MovieChat Forums > House of the Dragon (2022) Discussion > Is how Daemon [spoilers] his wife even p...

Is how Daemon [spoilers] his wife even possible?


It's the first ('horse') step of the kill that bugs me: Daemon advances (with no weapons in hand) toward Rhea and her horse; Rhea reaches for her arrows & bow (I think) and her horse (perhaps sensing her sensing danger) rears up. Rather than getting trampled by the hooves of Rhea's horse Daemon somewhat amazingly gets in between the flashing hooves and pushes on the horse's chest hard enough to make it fall backwards, i.e. to go all the way over onto its back crushing Rhea. But is this really possible? Big horses of a racehorse-ish size and quality weigh a heck of a lot, hence they can crush their riders, but then I wonder how Daemon can impart enough force in just a fraction of a second to push such a (defending itself) horse over backwards?

At the very least this whole first step of the kill seems to me like a fairly miraculous piece of improvisation by Daemon. Realistically he couldn't know for sure that (a) the horse would rear up at all, (b) that he'd be able to avoid the horse's hooves and serious injury himself, and (c) that he'd be able to hit the horse just right and with enough force to completely flip the horse over and thereby do the necessary maximal amount of damage to Rhea. So I guess we're supposed to think that Daemon just improvised what actually happened, and that he was just spectacularly lucky with how it all worked out. (Of course he also seems to have been somewhat lucky that Rhea was unaccompanied.) In sum the first part of Daemon's killing of his wife seems to me to be both poorly written and poorly staged and shot (it took me several rewindings and pausings to figure out what was supposed to have gone on; in real time and at full speed the sequence was a "Huh? What happened? 'Is this magic?' moment).

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I think it all comes down to the writers wanting to have their cake and eat it too with Matt Daemon. So they continue with this ambiguous ' Is Matt Daemon an evil monster or is he just a naughty boy who gets into trouble ? ' nonsense. At some point ( you would hope ) they will have to jump one way or the other with him or it will just become more and more absurd and annoying.

So did Matt Daemon mean to kill his wife all along or not ? Was he going to get help after she was injured in what could have been an accident ? And did he only come back and kill her because she gave him one too many insults ?


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I thought they'd show his dragon that scared the horse but it was just Daemon turning into Crocodile Dundee.

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I had issues with that scene, too. It didn't flow well, or look right. It could've been done a lot better.

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It was mentioned in Episode 1 that Daemon basically smells like Dragon and most likely he came directly on his dragon there. So the horse smelled that and thought it is in grave danger, so it decided to run, thus it collapsed. Very likely Daemon was expecting the reaction and got lucky it so perfectly worked out. But she might have otherwise maybe a small "climbing" accident. She must die, so he can remary.

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It was mentioned in Episode 1 that Daemon basically smells like Dragon and most likely he came directly on his dragon there. So the horse smelled that and thought it is in grave danger
Nice. That's the best suggestion yet, and feels like a GRRM ASOIAF plotpoint alright. It needed to be set up a little bit better (maybe even by having Rhea scornfully *say* something like, 'My God, phew, you always did stink of Dragon').

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[deleted]

Yeah it happened so fast. I didn't see Daemon touch the horse or do anything. it just seemed like the horse reared when she reached for her bow.

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