House of the Dragon just killed off one of its longest-running characters in the most brutal way possible. Season 3 Episode 6 stages a devastating ambush that changes the war forever.
Another one bites the dust in House of the Dragon
Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) dies within the opening minutes of House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 6. Arrow fire ends his life after he loses a battle he cannot win. HBO stages the sequence exactly as George R. R. Martin wrote it in Fire & Blood.
Cole rides into a field littered with dead soldiers. The bodies belong to living men, who spring up and ambush his army. He tries to surrender and barter for his soldiers’ lives. Instead, forces led by Oscar Tully (Archie Barnes) and Roderick Dustin (Tommy Flanagan) cut them down. The show names the massacre “The Butcher’s Ball.” Cole takes roughly two dozen men with him.
The knight had already declared his intentions in Episode 5. “It will be glorious… And not in their service, finally. But in my own,” he said. He also told Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox), “I am the realm’s greatest warrior, and I will die as such.”
Tully speaks a line lifted straight from the novel. “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,” he said. Alysanne Blackwood looses the fatal arrows. She speaks no dialogue during the sequence.
The episode never revisits Cole’s death afterward. Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) instead dispatches Alicent (Olivia Cooke) to Harrenhal on an assassination mission. Freedom for Alicent and Helaena is the offered price.
At the castle, Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) starts a relationship with Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin). Rhaenyra separately discovers that Helaena (Phia Saban) is carrying a child. Bold Jon Roxton (Joplin Sibtain) then seizes Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) in the final scene. Two episodes remain.
House of the Dragon airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Originally reported by Anubhav Chaudhry on SuperHeroHype.
