Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Hard Salt Beef’
It wouldn’t be much of a “Game of Thrones” spinoff without a visit from the House of the Dragon.
The Targaryens, long the monarchs of Westeros, arrive en masse at the tourney at Ashford Meadow in this week’s episode of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” Their appearance raises the stakes for our man Dunk considerably.
For starters, the prestige of winning against a field that includes royalty would be hard to measure. But the danger of running afoul of these all-powerful people can’t be ignored. They may no longer have dragons to back them up — the beasts go extinct sometime between when “House of the Dragon” is set and the events depicted here — but they certainly rule as if they do.
Just look at Egg, Dunk’s squire. The kid seems to know a great deal about the royal family and all the other great houses and knights in the realm. He even outs a member of the Kingsguard who is posing as a salt-of-the-earth son of a crab fisherman but is in fact the heir to a giant shipping empire. So it seems worth noting that the first thing he does when he sees their three-headed dragon sigil is high-tail it back to camp.
Some of the Targaryens we meet resemble the arrogant, platinum-blond beauties we’ve known from the other series in the “Game of Thrones” universe. One of the royals, a young prince named Aerys (Finn Bennett), mistakes Dunk for a servant and patronizes him accordingly. When the shabbily attired Dunk politely asserts that he is a knight, Aerys’s contempt only sharpens.
Aerys’s father, the foul-tempered and foul-mouthed Prince Maekar (Sam Spruell), appears to have little love for his son, whom he declares he’ll kill if he doesn’t shape up. But Maekar shares his offspring’s instinctive disdain for their social inferiors. Granted, the man is upset largely because his other sons, Prince Daeron and Prince Aegon, have gone missing on the way to the tourney.
When Dunk sneaks into Ashford Castle and gets caught eavesdropping on the royals, he learns firsthand that Maekar shares most of the other aristocrats’ contempt for hedge knights like Dunk and Ser Arlan. But Maekar’s older brother, Prince Baelor (Bertie Carvel), provides an exception to the rule. The heir to the Iron Throne, he appears to be an exceptional Targaryen in several respects. He has a plain, kindly face rather than a “Thin White Duke”-era David Bowie-like one, and his hair is dull gray rather than white gold. His brown-haired son, Prince Valarr (Oscar Morgan), strays similarly from the standard Targaryen blond.
Unlike all the other lords and knights Dunk approaches to vouch for the legitimacy of Ser Arlan, Price Baelor remembers the man well. To the towering knight’s gratitude and relief, the prince lists some of his mentor’s most notable tournament victories. He even recounts how they once split four lances against each other in a joust before Baelor finally emerged victorious. Dunk briefly insists it was seven before Baelor gently reminds him that tales sometimes grow in the telling. With that, Ser Duncan, who risked life and limb to slip into the castle and sneak around the royals at all, is admitted into the tourney.
But he’ll need proper gear to participate. This includes having his shield repainted with a sigil of his very own. In the course of awkwardly flirting with Tanselle Too-Tall, the towering, fetching puppeteer, he hires her for the job. He comes up with his new symbol with Egg’s help: an elm tree at sunset, with a shooting star overhead, representing their auspicious omen from the night before. Later, Dunk asks his sidekick whether he impressed the woman. “You are both gigantic” is about as much as the boy will concede.
Dunk also cuts a deal with an armorer named Steely Pate (Youssef Kerkour), who takes pity on the young warrior and offers him a discounted rate on a custom suit of armor. To afford it, Ser Duncan must sell his beloved horse. He promises her he’ll buy her back if — ahem, when — he wins, and gives the buyer some of his money back just to make sure she gets some tasty food to eat. Dunk may be stupid, as he has apparently been told all his life by everyone from Ser Arlan on down, but he has a heart of gold. In Westeros, that’s rarer than actual gold.
Not all of Dunk’s day on the tourney grounds is a drag. He and Egg thrill to another elaborate puppet show by Tanselle and her troupe, the moral of which is that all men are both knights and fools where women are concerned. Later, our dynamic duo is whisked into a tug-of-war by Ser Lyonel Baratheon, Dunk’s apparent new best friend. Ser Duncan holds down the anchor position, Egg clings to the rope like a monkey, and Ser Lyonel takes a break to grab a drink before returning to lead the squad to victory.
Both Dunk and Egg are pumped to watch the action get started when a great horn summons the participants in the first tilt to the field that night. Powerful lords and knights in colorful and elaborate armor matching the sigils of their houses clash against one another in wave after wave. A representative of House Tully, whose symbol is the trout, bites into a raw fish as a display of machismo. “The part with the fish was disgusting,” Egg concedes afterward.
As transported as he seems initially, however, Dunk soon begins having traumatic memories of his master’s death and burial. (These flashes are a bit different from the memories with which the episode opens, in which Dunk recalls his prodigiously well-endowed master urinating outdoors in the nude.) After the action concludes, Ser Duncan explains to Egg that while Ser Arlan was no prince, in any sense, the old hedge knight treated him like family when he had no obligation to do so. For Dunk, success at the tourney is more than a way to earn fortune and glory. He means to ensure his beloved teacher has a legacy that lasts.
Although we’re only two short episodes into the season’s brief six-episode run, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is already a significant shift from the somber grandeur and Grand Guignol horror of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon.” Its tone is light. Its threats are decidedly less than world-shaking. Its protagonist is a commoner, not a noble. Its editing is positively zippy in places.
Moreover, while the show relies on the interplay of Peter Claffey’s decent but dense Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell’s precocious problem child, Egg, the result is less a “Lone Wolf and Cub”/“The Last of Us” survival story than a mismatched buddy comedy. Ser Duncan may be the only contestant in the tourney dopey enough not to realize that there is more to his suspiciously knowledgeable and headstrong squire than meets the eye.
This is not to say he has nothing to teach his young charge. Throughout all his interactions, with both the highborn and the low, Dunk shows humility almost to a fault but not where his old master is concerned. True, Ser Arlan was a hard man with nothing spectacular about him. (With one very big exception.) Yet he was brave, he was loyal, and he took his vows seriously — to the lords he served, to the squire who served him and to the smallfolk to whom both he and Dunk belonged.
If Dunk can pass along those values to Egg, enriched by his uniquely sweet disposition, he’ll have made the kid a knight in all the ways that really count.
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