What is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms? Having watched the entire first season, coming to Sky Atlantic, I’m still not sure I could tell you. It’s obvious that the second of HBO’s Game of Thrones spin-offs seeks to zag where House of the Dragon zigged, the latter a far more conventionally Thronesian epic of dynastic warfare. A Knight seems by comparison a modest, nutrition-light souffle of a project – if indeed souffle is the right word for a series with an unabashed zeal for bodily fluids. Blood, vomit, urine and excrement abound.
Set some 89 years before the events of Game of Thrones, and several decades after House of the Dragon, this new six-episode series is based on the “Dunk and Egg” novellas, a George RR Martin side project. Peter Claffey is “Dunk”, or Ser Duncan the Tall, a lowly Hedge Knight set on making his name. Dexter Sol Ansell is “Egg”, a young, bald-headed child who becomes Dunk’s dutiful squire. If there’s something vaguely daft about their names – you half expect them to meet a character called “Toast Soldier” – it’s certainly apt enough for the tone of the series. A Knight is a loose, low-stakes oddity. And it’s one that I can imagine many Game of Thrones fans abhorring.
