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.
Claffey is an unusual lead – at 6ft 5in, he’s a few inches off the man mountain described in the source material, but he cuts an unwieldy figure nonetheless. He doesn’t seem so much intimidating as overgrown: there’s an awkward rawness to his physicality that the actor handles well. Eleven-year-old Ansell is good in spurts in a tricky role for a cherubic pre-teen, more convincing when channelling sincere emotions than when spouting vulgarity beyond his years. The supporting cast too are roundly successful, a collection of typical Thrones preeners and pouters; Daniel Ings gets the showiest role as the flamboyantly obnoxious Ser Lyonel Baratheon, a brash knight with a big future.
And yet, there’s something about A Knight that doesn’t quite work. It makes very little effort to justify its own existence – refreshing, perhaps, for a franchise that has too often treated its subject matter with stodgy self-importance, but ultimately frustrating. It is a character piece without a sufficiently interesting character at its core.
The sort of HBO-specialty gratuitousness that made Thrones such a buzzy provocateur is here, but seems crasser and more jarring than ever. We don’t get five minutes into the first episode before seeing Dunk expel faeces from his bare backside. (A nice “Welcome back to Westeros”, I suppose.) The very beginning of the second episode features a long shot of a man with a penis as big as a forearm, micturating in full view of the camera. It’s indecency for indecency’s sake.
Towards the end of the series, the violence starts to ramp up, and we get some gore to give the scatology a run for its money. It’s only in this final spell that A Knight starts to feel more like Game of Thrones; up to then, it feels utterly separate, operating in some sort of bizarre tonal otherworld. Maybe this is the appeal of a fractalling multi-series franchise like this – you can take a risk, and try something new. You can go smaller. But this series may just prove too different, and too small. As a spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms feels like a footnote. As a series in its own right? It’s utterly confounding.
