He’s a Tall One

It’s hard to get excited about Game of Thrones. Okay, yes, not everything HBO is putting out based on A Song of Ice and Fire is called “Game of Thrones”, but at the same time, that series is why we all got interested. We all tuned in, season after season, for Game of Thrones, and when that series fell apart right at the end, it effectively drained away any enthusiasm we, collectively, had to the franchise. Game of Thrones killed itself, and now we don’t really need more Game of Thrones. It’s not that the prequel follow-up, House of the Dragon, is bad, it’s just that it’s so much harder to care when it’s all building to that train wreck.

Hell, you can feel it coming even from the big man himself, George R.R. Martin. He seemed to have such enthusiasm for it when the series first launched, and he talked about how the last couple of novels would come along and would tie things up… and then the television series got ahead of his books, and it feels like he saw what happened and even he can’t bring himself to finish this folly now. “No, I swear, my ending wasn’t going to be like that. It was going to be something else… I’ll show you…” and then he hides his old computer and pretends to not see all the messages fans send him. “One day,” he swears to us, while working on some other project that entertains him more.

And so it is with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the newest spin-off / prequel for the franchise. Based on the Tales of Dunk and Egg series of novellas, these seem to be what Martin is actually most passionate about right now. It’s a prequel, but it had very little to do with the main plotline of his world. Instead it uses Westeros as a backdrop to tell a story about a hedge knight, one without a kingdom or lord to call home, wandering the countryside and working for whoever will have him, alongside his young squire who has his own secrets to keep. The novellas are enjoyed by fans, and it would seem like this would be the kind of series, if any, that maybe could get some attention from the fanbase once more. So long as (metaphorically as well as literally in the first episode) it doesn’t shit the bed.

In the first episode we’re introduced to Dunk (Peter Claffey), a lowborn squire who assumes the role of a knight when his own knight, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), dies of natural causes. He swears he’s been knighted by Pennytree, but as it happened just between the two of them on the eve of Arlan’s death, without any nobility to see it, no one really believes him. He’s just a hedge knight, he’s not a real knight, not in the ways that matter, like title, and nobility, and money.

Still, there aren’t a lot of options for a hedge knight other than to do knightly things, like compete in a tournament. It’s that or sell his horses and go work as a soldier for a city watch. With an event in Ashmore just days away, Dunk really wants to enter (as Ser Duncan the Tall) in the hopes he might make enough money to survive for a little while. He doesn’t need to win the whole thing, just a match or two so he can make a go of it. Helping him is Egg, a young boy he meets on the road to Ashmore who seems knowledgeable of knights and nobility, certainly more knowledgeable than he should be. Still, it will be a tough road ahead for the two of them to make Dunk into a knight that has any hope of being respected.

To its credit, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms seems designed to dispel any notion that this is just another Game of Thrones. That series, and House of the Dragon, are concerned with the power players of the kingdom, the great families fighting for control of the world and the right to rule it. By its very design (both in the novellas and the series adapting them), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t have any care for that (at least, not in its first episode). There are lords and princes and all the rest, sure, but the story is about surviving a single match in a tournament, finding the next meal, getting just a little coin. This is a street-level (or, really, a dirt-level) adventure in Westeros, which makes it feel very different right out of the gate.

The lack of lofty ambitions also means that the very perspective of the series is different. Instead of multiple factions each getting their own plotlines, swirling and twisting around each other, there’s just Dunk, on the road, trying to figure out what’s next in his life. We have one protagonist, his assistant, and a big, wide world that he has to navigate, and that keeps the story very focused in a way this franchise hasn’t shown us before. It’s different, and different is good when we already have seen how those otherwise lofty ambitions can fall apart. Telling a simple tale about a knight and his squire might just be what this franchise needs.

Certainly it’s easy to cheer for Dunk as he goes about his journey. He’s a soft-spoken, simple guy who just wants to be able to be somewhat successful in his chosen career. You can tell he doesn’t want to be the best knight in the realm, that he doesn’t have lofty dreams beyond his next meal and a place to sleep. He’s relatable in ways most Game of Thrones characters haven’t been in quite some time. He seems like a genuinely good guy just trying to make a life in a world that can otherwise be hard and mean, and that goodness does tend to rub off on people around him.

We don’t know nearly as much about Egg, with the kid being a side character that, in this first episode, follows along being Dunk until the hedge knight finally, grudgingly agrees to take them on as a squire. It’s obvious there’s more to the kid than he lets on, but (without looking up spoilers from the novellas) those secrets are his to keep for now. He’s just a young boy looking to see the world with a knight, and he might just be helpful, and soften the already good-natured guy even more.

With all that said, there’s a lack of momentum in this first episode that does hold it back some. There are only six episodes for this first season, which may fully adapt the first novella. If so, you’d like to see just a little more push to its plotline. By the time we close out the. First episode Dunk has only just accepted Egg into his service and the knight hasn’t even made it into the tournament. He doesn’t even know if he’s going to be allowed to compete. Likely that comes in the second episode, but so little really happens here that by the time the credits rolled I looked at my wife and we both said, together, “that was it?” It’s not that what we got was bad, just that there wasn’t quite enough to really hook someone in the story.

It speaks to the fact that despite its smaller ambitions, this series was clearly designed for binging. Once the full season is out this will all likely play as one full movie and will have all the momentum it needs. But as a single episode, a premiere for where the series will go, the series is missing something. We need just a little more, that last hook that makes this compelling watching. I like Dunk and Egg and I think they’ll be great in a series that gives them something to do… we just need that something. When it happens, this series can sing, but as a single taste of the series to come this first episode wasn’t quite enough.

For fans of the franchise (however many of them still exist) this first episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms might be enough to get them interested in more Game of Thrones (or call it what you will). For anyone on the fence, though, maybe wait until the full six-episode season is out. Then, I’m sure, the adventures with Dunk and Egg will really take off.