This post contains major spoilers for House of the Dragon season three, episode six. If you want to avoid them, you can instead check out our coverage of episode five.
Like Blood and Cheese before it, Criston Cole’s death at the Butcher’s Ball is one of the best moments in Fire & Blood. And like Blood and Cheese before it, House of the Dragon just botched the whole thing.
I’m tired of being exhausted by House of the Dragon, a show that feels intentionally antagonistic to its source material. And yet, like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy not to pull away the football, I somehow keep finding myself looking forward to certain moments from the story. And there were none left I cared about more personally than the death of my fictional nemesis, Ser Criston Cole.
House of the Dragon delivered the kind of Cole I had hoped to see and more. I’ve long hated the “Kingmaker,” because as much as anyone, he helped launch the devastating Targaryen civil war that tore the Realm apart. And why did he do that? Honest convictions? Loyalty to tradition? Genuine belief in the man he seated on the Iron Throne? No. Cole set the Dance of the Dragons in motion because he blamed a young woman for his own failures. Because he violated every sacred oath he ever made and couldn’t live with himself.
Cole is among the biggest losers in all of A Song of Ice and Fire, but what truly made him among the worst of the worst is that he should have been among Westeros’ best. He was a self-made man in a world where the highborn do everything they can to keep others in their place. He came from a nothing house and earned his place on the Kingsguard. The handsome and dashing Cole also had a keen military mind and was a fearsome warrior. He had everything he needed to be a noble, successful man and knight. Instead thousands died because he was a capable man incapable of controlling himself.
Until his final episode, House of the Dragon did a good job showing why the Realm detested him while also making Ser Criston a more interesting character. House of the Dragon showed him living with the terrible consequences of his failings while knowing he was damned for them. Fabien Frankel’s fantastic performance also gave the the knight more nuance and complexity than the villain written about in Fire & Blood (which is exactly what an adaptation of a history should do).
Then, right before they killed him, House of the Dragon undid all of that. The series completely flipped his character. They made him look heroic and worthy of a noble death while also making him look stupid. And they did all by both bastardizing one of the best sequences from Fire & Blood and making one of its most beloved female characters look craven.
House of the Dragon‘s corpse feast in the previous episode is another example of the show recognizing a great moment from Martin’s in-world history without understanding why it’s so impactful. The show merely used it for a shocking moment without any kind of setup. In Fire & Blood, the corpse feast had nothing to do with the Gold Cloaks or King’s Landing. It was a type of psychological warfare used against the Greens, not by their allies.
It all began after a brutal victory by the riverlords and Winter Wolves against a green army of westernmen. The battle near the God’s Eye lake is known as the Fishfeed. Sadly the show only acknowledged it with a post victory song. The Fishfeed resulted in Criston Cole and his army and Aemond abandoning the nearby Harrenhal. As Aemond went to burn the country side, Cole marched his men south through the riverlands. Rhaenyra’s army didn’t let them leave quietly. The blacks started burning everything in front of the greens. Cole’s army found itself traveling through a burnt country side full of devastation. Their enemies populated the path with “swollen and stinking” dead animals and dead men “befouling the waters.”
It was gruesome and bleak. Then the greens came across something even worse. The riverlords and Northern graybeards had arranged a feast of dead men from the Fishfeed. They positioned the corpses at a table as if having a feast, an image so good House of the Dragon couldn’t help but use/steal for other purposes. But the show did so without utilizing the corpse feast’s true purpose. It was so much more than just a matter of mind games.
After the corpse feasts, Cole’s men started dying as they marched. Hidden archers in the forest shot men down. Other soldiers began to disappear from the back of the line or after fleeing into the woods in fear. It was though they were haunted by ghosts. As they continued, they came across more of the dead. Each day they grew more and more accustomed to the horrible sights that terrorized them. The more rotting dead bodies they saw, the more they grew numb to their presence. And that’s how Rhaenyra’s men outwitted the Kingmaker.
As Cole’s army came nearer to the sacred God’s Eye, they wandered upon another gathering of corpses arranged at a table for a grim gala. Only this time as they thoughtlessly passed the table of ghastly diners they proved to be anything but. Men disguised as the dead jumped up and killed a dozen of Cole’s men before the greens realized what was happening.
