithetically some of the best moments of season 3 so far. The deposed King Aegon II and Larys Strong’s quippy dynamic out on the road provided the humor that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms used to its advantage this past spring. It’s also the closest this series has gotten yet to Game of Thrones’s journey following Arya and the Hound around non-castle Westeros. Same goes for Cole. When the “real plot” of House of the Dragon came to a screeching halt after episode 3, the few scenes in which Cole was able to reckon with his diminishing place in the war’s grand narrative were another potential gold mine for emotional storytelling.
That all ends in episode 6. Within the first eight or so minutes, Ser Criston Cole dies by arrow fire after attempting to fight a losing battle. The scene plays out exactly as it’s described in George R. R. Martin’s novel, Fire & Blood. Cole arrives at a field of dead soldiers only to find that he’s been tricked. The men were simply playing dead, and they jump his army after luring them in. Then, after attempting to surrender and bargain for his men’s lives, they’re all slaughtered by Oscar Tully and Roderick Dustin’s party in what’s dubbed “The Butcher’s Ball.”
The rest of the episode feels a bit like how Cole felt near the end, watching the story play out before him and realizing that he can’t do anything more to change its course. It’s as he says at the end of episode 5, knowing that he’s about to die the second episode 6 begins: “It will be glorious… And not in their service, finally. But in my own.”
For what it’s worth, Cole does kill roughly two dozen men before his end. His fights include some of the best flail-slinging I’ve ever seen. I mean, how often do you even get to see someone fighting with a flail?
Tully’s great line here—"I made a promise to the dead, Cole. I told them I would build a sept for them out of traitors' bones, and I don't have near enough bones yet.”—is also taken directly from the source material. But the Butcher’s Ball’s placement so early in the episode leaves a little to be desired. The arrows are flung by an actress whom I cannot remember having a single spoken line before this moment. (And she still doesn’t.) Worse, the episode doesn’t return to any of these characters or the impact of Cole’s death again. For a character so certain that they would “sing songs” of his campaign, House of the Dragon doesn’t even bother to have anyone react to his departure. Maybe this should’ve taken place at the end of episode 5—immediately following his declaration to die fighting.
Really, I just wish Cole’s death meant more to the other characters this episode. Or, if it didn’t, that we touched on how they felt at all. Love him or hate him, Cole’s story had been an integral part of this show since the beginning. Now? It’s tougher to tell who, or what, House of the Dragon believes deserves the spotlight.
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