House Of The Dragon Scene Leaves Viewers Saying The Show Has Finally Gone Too Far

Spoiler warning: This article discusses major events from Season 3, Episode 7 of House of the Dragon. Anyone who has not watched the episode yet may want to come back afterward.

Incest is hardly unfamiliar territory for the Targaryens, and viewers have spent three seasons trying to keep track of a family tree where marriages between close relatives are treated as royal tradition. Even so, the show has found one particular line that many fans seem much less willing to cross: sons imagining themselves having sex with their mothers.

The family connections are complicated enough before the dreams begin. The two sides fighting for the Iron Throne include rulers married to close relatives, while the previous king himself came from a brother-and-sister marriage. Within the world of the show, those relationships are part of the dynasty's long history, but the latest Harrenhal sequence still managed to catch viewers off guard.

There is really no elegant way around it: the Targaryen family tree has become a mess of uncles, nieces, brothers, sisters, cousins, husbands, and wives who are often several of those things at once.

House of the Dragon has always used that history as part of its story, but Harrenhal has given the series another way to make the relationships even more uncomfortable. The ruined castle has repeatedly become a place where characters experience visions that mix fear, guilt, ambition, memory, and desire.

Daemon Targaryen, played by Matt Smith, spent much of Season 2 trapped in those visions. One of the most disturbing showed him having sex with his mother, Alyssa Targaryen, before realizing who she was. Now the series has returned to almost the same idea with another Targaryen prince.

Motherf**ker HBO

Harrenhal has already played this trick on another Targaryen

The parallel with Daemon is hard to miss. Both men arrive at Harrenhal carrying their own anger and need for power, and both become vulnerable once the castle starts blurring the line between what is real and what they think they are seeing.

During Season 2, Daemon's visions included people from different parts of his life, with Alys Rivers often nearby as his grip on reality became less certain. His encounter with his mother became one of the strangest moments in that storyline, and the show has now given Aemond a version of the same nightmare.

The difference is that Aemond is not simply dreaming alone. By Season 3, he has formed a relationship with Alys, making the switch between her and Alicent far more personal. A breakdown of the Episode 7 sequence also notes that the scene follows earlier signs of Aemond's unusually intense attachment to his mother.

Season 3, Episode 7 takes that setup much further. Aemond, played by Ewan Mitchell, experiences another strange Harrenhal sequence in which he believes the woman in bed with him is his mother, Alicent Hightower, played by Olivia Cooke.

The moment does not appear out of nowhere. Earlier in the season, the show had already leaned into Aemond's complicated feelings toward Alicent. That discomfort reaches a new level here as his vision turns their mother-and-son relationship into something sexual.

Reality finally breaks through when Aemond realizes that Alicent is not actually beside him. The woman he has been sleeping with is Alys Rivers, played by Gayle Rankin. Once he sees Alys for who she really is, his mood changes at once and he pushes her away.

For some viewers, that was screen time they would have preferred to spend somewhere else in Westeros. After watching Daemon go through his own mother-son vision at Harrenhal last season, seeing Aemond follow almost the same path proved too much for part of the audience.

One fan went as far as describing themselves as 'traumatised'. Given what the sequence asks viewers to watch, it is not difficult to understand why the reaction was so strong.

The responses kept coming. Another viewer wrote 'lord so much incest going on in House of the Dragon' followed by the vomit emoji, while someone who said they loved the series admitted they would 'need that Incest s**t to be toned down'. The complaint was not that incest had suddenly appeared in the story, but that the show had found an even more uncomfortable version of something viewers already knew was part of Targaryen life.

Plenty of viewers protested at seeing a son dream about having sex with his mother, especially since the show did this before HBO

A fourth viewer summed up the feeling that the show somehow keeps finding another level to reach: "You think House of the Dragon has pushed the limit of incest it can show on TV and then it just gets worse every episode,"

The actors had the less enviable task of actually filming it. Rankin, who plays Alys, spoke to Variety about working through a sequence that required Aemond to move between seeing Alys and imagining Alicent. She described the finished moment as 'a very odd, f**ked-up scene'.

Despite what appears on screen, Rankin said the atmosphere on set stayed controlled and professional. She explained: "It was very intimate and very odd but very professional."

The scene also changes Aemond and Alys' relationship

Until this point, Alys had become one of the few people at Harrenhal who could get close to Aemond when he was physically and emotionally vulnerable. Their connection had moved from uneasy conversations toward something more intimate, which makes his reaction after recognizing her especially telling.

Instead of treating the encounter as a straightforward romance, the show ties Alys to the same fears and desires that have been following Aemond through Harrenhal. He initially wants her when his mind presents her as Alicent, then recoils once the illusion disappears.

That leaves Alys in an unusual position going into the Season 3 finale. She has seen a side of Aemond that few other characters have, while he remains dependent on her after everything that happens later in the episode. Their relationship is intimate, but it is hardly comfortable or stable.

Rankin said humor helped the actors get through the technical side of filming such an uncomfortable sequence. She explained: "We tried to like make jokes, just to keep it light-hearted because those scenes are not easy and they're complicated and very technical. So it was also just like it was another day at the office for being like a very odd, f**ked-up scene."

The episode then makes the situation even stranger by bringing the real Alicent into Harrenhal. She ends up having an awkward meal with Aemond and Alys, meaning Aemond has to sit across from his actual mother soon after imagining her during sex with the woman beside him.

The family reunion does not improve from there. Alicent attempts to poison her son, and Aemond appears to survive long enough to stagger back into Alys' room before collapsing. After spending much of the episode pushing Alys away, he ends up dependent on her again, leaving their already unusual relationship in an even more complicated place before the finale.