The Tale of Dunk and Egg

Having covered the start of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, back when we reviewed the premiere, we can skip past basic setup and get right into the meat of the series. Set one hundred years before the events of Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had a few things it needed to do. First was, of course, getting people settled back into the land of Westeros. This isn’t a hard task for this series as House of the Dragon has also been running, meaning fans of the world (and the HBO franchise) haven’t exactly lacked for Westerosi content. Still, there could be people that hadn’t bothered watching House of the Dragon because they were burned out after the terrible ending of Game of Thrones, and this might have been their first taste back in Westeros.

On that front, then, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a great reintroduction to the world. Set within Westeros, but removed far enough from the events we already know, this series is able to play with the setting and imagery to make everything feel familiar without having to get bogged down in the details. We know the iconography of House Targareyen, we understand how the politics of the world works, we are familiar enough with setting and tone that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms can shorthand it all without having to spoonfeed everything to us again. It’s a nice reward for past fans that are finally coming back, feeling like a return to a familiar home we’ve missed for some time.

But A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms keeps its focus small. Its charm comes from the fact that, unlike Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon, the perspective in this series is narrow. We don‘t have a ton of different factions all vying for control of the continent. That might be going on elsewhere (although we don’t hear much of anything about it here), but our focus is on Sir Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg. We only have to care about two main characters, and their adventure together and Duncan tries to prove he’s worthy of being a knight. Whatever else might be going on is secondary, and that means viewers can easily settle in and enjoy a story about an unlikely hero and his faithful boy companion. It’s a nice change of pace for the franchise.

It helps that Sir Duncan the Tall (aka Dunk) is a worthy character to follow. He’s a simple man, clearly used to being picked on and beaten down, big in size but meek in spirit. This adventure for him, going to the tournament to prove himself as a knight, is his one chance. It’s not just to prove he’s worthy to be there to everyone else. Really it’s a story about how he’s trying to prove he’s worthy to himself. He doubts he should be there, he worries about what happens when he loses. He has no choice, though. If he can’t be a good knight here, how can he be one anywhere else?

But that is also the crux of the situation. He came to the tournament to prove he was a worthy knight in combat but, as the story goes on across the six episodes this season, what he really proves is that he’s a worthy knight in his heart. Yes, he’s still fairly untrained and he could certainly use more time practicing with weapons, both on the ground and on horseback. But when it comes to the knightly code of honor, of protecting the defenseless and upholding the honor of the crown, Dunk is mightier than just about any other knight at the tournament… which is why many of them flock to his banner when he had to prove himself in the big challenge at the climax of the season.

The season is a bit of a slowburn. It takes three full episodes before anything major happens, letting us spend a fair amount of time learning about the good-natured Dunk and his young squire, Egg. The drama picks up once Dunk has to put himself in between a puppeteer and the Targareyen that’s attacking her. Dunk fights off the knight, but because they’re a prince and Dunk isn’t, that leads to him getting thrown in the dungeon, with a likely execution (or at least the removal of a body part or two) as pennance. Dunk has to ask for a trial by combat to prove his worth, and it becomes a Trial of the Seven (seven knights for his accuser, and seven men on Dunk’s side) to fight each other, potentially to the death, all for “justice.” And it leaves Dunk sick.

Because we spent three episodes with him we could watch him befriend other people, nobles and knights and squires, and feel happy for Dunk when his allies came to his aid. But we also got to learn him as a character and we could see that none of this is what he wanted. He doesn’t want to see people get hurt. Hell, he doesn’t even seem all that comfortable with violence at all (even if his sheer size makes him decent at it). He’s a knight because he was a squire and this is the life he knows (which was better than being a beggar in Fleabottom), but his training was in the honor of it, not the bloodshed. There’s nothing honorable, in his eyes, in seeing someone die.

That makes Dunk a very different protagonist for this franchise. Most people are out for themselves, or greedy for power. They don’t care about the “people”, just their own honor. And we also see that because Egg, who (spoilers for the third episode of the season and everything that comes after) is also a Targareyen, respects Dunk and actively wants to be his squire, he’s going to be another honorable person in this world that has too few of them to begin with.

In a way that leads us back to Game of Thrones because this series feels like a perfectly engineered counterpoint to that series. For all the fans that watched all eight seasons of Game of Thrones and were left disappointed by how that series ended, the franchise has something else that feels not only like a palette cleanser, a way to forget the bad of the previous series and enjoy something new, but also as a reminder about what we all liked about this world. It can get us into this world we liked without having to think about all the terrible stories we watched and how the previous series totally screwed the pooch.

But it also is kind of an apology. It’s a very carefully plotted show with a short runtime (only six episodes this season) that tells a full story, beginning to end. If you only wanted to watch this season and move on, you could and you’d feel like you got everything you needed. Game of Thrones was one long, massive story and its successes and failures hinged on nailing its ending… which it absolutely did not do. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, in a way, says, “yeah, we know that other series failed you. Sorry about that. Have a complete story you can enjoy, and if you like it, come back next season for another complete tale about these characters you like.”

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is everything Game of Thrones is not. That’s a good thing, considering how that other series ended. If Game of Thrones had gone out on a high note, this series might feel like an afterthought, extended material just to keep people watching. But because Game of Thrones crapped the bed right when it needed to soar, fans have been left craving something else to justify all the time wasted on that series. House of the Dragon is fine, but it does feel like more of the same from Game of Thrones.

But A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is special. It’s short, it’s focused, and it gives you everything you want without expecting more from you. If we can get a season like this, year-to-year, it might just make us all fans of Westeros again. Or, at the very least, it’ll make us all fans of Dunk and Egg. They’re worth watching, even if the rest of Westeros burns.