Warner Bros.
“I think I’m done with princes,” says Ser Duncan (Peter Claffey) at a pivotal moment in HBO Max’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms—surely echoing the sentiment of everyone who’s slogged through the last three seasons of Game of Thrones and the first three of its sequel, House of the Dragon.
Unfortunately for Ser Dunk the Tall, the princes aren’t done with him.
That may work to his benefit, and hopefully ours as well. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is the best news from Westeros since Ramsay Bolton got wolfed down by his own hounds in the Battle of the Bastards. It’s a lighthearted (but heartfelt) tale in a franchise that’s otherwise collapsed beneath its epic weight.
Don’t go looking for familiar Game of Thrones tropes here.
There are no cast-of-thousands set-piece battles, no dragons (not real ones anyhow), very little talk of bending the knee, and only one bona fide castration. The harlots keep their bodices on. The only nudity we get is a side view of Claffey’s buttocks as he takes a crap.
But it’s got things rarely seen in Westeros. A heart. A plot you can follow without a map. And something even Tyrion Lannister could only manage when he wasn’t too busy being drunk and knowing things: a sense of humor that Chaucer would applaud.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has accomplished in six half-hour episodes what Game of Thrones never could in eight seasons: a sense of what it’s actually like to live in Westeros (Duncan nearly backs out of the empty tavern when the keeper says, “Sit where you like.” We’ve all been there). It works not because it leads us into exotic new territory, but because the muddy ground we’re on feels refreshingly real.
The creators admit to few direct influences on the show or The Hedge Knight, the 1998 novella that inspired it. They could learn something from honest Ser Duncan. Pop culture references cling to it like the muck on Dunk’s trousers: spaghetti Westerns, samurai movies, A Knight’s Tale, and for all we know that wrestling picture Barton Fink was supposed to write. As Duncan, Claffey gives off serious palooka vibe.
We meet him as he buries his aged mentor, a hardworking but unstoried hedge knight called Ser Arlan of Pennytree, who may have knighted his squire Duncan just before his death but probably didn’t. Dunk’s going with the title anyway.
He needs it for the local tournament, which is the only path that houseless knights have to upward mobility. To enroll, he’ll need some knight of repute to vouch for him, which nobody will because who the hell was Ser Arlan of Pennytree?
Dunk works with what he’s got. He’s tall and bluff. He’s got Ser Arlan’s leftover armor and horses, and a cracked shield that a traveling puppeteer with the delightfully apt name of Tanselle Too-Tall (Tanzyn Crawford) agrees to repaint for him.
And he’s got a squire, albeit one he didn’t ask for. This is when you really get the feeling you’ve been in this story before, and way too recently.
When your plot revolves around a hardscrabble wandering knight and his sidekick, a bald little fellow named Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) who turns out to be of the blood royal, another famous name must be mentioned. Nobody watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is going to get through this tournament without thinking about Ser Duncan’s greatest rival.
Not those naughty Targaryen princes. I mean The Mandalorian.
HBO wants us all to remember that Martin wrote The Hedge Knight back when George Lucas was still trying to figure out what a female Hutt looked like. But come on, Warner Bros. Discovery. Don’t tell me you weren’t trying to ride that wave.
At least Egg isn’t a puppet. He’s called that because he’s as bald as one, but at a critical moment we find out he shaved his head to hide the trademark silver locks of his house, and “Egg” is short for Aegon: there are as many Aegons in House Targaryen as there are Paulies on Staten Island.
Princes in disguise can be handy when the local law is preparing to break out all your teeth and cut off your hand, which is what the Targaryen house knights are fixing to do after Duncan protects Tanselle from ca-razy Prince Aerion (Finn Bennett), who does not like puppeteers who make fun of dragons because he thinks he is one.
You read that right. The House of the Dragon always did have more than its share of grandiose nutjobs. Just to remind us that we’re still in George R.R. Martin territory, Aerion vividly snaps Tanselle’s finger. Oh, you like that character? Here, let me mutilate her for you.
Which is how Duncan loses his freedom and gains the affection of the common folk and every rival house at the tourney. The Targaryens are the Kardashians of the Seven Kingdoms. They haven’t been popular for a long time but they won’t leave.
Not all of them are bad. Prince Baelor “Breakspear” (Bertie Carvel), heir to the Iron Throne, knows that his nephew Aerion is a worthless prig and so gives Dunk a shot at keeping his body parts: trial by combat, which Aerion one-ups by demanding “trial by seven.”
Each side must supply seven knights to duke it out on the field of honor. That letter on Martin’s desk is from Akira Kurosawa’s estate.
George R.R. Martin knows how to pillage history effectively. In characters like Ser Arlan and Prince Baelor, he captures the blunt reality of medieval knighthood that lurks behind the heavy tapestries of chivalric legend.
