The following story contains spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 2, Episode 3, titled “The Burning Mill.”
THERE’S SO MUCH going on in House of the Dragon that we can’t blame anyone too much for occasionally feeling a bit lost. Which ones are the Greens again? And who stands for what? Someone is someone else’s brother? Or cousin? It all gets very confusing, and we understand and respect that.
And so we respect even further just how confusing it might be for a character we’ve never seen before to suddenly claim to be among the most important in the show. That’s exactly what happened in Season 2, Episode 3, when a random dude named Ulf (Tom Bennett) started telling people in a brothel bar that he was a secret member of the Targaryen family, a half-brother of Daemon, Rhaenys, and the late King Viserys.
Ulf barged into the bar, gregariously greeting everyone like he was Ray Liotta in Goodfellas before sitting down and immediately spilling his beans to a table full of other dudes boozing it up. His family member just died, he says, not so subtly revealing that he’s talking about Prince Jaehaerys. He continues, proclaiming that he’s actually the bastard son of Baelon the Brave (Daemon, Rhaenys, and Viserys’s late father), and that if anyone heard that truth, they’d have his head (which we know to be true considering what we know about Game of Thrones, Westeros, and how families like to keep bloodlines nice and tidy). He further elaborates that he considers Rhaenyra to be the true queen.
That’s enough for right then and there, though, as King Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) himself suddenly bursts into the brothel, killing the mood for everyone—until Ulf decides to say “ALL HAIL THE KING!” and break the ice.
What are we to make of all this? As of now, not too sure. Though we can remember that a trio of bastards King Robert Baratheon’s son Gendry, Ramsay Bolton, and Jon Snow (though he’s not really a bastard) turned out to play pretty major roles in how Game of Thrones turned out. We’ll just have to wait and see, because, as we’ll discuss below, Ulf isn’t a character in George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood—or, at least, he’s not the Targaryen bastard that he claims to be.
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Is Ulf really a Targaryen, and Baelon the Brave’s son?
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Whether or not Ulf is telling the truth about his Targaryen lineage remains to be seen, though Baelon the Brave is known in the Fire & Blood and larger ASOIAF lore to be a good and honorable man, and was not believed previously to have any bastard children.
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Of course, it’s worth remembering that Fire & Blood isn’t being told via some type of all-knowing narrator; it’s essentially a historical Westeros textbook that’s sourced by unreliable historian narrators. That gives the show wiggle room with this kind of thing.
Still, the possibility that House of the Dragon could be changing Baelon the Brave to be someone who had children out of wedlock has been a point of contention for some fans:
It’s possible that House of the Dragon is changing things, and having Ulf become a key figure in the politics of the world, and potentially someone who can shift the balance of power in Rhaenyra’s direction when called upon.
But it’s also possible that Ulf is just a drunk lying about something incredibly touchy and dangerous—and the show isn’t afraid to show that silly mistakes can have major consequences. We will just have to wait and see.
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