It’s one of the oldest tricks in storytelling, and House of the Dragon just peaked an episode with it.
In Season 2, episode 2 of the Game of Thrones prequel, the HBO series seized on classic tropes that simultaneously turn any scene into slapstick and generally irk this twin writer: the Evil Twin and the Fake Twin Gambit. No one loves the Evil Twin trope more than entertainment writers, who’ve been throwing that doppelgänger spanner into the works for decades through silent cinema, soap operas, horror movies, and comic books. Now it’s appeared in HBO primetime fantasy, through the cruel fate of the Cargyll twins, Arryk and Erryk (Luke and Elliott Tittensor), a sequence of fake twinnery with a tragic end.
‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 perfectly illustrates how men’s egos start wars
But did this gambit actually pay off for House of the Dragon? Or was it yet another TV show clinging to low hanging plot devices that declare twins two polarised sides of the same coin and little else?
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