Season 1, Episode 6: ‘The Morrow’
“The gods don’t favor a fraud.”
“Then why have they favored me?”
This exchange between Ser Lyonel Baratheon and his newfound friend, Ser Duncan the Tall, is the key to understanding “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” “Ser” Duncan is not a knight at all.
A combination flashback and daydream appears to confirm it. Reflecting on the day his master died, Dunk rewrites Ser Arlan of Pennytree’s final minutes in his mind. The dying knight repeats the story of how his hometown got its name: Departing soldiers would nail pennies in the oak tree in the center of the village as they left, to be claimed upon their return. Most pennies, he says, were never retrieved.
“Why did you never knight me?” Dunk asks the knight, as if his whole life were already in the past. “Did you think I’d leave you? Or was it something else?” His fear, it’s clear, is that Ser Arlan considered him unworthy of the oaths.
In Dunk’s reverie, Arlan awakens to finish his story about the Pennytree. But we never see him knight Dunk, presumably because he never did knight Dunk. Now the towering wanderer’s impostor syndrome all season — not to mention his inability to perform the knighting ritual for Ser Raymun Fossoway — makes perfect sense.
But something extraordinary happens to Dunk in this episode. His allies and his enemies alike treat him like a true knight.
First there’s Ser Lyonel, who apparently abandons the comfort of his ornate pavilion to personally see to Dunk’s recovery. Lyonel is no fan of the Targaryens — “The only good dragon is a dead dragon” — and does not mourn Prince Baelor, whom he deems a fraud for fighting against Kingsguard sworn not to harm him. (It was only bad luck, and a stray swing of his brother Maekar’s mace, that killed him.) Lyonel invites Dunk back to his ancestral seat of Storm’s End to serve by his side, not just as a knight but also as a friend — “a brother,” even.
Ser Raymun is similarly fond of the man for whom he lost his place in House Fossoway, exiled by his sore-loser cousin, Lord Steffon. Changing his family sigil from a red apple to a green one, he begins his own breakaway branch with Red (Rowan Robinson), the friendly prostitute who was the first person other than Egg to cheer for Dunk in the trial. The visibly pregnant Lady Fossoway has convinced the inexperienced Raymun that their one night of passion after the trial has already given him a male heir. Dunk has the good sense simply to congratulate his buddy and move on.
Even Prince Maekar must concede that Dunk is, if not a great knight, then at least a good man. The death of his brother Baelor has stripped away all his usual foul-mouthed bluster, and he is visibly fighting back tears when he has his first audience with the man for whom Baelor died. The people, he tells Dunk, will blame both of them for the death of their beloved prince and heir to the Iron Throne — Maekar for dealing the deathblow, Dunk for dragging Baelor into his quarrel with Makear’s son Aerion.
Aerion, Maekar says, is being sent to the Free Cities as a result of his behavior at the tourney. (The same place, ironically, to which Dunk had once hoped to escape.) Perhaps some time abroad will make a better man of him, his father muses.
In the meantime, Maekar’s youngest son, Aegon — better known to Dunk as Egg — is the right age to become a squire, but he refuses to serve any knight but Dunk. The tall man declines to enter into Maekar’s service to teach the young royal. “I think I’m done with princes,” he says, the funeral pyre of Prince Baelor still weighing heavy on his heart.
At a second funeral, a different Targaryen prince changes Dunk’s mind. Daeron, the drunken dreamer, approaches Dunk at the raucous memorial service for Ser Humfrey Beesbury. (True to the family name, his coffin also serves as a beehive.) Dunk feels that a hedge knight like him is no proper master for a princeling. So Daeron asks Dunk to consider how he and Aerion turned out.
Both were raised in the proper royal fashion; Daeron wasn’t always a wastrel, and Aerion was once a really nice kid. Now look at them both. Does Dunk want Egg to become as broken as they are?
So Dunk goes back to Maekar to accept his request, on one condition: Egg can serve as his squire, but only if he joins Dunk on the road, living the life of a hedge knight. Now it is Maekar’s turn to decline. He is loath to effectively lose another son.
As Dunk readies to depart Ashford Meadow, however, the young prince catches up to him, saying that his lord father relented and has given “Ser Duncan” his blessing to train the kid. The two ride off, debating the proper number of kingdoms in Westeros; a closing title screen reading “A Knight of the Nine Kingdoms” appears to take Egg’s side in the argument.
There’s just one problem with this new arrangement: Egg didn’t get his dad’s permission at all. The season ends with Maekar angrily hunting for his errant son. Then the anachronistic strains of “Sixteen Tons” play over the closing credits, much as the episode opened with similarly incongruous jazz trumpets. In terms of deviation from the “Game of Thrones” musical norm, it’s the franchise’s boldest move to date.
So is “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” as a whole, though it feels strange to say so. After all, much of the show’s charm stems from how unassuming it is. That folksy whistle-and-acoustic-guitar music in the premiere set the tone for so much of what was to come. Indeed for half its run, “Knight” is mostly a lighthearted story about a massive fish out of water and his diminutive sidekick, searching for fortune and glory at the Westerosi equivalent of the Big Game.
But Dunk and Egg are such endearing figures — good-natured, adorable, deeply committed to the chivalric virtues to which other knights and lords pay only lip service — that when things get dangerous, the show feels as epic and high-stakes as anything from “Game of Thrones.” Such is our attachment to them, and such is the skill with which Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell portray them.
Add it all up, and you have a show that plumbs the same emotional and thematic depths as “Game of Thrones” or “House of the Dragon,” in a fraction of the running time, with a jaunty rhythm and a sense of humor all its own, signing off to the dulcet tones of Tennessee Ernie Ford — a decency fantasy, in which the man who proves truest to knightly ideals is not a knight at all.
“Ser Duncan” may think himself a fraud, but it is virtue, not vows, that make a hero. That’s great news! It means that in the battle to protect the innocent, any one of us can pick up a metaphorical sword and win the day.
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