5 hours ago
5
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I first entered into A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms extremely gingerly. Game of Thrones (as we all know) all but cratered during its final season, to the point that watching it almost felt like a punishment. House of the Dragon was somehow even worse, for reasons we’ll come to shortly.
And so, presented with an opportunity to dip my toes back into Westeros, I hesitated. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me repeatedly due to a capitalist desire to permanently entrench all existing IP in order to minimise subscriber churn, shame on me.
What’s more, A Knight for the Seven Kingdoms looked terrible. All available clips looked so grimly lighthearted, with all the comedy coming from big heroic moments being undercut with silliness. Want to see a classic Game of Thrones archetype get lost on the way out of an important meeting? Check. Want to see him suffer through explosive diarrhoea behind a tree? Also check. Intentionally or otherwise, the series seemed to market itself as a low-rent spoof of what came before; the Meet the Spartans of Game of Thrones.
How wrong I was. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has just ended its (refreshingly brief) run, and it may well qualify as my favourite Game of Thrones project yet. The previous shows all came with an element of “eat your vegetables”, more interested in laying out the intricacies of multigenerational dynasties than propulsive plot. Watching an episode, especially at first when you’re plunged headfirst into a maelstrom of ancestors and rivalries and several thousand characters who all sound like they have the exact same name, was dizzying. Until now, Game of Thrones has very much been for people who already know the books inside out. Anyone else? There’s Wikipedia, do try to keep up.
But the most thrilling thing about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is how completely simple it is. The story, as it stands is this: there’s a guy who wants to be a knight so he can go jousting once. That’s it. There’s no secret incest or magical tree. There’s no existential threat to all of mankind. There are no dragons and even royalty (which is, as the title states, the whole point of Game of Thrones) is dealt with glancingly.
Now, obviously something as bare bones as this risks complete failure if its fundamentals aren’t exactly in order. But, magically, they are. Ser Duncan the Tall, AKA Dunk (the guy who wants to be a knight), is a great big lovable bozo, all heart and good intentions. And, as played by the broad, open-faced Peter Claffey, it is impossible to root against him.
Compare this (a decent man who just wants something simple) to the incomprehensible sprawl of House of the Dragon. To enjoy that show, you need to not only train yourself to tell any of the several dozen identically wigged characters apart, but to also research where each of them stands in their overgrown sprawl of a family tree. There’s a Rhaena, a Rhaenys and a Rhaenyra. There’s a Laena and a Laenor. There are identical twins called Arryk and Erryk. The whole thing is absolutely perverse.
Here, though, there’s a Dunk and there’s an Egg, and then there are a clutch of happily distinct characters who, since the show is set on a series of road trip novellas, we probably won’t even see again anyway so we don’t need to memorise anything. A Game of Thrones series that doesn’t feel like close-reading the Old Testament. Imagine.
Plus, I was wrong about the comedy. While the tone is noticeably lighter than its self-important forebears, the penultimate episode of the series might qualify as one of the most brutal things you will ever see. This is the episode where the joust actually happens, and Dunk spends the majority of its duration being beaten and stabbed in a horrible squelchy closeup, often from his own point of view. The violence he suffers is unbelievably galling, and it’s made so much worse by the fact that we know him and understand his motivations perfectly.
For a while, that episode had a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. And while it has dipped a little in the last week, it’s still high enough to rank as one of the top five highest rated episodes across the entire franchise. You’ll notice that no House of the Dragon episodes make up the remaining four spots. Also, in terms of ratings, it was recently reported that A Knight of the Seven Kingdom now averages 1 million viewers per episode more than The Pitt. And The Pitt is so successful that it has been widely touted as the saviour of television as we know it.
What we have, in other words, is the preferred future for Game of Thrones. Shorter seasons. A tighter focus. Enough room for a little fun here and there. If the franchise is going to expand, this is the direction it should expand into. But in the immediate future, can we have more Dunk and Egg as soon as possible, please?
