House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 4 Ending Explained: Did Two Characters Just Die?

This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 2 episode 4 and Fire & Blood. Now that’s how you end an episode of a Game of Thrones series! House of the Dragon season 2 hasn’t started off slowly by any means. In the first three episodes alone, viewers have witnessed the beheading of […]

The post House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 4 Ending Explained: Did Two Characters Just Die? appeared first on Den of Geek.

Almost nothing’s more important than a first impression. It’s a chance to put your best foot forward and leave a mark that folks will remember. But what if you don’t want them to remember your best foot? What if the impression intended to be left is of five toes digging into their backsides—and crawling under the skin?

It’s a funny idea, yet for more than a hundred years filmmakers have reached for exactly such visceral reactions to character introductions and entrances. They have striven to create sequences, movie moments, and performances that promise or forewarn of terrible sights to come, and characters who will never be forgotten. But not all villain intros are created equal, and in this list we humbly attempt to figure out some of the most infamous and revered.

26. Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

We begin with an introduction so visually intense and immensely threatening that it makes this list despite the character never really appearing again for the rest of his film trilogy. Sauron is indeed introduced and dispatched in a prologue largely invented for the screen in Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, but his presence is so menacing that viewers are convinced the Dark Lord ever must never return to power or else it will spell doom!

Technically Sauron is just an impressive piece of armor work by costumer designers Ngila Dickson and Richard Taylor. He wordlessly appears for a few shots holding a ring in front of fiery volcano that might as well be the mouth of Hell and then later marches up to massacre some nameless men of Gondor, plus King Elendil. But in a strong lesson of visual storytelling, Sauron is always filmed from extreme close-ups with the camera looking up, or skewed canted angles of the camera peering down behind his shoulder as he looks upon the prey at his feet. Sprinkle in some breathless voiceover narration from Cate Blanchett as she recounts these events with the severity of scripture, and Howard Shore’s malevolent score, and you have an introduction fit for the Devil himself. But as we never see that devil in the flesh again, we cannot really put Sauron any higher.

25. Alonzo Harris in Training Day (2001)

Above we recognize the visual power of a villain who is introduced killing scores of men with each swing of his arm. However, the power of a single performance can move mountains. Consider then Denzel Washington’s deceptively quiet introduction in Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day. While the performance is rightly remembered these days for Washington’s supernova speechifying at the climax, he’s introduced silently attempting to savor his breakfast and read the newspaper. He also makes mincemeat of the film’s would-be hero, rookie cop Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke), between sips of coffee.

On Jake’s first day on narcotics, he meets legendary detective Alonzo at a diner where Washington completely bends the law of physics until Jake and the audience find themselves orbiting Alonzo’s center of gravity. He does this by forcing Jake, and ourselves, to wait while he finishes the paper. Every second of dead air adds to the unexpected tension. Then through a rapid barrage of sticks and carrots, classic Denzel grins interspersed with literally shouting “boom” unexpectedly to make his captive audience flinch, Washington dominates the scene and instantly begins his attempt to seduce us to a world of vice. In baby steps, he urges Jake to admit he fancied his female partner and slept with her while having a wife and child at home. In a minute, he’s corrupted the hero and the kind of film we’re watching.

24. Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Everything about Immortan Joe is an affectation as carefully scripted and designed as any performance for the screen and stage. And the designs this character—and by extension director George Miller and costumer Jenny Beavan—imagined are quite ingenious. Like a certain Dark Sith elsewhere on this list, Joe breathes through a mask that has painted on