Who dies in House of the Dragon | Character Deaths

House of the Dragon, much like its predecessor, Game of Thrones, will very likely have a high death toll

It wouldn’t be a “Game of Thrones” spinoff if there weren’t a lot of heartbreaking and/or bloody deaths, and “House of the Dragon” has already delivered on that front. The new series, based on George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” follows the Targaryen family in the middle of a succession crisis and in the leadup to a civil war that will shape their history, known as the Dance of the Dragons.

Ahead of the show’s premiere, showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik said that the series wouldn’t have gratuitous sex or violence. “It’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ There is sex and violence as part of the story,” Condal said. “The particular way that we’ve approached it in this time is making sure that whenever you’re going to have any kind of . . . sex or violence on screen, that there’s a compelling story reason for it, and that it’s a story that needs to be told. It’s not being done gratuitously or to titillate or anything like that.”

After nine episodes, the show has a pretty massive body count, and we’ve lost some of the series’s major players. Ahead, these are all the biggest deaths in “House of the Dragon” season one.

Two significant characters died in Sunday’s House of the Dragon: one of old age/overall infirmity and one of having his skull cleaved in two with a sword. How bizarre to find that I had a much harder time watching the former than I did the latter.

House of the Dragon‘s forebear, Game of Thrones, inured its viewers to a certain kind of on-screen violence; just when you thought the camera would pan away and save you from seeing a disgusting coup de grace… it instead zooms in. (And yes, I am thinking of when The Mountain gouged out Oberyn Martell’s eyes with his thumbs then smashed his head until it burst like a watermelon left too long in the sun.)

Ser Borros Baratheon, played on House of the Dragon by actor Roger Evans, is the current lord of Storm’s End, which is the location of an important scene from George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood. In the aftermath of Viserys’ death and Aegon’s crowning, Rhaenyra will be looking to rally her supporters, which will involve Storm’s End. Something… not great happens there. If you know, you know. All we’ll say for the sake of non-book readers is that footage in the finale trailer suggests we’ll be seeing those events play out, in which case someone is going to die.

Lord Beesbury (Bill Paterson) is widely considered the first casualty of the Dance of the Dragons, the name given to this particular civil war that’s erupting. But there are a lot more on the way.