There were more Ser Arlans than any history will ever record. “Hedge knight” applies a common medieval insult for anyone practicing a trade without official license. There were hedge priests and hedge lawyers, hedge doctors and for all I know hedge plumbers and hedge hedge-trimmers.
For men of Arlan’s and Duncan’s sort, knighting was a grunt job that took as much hustle as muscle. They worked their way from one tournament to the next, one battle after another, trying to get a steady gig with some baron or earl who would feed them. They had about as much time for chivalry or courtly love as your average Uber driver has for joyriding in his Tesla.
The Prince Baelors of the world—he seems to have been modeled on England’s Edward the Black Prince—embody how royals were supposed to care for their knights, if not their kingdoms. A “good” ruler wasn’t one who offered free health care to his subjects. He was expected to win battles and remember the names of knights who had fought or fallen in his service.
This is what Baelor does, why he comes to Duncan’s aid in a tight spot, and what ultimately brings on his doom. At least he didn’t die of dysentery like the Black Prince.
Between these twin poles of medieval power are the other knights and nobles who will fight at Duncan’s side: Ser Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings), the “Laughing Storm,” a freebooting noble who plays the tourneys for profit (as many nobles did) and has the fancy plate armor to show for it; one-eyed Ser Robyn Rhysling (William Houston), the “maddest knight” in the Seven Kingdoms; and the newly knighted Ser Raymun Fossoway (Shaun Thomas), called “The Reluctant” because he barfs before the battle. Seeing how Westeros hands out nicknames, he could have done a lot worse.
The big combat scene shows more technical knowledge of real medieval battle than Game of Thrones ever gave us: no Starbucks cups or water bottles in sight. We get actual chain mail, the kind that’s designed to grab hold of the pointy end of a weapon rather than deflect it. We get a helm that Dunk can barely see out of and winds up discarding, as most jousting knights did after they’d been unhorsed. We get skull-shattering battle maces that were way more lethal than broadswords.
And we get Egg doing what sidekicks are supposed to do when the hero is down: shouting “Get up!” as the ref prepares to call the match for his opponent. Tell me Martin wasn’t watching Wallace Beery pictures when he wrote this.
One of the great single-combat scenes in Game of Thrones—the showdown between Pedro Pascal’s showboating Oberyn Martell and Gregor Clegane—proved how unwise it is to take bows before your opponent is completely dead.
I feared something similar was coming in the climactic duel of this series, but Ser Duncan is made of different stuff. He ends the battle not to prove his mettle or champion his innocence, but because he’s all too aware that other knights are dying in his cause.
This puts A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in loftier territory than Martin is used to leading us into—wait, a good guy does the right thing and lives?—but it’s welcome morality for a storyworld that is generally allergic to morals. Ned Stark lost his head because he thought you should warn your enemies you’re coming for them. Ser Duncan doesn’t go that far. But he is clearly trying to do better by his profession.
This also captures an historic truth: knights were not very popular in medieval Europe. When they weren’t entertaining people at tournaments, they were taking your stuff at swordpoint. Duncan, a former street rat whose girlfriend was murdered by corrupt Gold Cloaks, didn’t get rich in Ser Arlan’s service. But the old man did teach him something: when you see a helpless person getting the shit kicked out of them, you’re supposed to do something about it.
This is the fulcrum around which A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms pivots, and what sets it apart from much of the Martinverse. Young Egg knows he was born into a lunatic family of entitled sociopaths. Someday he will be King Aegon the Unlikely—so a wandering fortuneteller predicts—and he needs a worthier mentor.
Martin does well with thwarted children like Bran Stark and Lyanna Mormont, who are too gifted for their own good. Egg is of that kind but suffers less for it. So far.
Egg has one of his odder but more oddly revealing insights in Ser Lyonel’s tent, when all the drunken Baratheon bannermen sing about a three-fingered woman named Alice, who used the digits she had left to pleasure men in a, well, let’s just say fundamental fashion.
The song is about as philosophically laden as a poem about a gentleman from Nantucket, but Egg decides there is something truly noble about a woman who finds a way to turn her limitations to her advantage. Surely “Alice” was not her real name. He believes it must have been Hope, because she gave more than was sought and her name “belongs to all who invoke it.”
This scene—a creation of the show, not the novella—goes to the heart of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in the way a stirring battlefield speech could not. Ser Duncan is not of noble stock, any more than Ser Arlan of Pennytree was a knight of renown. But they both sought hope; and of such rough fabric are songs woven, even if they aren’t the kind you sing when you’re sober.
This is what makes A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms a light but perfectly paced series, one that HBO Max has wisely renewed for a second season and perhaps a third. It’s not about noble people, but it has nobility within it. It’s not big, but it has a tall hero and a small gleam of wisdom. Proof that you don’t need princes to make an epic. You just need good characters and a little hope.
Extras are plentiful and include featurettes, a set tour, web documentary series, Inside The Episode featurettes (Episodes 1-6), character spotlights, and blooper reel.
