In an episode of The Simpsons, Barney Gumble, Springfield's resident alcoholic, visits Moe’s Tavern, which has been turned into a speakeasy after the town realizes that prohibition laws are still on the books. Moe charges him $45 for a mug of beer. Flabbergasted, Barney says, “This better be the best-tasting beer in the world.” He takes an eager sip. He then says, “You got lucky,” and gives Moe $45. This is how I feel about the latest television series in George R. R. Martin’s Westeros universe, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
To say that I was burned by the ending of HBO’s Game of Thrones would be an understatement. All of us got burned. It was a final season and finale so legendarily awful it has supplanted Lost as the perennial example of “a show with an ending that pissed off all the fans.” Once showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss ran out of George R. R. Martin’s original material, it really showed—the show missed the zippiness, the twists and turns that made early seasons so much fun to watch, and all the characters got a lot dumber.
I watched Game of Thrones for ten years of my life, and then I assumed I would never need to know how to spell “Targaryen” ever again. How wrong I was. HBO has the rights to more than one Martin property, and by god, they’re going to use them. The follow up prequel, House of the Dragon, unfortunately suffers from a pretty similar issue as the ending of Game of Thrones. House of the Dragon is based on just one book, a history of the Targaryen family that’s written as an in-universe academic text about the history of the Targaryen dynasty. In the hands of truly great showrunners, this would give the crew room to make these characters truly sing, to expand them in meaningful ways. In practice, the expansions to the world and characters have diminishing returns, and House of the Dragon is less prestige drama and more high budget soap opera.
What I’m saying is: I did not expect A Knight of the Seven Kingdom, based on a collection of short stories by the same name, to be very good. I am quite fond of the stories of Dunk and Egg, as this collection of tales is called by fans, but I’m not a fucking idiot. I let the premiere of this show pass me by, only watching after I’d seen other people’s good reviews on social media.
And it’s great. It’s just great! Instead of being about the trials and tribulations of the royal families, like A Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, this show is just about A Guy. Ser Duncan the Tall was a squire to a knight, but that knight died just before they were about to reach a tournament. Ser Duncan intends, then, to enter the tournament himself, and ends up enlisting the help of a clever bald-headed boy called Egg.
Then quite literally, hijinks ensue. There’s a whole runaround that Duncan has to do in order to enter the tournament, and he visits a few of the noble houses that Game of Thrones fans probably remember: there’s a drunk Baratheon, and a whole cadre of Targaryens who hate each other. There’s a puppet show, with actual puppets being puppeteered on screen, one of them a puppet dragon that’s much more impressive than the series of CGI dragons this franchise has shown me. In fact, not having to animate an enormous CGI dragon has clearly opened up some room in the budget for nicer-looking wigs and costumes, as well as one really fun joust at the end of the third episode. In the most recent episode, there are no less than two original, in-universe dirty songs, one of which casually drops the entire Targaryen family line if you listen carefully. I am not necessarily gasping at outlandish turns of fate in this show, but I enjoy the way Ser Duncan and Egg bond with each other, and how this low-born hedge knight teaches chivalry and righteousness even to the royal family.
There’s as much depth to the worldbuilding as I remember from the first season of Game of Thrones, but it’s also a lot more fun overall. There’s no succession crisis; there’s just a dumb knight and his clever squire, and the drama of whether or not he’ll get to kiss the cute girl at the puppeteers’ booth. The whole thing is more T.H. White than, well, George R. R. Martin. There’s even a secret prince.