There was no fighting back like we saw on HBO. Instead they fled… right into the waiting black army that surrounded them. It was a masterful tactic against a masterful tactician. Without the ruse, Cole would never have easily walked into a trap. Without the previous corpse feast and pathway of horror, he and his scouts never would have let their guard down. It only worked because it required both patience and deception.
By moving the corpse feast to King’s Landing, House of the Dragon did more than just lessen its impact. It abandoned the logic behind both the plan and why Cole fell for it. It still used fake dead soldiers to trap Cole. But that abridged tactic needed Cole and his men to be stupid and easily walk into a pretty obivous trap without thought. House of the Dragon‘s Butcher’s Ball abandoned logic. It did it without putting in the work to explain why it was both logical and truly memorable, one of Fire & Blood‘s best sequences.
If that had been House of the Dragon’s only big error, it might have been sort of okay, but it only got worse from there. In both the book and the show, Cole knew what those men represented: “our death.” In each version, he also offered to strike his banners in exchange for his men’s lives only to be told (by a different character) his traitor’s bones were needed to keep a promise to the dead. And like in HBO’s adaptation, he never got a chance to fight against multiple men before his death. (In the book, it’s actually an offer to fight three against one.)
This is where the show made its most unforgivable mistake of them all. The commanders who walked out to meet with Cole despised him and everything he had done. They refused his offer to battle him not because they feared him, but because they hated him. One of the rivermen called on nearby archers to fire on Cole without warning. It’s seemingly a dishonorable act by the riverlords and northererns, two groups we’d expect to act with honor on the battlefield. But Fire & Blood makes clear why they did not grant him such a death. “I’ll have no songs about how brave you died, Kingmaker. There’s tens o’ thousands dead on your account.”
It’s the best. A truly poetic end for Ser Criston Cole, a man who should have been a great knight who instead became a scorned lover whose own lack of honor unleashed fire and blood on the Realm.
House of the Dragon instead gave Cole exactly what he wanted by stripping all that context away. In the previous episode, he was the one who spoke about dying in a way the singers would remember him. Like the great warrior he believed himself to be, he then slew the men disguised as the dead. And he faced his own death like a brave knight, taking out the favor of his beloved so she would be close to him during his final moment. Criston Cole died a heroic death before cravens refused to face him with dignity, rather than dying in a manner befitting the punk he really was.
It’s a vastly inferior scene in every way. It makes Cole look stupid, the one thing he wasn’t. It then makes him look heroic and sympathetic, two things he never was. Then after the first arrow hit him, it got even worse. Instead of the three rivermen archers who kill him on command in Fire & Blood, the show gives the job to a woman, Alysanne Blackwood. House of the Dragon has given her an incredible look, but has never even bothered to explain why she’s a favorite figure of book readers. Instead, the show made her look craven—a woman without honor slaying a brave man like a pig—by having her take out Cole seemingly on her own from afar. That’s what Oscar Tully’s disappointed reaction to that moment and the subsequent slaughter that followed suggested.
(Black Aly striking down an enemy with a bow is another example of the show misusing a great moment from Fire & Blood without knowing why it was great.)
Without the biting final message and unified approach to Cole’s demise, his death completely changes for the worse. It goes from an incredible end befitting a loser who long ago sacrificed his honor to an ignoble act by enemies against a brave knight. And it came after the show also stripped away the effectiveness of the corpse feast by first moving it some other place entirely for an all new purpose while also shortchanging it’s actual place in the story. In Fire & Blood, it’s a brilliant tactic that brought down a great commander. The blacks shielded its true purpose by making it feel like psychological warfare. Then, when it worked, those same soldiers made sure Criston Cole got the death he deserved. It was onne free of glory, a death nobody would ever sing about.
Like Blood and Cheese, it was so much worse than Martin’s version in every way, most of them indefensible or inane. This inferior version made the story of both Criston Cole and the Dance of the Dragons worse by making it less interesting, less impactful, and less logical.
I couldn’t wait to watch Criston Cole die. Now wish I could forget I even saw it. But it’s not all bad. The memory of the show’s butchering of the Butcher’s Ball will help me remember something important: I should stop looking forward to big moments on House of the Dragon.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He couldn’t wait to enjoy Crison Cole’s onscreen death. Instead he got….this. You can follow Mikey on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.