**Major spoilers for House Of The Dragon season three episode one below**

House Of The Dragon fans have been left horrified after the third season’s debut featured a mother-son kiss on screen.

The Game of Thrones prequel show, based on aspects of George R. R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, returned last night (June 21), airing on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK.

In the season three premiere, Aegon’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) family grappled with his sudden disappearance, with the chaos triggering a shocking move from Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), who, during a tense conversation with his mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke), kisses her on the lips.

Although its predecessor also depicted incest onscreen to shocking effect, fans have been somehow even more shocked by the mother-son moment. “That was easily the most uncomfortable kiss I’ve ever seen on TV,” wrote one X user after the episode aired, while many settled for sharing gifs of people retching.

While some saw the moment as a nod to the morally dubious family Aemond comes from: “He’s a Targaryen, what do you expect”, others felt the moment was unnecessary, and “did nothing for the storyline or for his character”.

You can check out more social media reactions below.

Ahead of its debut, showrunner Ryan Condal revealed to EW that the season would open with the epic sea confrontation dubbed The Battle Of The Gullet. Describing it as “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made”, he said the sequence was essential to include in the show.

“To try to tell this story without doing the Gullet would be trying to film Lord Of The Rings without doing the Battle of Helm’s Deep,” he said. “If we were gonna do it, we had to do it right. And that meant dragons and ships and multiple theatres of conflict.”

Indeed, that battle see’s a major character death in Harry Collett’s Jacaerys Velaryon. NME sat down with him to discuss filming the major moment, which required him to be strapped to a motorised saddle and repeatedly dunked into tank of “really cold” water.

“When I got out of the water, the medic ran over and was like, ‘You need to come with me right now,’” Collett recalled. “My hands had turned blue and she thought I had hypothermia…”

However, it turned out to be coloured dye running from Jacaerys’ riding gloves. “I’d worn them for the whole show, but obviously they weren’t made for water… For a second, I looked at my hands and thought, ‘Oh no, this is bad. Maybe I’m really dying.’ They say that your skin changing colour is one of the last stages [of death]… Genuinely, I think it put a lot of panic into people. That was one of my funniest moments of filming, actually.”

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