‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Went Full ‘Battle of the Bastards’ (and Then Some) This Week
This story contains spoilers for the latest episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, “In the Name of the Mother.”
Amid the slew of so-so spin-offs and sequels inevitably wrung out of mega-franchises in our current media era, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has been a breath of fresh air because it doesn’t just feel like another Game of Thrones retread. Sure, it’s still set in Westeros, and all of the familiar trappings are there—it’s light-hearted, but not without grime and grit, nor those more visceral moments that call back to Thrones at its gnarliest—but the stakes are comparably lower, and the scale more human. (To put it bluntly: there’s no looming existential threat in the form of a frozen zombie army, nor dragons ready to go nuclear on the denizens of King’s Landing.)
Sure, it’s fun to have what is essentially a buddy comedy set in the Thrones universe, but it’s the human-level perspective that has really made it stand out. And so we come to “In the Name of the Mother,” the series’ latest episode, in which that jovial tone is exchanged for peak-Thrones brutality in a gnarly battle sequence that rivals the grit of the Battle of the Bastards. It primarily centers around the Trial of the Seven, forced upon Dunk (Peter Claffey) after he came into conflict with Prince Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett)—a gladiatorial fight to the death which pits Team Dunk against Team Aerion. What we get is a marked tonal detour from what has come before: there’s hardly a gag, nobody cracks a smile, and the fighting is steeped in blood, mud and viscera, an all-out scrap scored by the clash of swords against chainmail, and smashing of maces against helms.
The first instinct might be to say that it’s all very classic Thrones, and in some ways, sure. The original series had its fair share of brutal battles, given the world of Westeros’ ever-violent nature, frozen in a state of conflict that spanned its eight seasons. But the Trial of the Seven retains the personal scale of Seven Kingdoms to great effect: this isn’t a spectacular, rigorously choreographed battle between expansive armies, so much as a graphic scrap in the dirt, Dunk and Aerion—the latter decked out in a fiery set of dragon-esque armor—going at it like they’re brawling on a barroom floor. For much of the fighting, we’re quite literally locked into Dunk’s POV, watching him get skewered and smashed through the tight view of his helmet visor, trading away the wide landscape shots that dominated Thrones battles of old for a shot design that is terrifyingly claustrophobic.
The violence of Thrones has always been gritty and unglamorous, but it’s hard to think of another sequence, save for the aforementioned Battle of the Bastards—in which Jon Snow (Kit Harington) clambered over corpses, sucked into the chaotic maelstrom of war—that felt so unrelentingly, brilliantly grim. As he readies himself to fight, we mostly hear Dunk’s panicked breathing. As his own physical state declines across the trial, repeatedly thrown to the ground and stabbed like a pincushion, the sound design deteriorates into muffled noise, his head rattled as he slips in and out of consciousness. Amid the chaos and confusion, he clambers around like a drunk. The mounting injuries are visceral and gross. When Dunk pummels Aerion’s face into the mud with his armored fist, it’s with the furious desperation of a man fighting off a wild animal.
Many have lauded Seven Kingdoms for bringing out the lighter side of the Thrones universe, but seldom has Westeros been so raw, powerful, and real. Perhaps that’s really what has made Seven Kingdoms such a stellar spin-off. Though we did enjoy the laughs.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
