Just when I thought I was out … just when I thought I would no longer have that sweeping, ever so slightly irritating theme tune ringing around my head for hours on end, or feel the need to remember the difference between House Tyrell, Tully or Arryn, I suddenly find myself pulled back in to the Game of Thrones extended universe. The blame for this goes to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the likably low-key Game of Thrones spin-off series about a cloth-eared hedge knight and his shrewd child squire currently ambling through its first season on HBO/Sky Atlantic.
Before its arrival, I had departed Westeros for good. My faith had first been shaken by that rushed, badly plotted final season of Game of Thrones proper, which bashed to bits six previous seasons’ worth of finely tuned political intrigue and fascinating character dynamics in a succession of endless (often badly lit) CGI-laden battles, before flambéing them in dragon fire. Worse came with House of the Dragon, a dreary, po-faced, endlessly withholding slog of a prequel series, the enjoyment of which seemed to rest entirely on whether the viewer was familiar with deep lore buried within a Westeros history book that George RR Martin wrote instead of cracking on with that sixth novel. If, like me, you were not, the show proved to be little more than a confusing conveyor belt of platinum-haired poshos glowering at each other. Oh and dragons. So many dragons.
For my money, the dragons were always the worst bit of Game of Thrones. They were just about tolerable, or ignorable at least, when they were scrawny lizards perched on the shoulder of Daenerys Targaryen, but as they grew, season by season, they began to dominate proceedings, and tipped the show over into the deep waters of the fantasy genre. Pre-dragons, if you squinted extremely hard, you could just about convince yourself that you were basically watching a fantasy-tinged version of Wolf Hall, with its noble families clandestinely scheming away against each other. That was the real magic trick of Thrones, to convince those of us usually unwilling to dip our toes into fantasy, that we were watching something more than that. But dragons the size of aircraft carriers, including a zombified version that breathed ice instead of fire, made that basically impossible. The spell was broken.
Until, that is, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms came shuffling along. A self-contained, small-stakes story told across six half-hour episodes, it feels like a rejection of the bloat of later Thrones and House of the Dragon. (Happily there’s not a dragon in sight, bar one made of fabric in a puppet show.) Instead, Seven Kingdoms shares some of the cheerful, bawdy qualities of parts of Game of Thrones’s early years, particularly the adventures of mismatched pairings like Jaime and Brienne or Arya and the Hound. Though Ser Duncan the Tall and his companion Egg’s matters are far less pressing: Dunk just wants to enter a jousting tourney to cement his knightly reputation, honour his deceased mentor and earn some coin; the more inscrutable Egg just seems to be going along for the ride, though later episodes will reveal more at play (thanks to early screeners, I raced through the entire first season in a single afternoon). At points, the pair don’t seem to be doing very much at all, just meandering aimlessly about the tourney site, sniping away at each other.
Which is more than enough, really: you could happily watch these two do nothing much, forever. There’s a lovely, easy chemistry between giant rugby player-turned actor Peter Claffey, who plays the dim but lovably sincere Dunk, and the excellent Dexter Sol Ansell as keen-eyed though ultimately innocent Egg. And the figures they bump into – Daniel Ings’s riotous Lyonel Baratheon, a handful of Targaryens of varying shades of loathfulness – are absorbing and entertaining too. The show clanks up several gears in its back half, with just a dash of Thronesian nastiness to keep you from getting too comfortable.
In short, it’s terrific. So now I’m left in a tricky position: do I properly dive back into the Thrones universe? I’ll definitely come back to Seven Kingdoms when it returns for a second season. And I am more than happy to write off House of the Dragon rather than trudge through its final two seasons. But then, according to Martin, there are several other Game of Thrones spin-offs in various stages of development. What to do with them? The answer is to hold out for the ones that prioritise great characters and stories over flash and fantasy – and keep the dragons to a minimum.
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