By Stuart Mitchner

However much my wife and I may disagree about other things, we’ve always been in accord about movies, whether it’s the late Alain Delon’s Once a Thief or HBO’s House of the Dragon.

What made the Delon film worth watching was the chance to see him in an American movie from 1965 with stunning location shots of San Francisco from the period when I lived there and was enjoying the first act of a screwball comedy romance with my future wife and viewing partner.

When House of the Dragon debuted two years ago, we gave up after the first episodes. Recently we tried it again out of sheer desperation, found the second season somewhat better, and are now looking forward to the third, which Variety says will go into production in early 2025. As always, the real stars were the dragons. What was lacking besides the sheer fun of Game of Thrones were characters as wild and witty as Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister and as dashing and loveable as Masie Williams’s Arya Stark.

Ulf Meets Silverwing

It is true, however, that toward the end of Season 2, some serious fun arrived in the person of the self-proclaimed Targaryen bastard Ulf, played with pub-crawling, whimsical ambiance by Tom Bennett. This most unlikely dragon rider finds his moment of truth when he steps on a dragon’s egg, crushing it to slime, and instead of being fried to a crisp on the spot, has a meet-cute with a female dragon named Silverwing. Talk about screwball comedy romances. First she gives him a poke with her fearsome snout that lands him on his back looking wonderingly up at his monstrous fate. Ulf naturally assumes that he was born to be a dragon rider (“Silverwing’s a goer, she is. We’re afraid of nothing”), which is fine until he begins to throw his scruffy weight around, leading Queen Rhaenyra to remind him that “A knight will comport himself with grace at the queen’s table,” to which he says, “Best make me a knight then.”

In a recent interview on RadioTimes.com, Bennett calls Ulf “one of the only characters in the show who ever smiles, let alone laughs. Every time I’m on set, I tried to use that.” Asked about going from powerless to powerful, he says, “It’s huge. Ulf is the bottom of the barrel; he’s Flea Bottom through and through. He’s poor folk and the oppressed. He’s the working class man under the thumb of the ruling classes and lived with that his entire life. Suddenly, he’s sitting on a nuclear warhead. The power shift is huge. Let’s see what he does with that.”

The Pirate Queen

Another promising new character is Sharako Lohar the pirate queen, who descends on the season 2 finale like the reincarnation of Ziggy Stardust. Played fiercely and funnily by Abigail Thorn, Lohar immediately initiates a competition with Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall, late of Oppenheimer). These two seafarers take screwball comedy to another level as kick-boxing mud-pit gladiators. Can we look forward to a Westeros variation on Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby? Probably not. Maybe just a crazy shipboard romance between the Master of Ships and the Pirate Queen. At the end of the battle, which at times evoked the deadly Deadwood match settled by a gouged-out eyeball, Lohar and Lannister emerge as two mud-caked creatures in a brave new world beyond gender, except that during a feast, when Lohar offers him the honor of impregnating her wives, Tyland nervously inquires, “How many wives?”

Always Delon

Alain Delon (1935-2024), remembered by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as “mesmeric and beautiful” with his “eerie, heartstopping, almost extraterrestrial gorgeousness,” would be wasted in Westeros. I doubt that many House of the Dragon viewers flash on The Crown’s Prince Philip when they see Matt Smith as Daemon Targaryen, but cast Delon in the part (or any part, even including Ulf) and they would see Delon, because Delon is always Delon whether he’s lowering himself into a den of thieves in Any Number Can Win, or dying in Ann-Margret’s arms in Once a Thief, or dealing death and dying as a Good Samaritan in Three Men to Kill, or literally losing his head after strangling the police inspector stalking him in Two Men In Town. Delon is harder to locate when playing a dandified Baron de Charlus in Swann in Love, his French translated in subtitles such as “Life is like an artist’s studio, full of half-finished sketches. We sacrifice everything to fantasies that vanish, one after another.” Sounds familiar. Like our streaming lives.

Toast!

Part of the fun of watching series TV and movies at home happens when a character is clearly done for, doomed, or about to be terminated, at which we shout, often in unison, “Toast!” This addictive expression, which online authorities date back to Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, could probably be found somewhere in Shakespeare. Another trope in our ongoing couch potato commentary first came into play when we were watching MI5 and it soon became obvious that the unsafest place to be was in a so-called “safe house.”

Speaking of Toast

Oh to be in Westeros now that September’s here and the St. Louis Cardinals are “toast.” At least, that’s the message the team’s owners are putting out. As August ended, my team for life was well south of the final Wild Card spot with 26 games left to play. We still have a mathematical chance, like about one percent, but to quote the Cardinal fan site Viva El Birdos, “this bird is all but cooked.” So the Cards are not only toast, they’re nearly put-a-fork-in-it cooked.

One way to fire up a team that’s still alive is to write them off, which the owners did around the time the Redbirds lost the first game of last weekend’s series with the New York Yankees. In the second game, the Cards beat the Yanks in the Bronx for the first time since the 1964 World Series. Last Sunday, on the same LG screen where the dragons danced and Delon romanced, I saw the Cardinals begin the fateful month of September by trouncing the Bronx Bombers 14-7 in the deciding third game. To watch the undaunted Cards pile on seven runs after New York had rallied to tie the game at 7 felt almost as good as seeing them win the 2011 World Series or put together the 17-game winning streak that took them to the playoffs in September 2021. Toast they may be, but like St. Louis native Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

The September Smile

Something my wife and I don’t have in common is her compulsion to donate to worthy causes; not saying that I don’t support the causes. All I know is I have a slew of complimentary calendars to choose from every year, and my pick for 2024 was the Amnesty International calendar with the smiling girl on the cover, who can also be found on the September page. Seeing that sweet and spirited smile, I’m filled with joyous, mindless hope. She’s from Bogota, Columbia, and she’s wearing a scarf around her neck that reads “Aborto Libre,” meaning “Free Abortion” during the International Women’s Day March. The photo is by Vanessa Jimenez/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images. The message is a reminder that much more than a playoff spot is at stake two months from this Tuesday.