‘House of the Dragon’ Season 3 Episode 4 review: “Tumbleton”

House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4, “Tumbleton,” hands the season to James Norton’s perfumed zealot, and he nearly walks off with the whole thing.

After a hat trick of episodes that gave us a naval slaughter, a coup, and a bottle-episode nervous breakdown, House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4 does the thing serialized epics always do at the midpoint. It lays track. Armies shuffle across maps. Characters trade information they will need in three-ish weeks. And then James Norton stands up naked out of a bathtub. The mad Hightower lad, installed in someone else’s great hall, is where the hour finds its reason to exist.

Director Clare Kilner returns, with David Hancock taking over the script. And together they open and close on Lord Ormund Hightower. Everything between those bookends orbits him. Even the scenes in House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4 he sits out.

(Note: The following is a spoiler-free review of House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4. You can read our lore-friendly breakdown for book readers here. You can also find similar write-ups for Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3.)

The perfumed man takes a bath.

The bathtub scene tells us exactly who Ormund is with absolute economy. Last week, we learned he occupied Tumbleton, a merchant town with soft walls and softer lords. And he’s requisitioned Lord Footly’s chambers, Lord Footly’s hall, and Lord Footly’s dignity. He rises, dripping, and lectures the man he displaced on how one deals with “those beneath you.” Norton plays the whole thing as camp of the highest order, letting us watch a man enjoy his own performance of power. It ranks as the liveliest work anyone on this show has done this season.

Ormund arrives fully formed, which stands as a small miracle given how thinly Fire & Blood sketches him. He mixes his own potpourri like a Renaissance poisoner. He fancies himself a scholar of histories and ballads, and he despises the uncouth. Oh, and he also carries a famously delicate nose. It’s a detail Alicent offers Rhaenyra almost in passing, and which the episode treats with such hush that you can practically hear the writers whispering remember this, this is his exhaust port.

The threat he poses runs deeper than dragonfire, though. Ormund holds 15,000 men inside a town packed with innocents, daring Rhaenyra to burn a seat that flew her banner. She correctly reads the trap, and Orwyle and Mysaria hand her the answer. She must send Daemon’s Rivermen to clear Tumbleton house by house. Bloody, yes. Merciful, comparatively. It stands as her sharpest call of the season, and it costs her the option of looking “strong.” No bastard-related puns intended.

A king raised in the light of the Seven.

Then, House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4 delivers its real payload. The red-haired boy who hovered at Ormund’s elbow all season, fetching towels and absorbing lectures, turns out to be Daeron Targaryen, as many theorized. Ormund raised Alicent’s youngest as his own pet project of sorts. He tells the boy he speaks kindly and says his prayers, that the Father smiles upon him. But also that a taint runs in his blood. The Targaryens read to him as alien savages who conjured abominations with dark spells to subdue what belongs rightly to superior men. Tessarion sits chained behind him as he says it.

Benjamin Evan Ainsworth plays Daeron with true delicacy, ushering another boy out of the room before Ormund’s temper breaks. Then we see him weeping alone. Ormund even seals the boy’s complicity by forcing him to execute the very soldier he pardoned an hour earlier. Justice, Ormund calls it. Grooming, we call it. “And now we begin,” he says, and the season resets around him.

The tragedy lands hardest in Alicent’s cell, where she tells Rhaenyra she sent Daeron to Oldtown so he might grow into a Hightower instead of a Targaryen. Her truest act of motherhood, she believes. Olivia Cooke lets us watch that conviction curdle. She saved one son from her family and delivered him to a worse one.

Everyone else keeps busy.

Elsewhere in House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 4, the hour scatters. Aegon and Larys reach Rook’s Rest and find Sunfyre’s corpse serving as a roadside attraction, a copper a touch. Tom Glynn-Carney plays Aegon’s grief with startling tenderness. He meagerly insists his dragon lives while pocketing a single scale, then submits to a camp of scavengers who put him to work hauling piss buckets and kissing boots.

Criston and Gwayne search Harrenhal for Aemond, meet Alys Rivers, and swallow her lie whole. Criston answers the news of a lost war by proposing guerrilla raids against an army twenty times his size. He’s clearly hungry for a death that will come clean and free of dragons. Fabien Frankel makes that nihilism ring tragically true.

And Daemon, shaking gold out of Jeyne Arryn, loses control of Caraxes for the first time in the series. The dragon sniffs out Sheepstealer and delivers him to a cave and to Rhaena. Matt Smith captures the moment of recognition beautifully, and the scene ends far too soon. Rhaena chooses exile. But Daemon chooses her. He torches a shepherd and presents the skull to his queen as proof of vengeance served. He quietly picks his daughter over his wife and buys a catastrophe on credit.

“Tumbleton” moves pieces more than it moves us. It also gives Westeros its most fascinating villain since Tywin, and hands Rhaenyra a war she can win only by losing the thing she wants most.

House of the Dragon Season 3 airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.