House of the Dragon Fans Are Thrilled About Episode 6’s Death

3 min readThis story contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 3, episode 6. If you’re looking for our recap of the episode, you can find it here. Love him or hate him, House of the Dragon’s most controversial knight just fought in his final battle. Ser Criston Cole (played by Fabien Frankel) lies dead in the Riverlands.Cole’s death occurred at the beginning of episode 6, in the most unglamorous, unceremonious way possible. The Rivermen, led by Oscar Tully (Archie Barnes), lured Cole's army into a field of soldiers pretending to lie dead. Before the real battle kicks off (though he does manage to kill about twenty or so soldiers), Cole is shot by a bowman through the gut twice, and then through the cheek. His killer is Alysanne Blackwood (though the actress, Annie Shapero, has not been spoken to yet in the series.) Bear in mind, this was all less than ten minutes into the episode. Ouch.The writers are loving an anticlimactic bow-and-arrow hat-trick this season (rest in peace, Jace Velaryon, you'll be in our hearts forever), and now Ser Criston Cole is the latest victim. Is it the “glorious death in battle” that he desired? Absolutely not. Is it the death he deserved? According to Frankel, who spoke in HBO’s “Inside the Episode” following episode 6, “[Cole] knows that it’s over, and there’s a relief in that for him.”Theo Whiteman/HBOAnnie Shapero plays Alysanne Blackwood, who kills Ser Criston Cole despite not having a single line in the series just yet.Since the first season, Cole’s been nothing but a nuisance, a traitor and a hypocrite, not just thanks to his treatment of Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy, and Milly Alcock before them), but also his subsequent, jealousy-fueled relationship with Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke). But are the fans happy with how Cole was sent off?Immediately after the episode, fans took to the dedicated Reddit community to share their thoughts, with one commenter declaring Cole’s death as a "wild way to start off” the episode. Another fan called killing him off right at the start of the episode "extra salt in the wound" from a narrative perspective, while a third said that it was "abrupt and unceremonious as possible."One fan of the show pointed out the irony of Cole often making whiny, dramatic speeches about losing the war to dragons, "likening their armies to mere canon fodder, only to die unceremoniously at the hand of foot soldiers with no dragons in sight."Theo Whiteman/HBOGood riddance, Cole.Some fans of George R. R. Martin’s Fired & Blood lamented the omission of a specific line from the book, which House of the Dragon adapts. Though Oscar Tully’s line about building a temple with traitor’s bones was kept in the series, there’s a moment in the novel wherein a Riverlands knight stands over Cole and says, "I'll have no songs about how brave you died, Kingmaker.” But it’s possible that the implication is enough, after Cole already spent the better part of episode 5 wishing for a glorious death.All in all, it was a swift end to one of the most agonizing characters in the series. Though some fans say good riddance, others are a bit more forgiving of Frankel’s take on the contemptuous character. “Fabien Frankel you absolutely nailed the character of Criston Cole,” one fan wrote on social media. “When you truly hate a character, it usually means the actor did an incredible job.”