Two half-hour episodes remain in the show’s short first season. (It was renewed before it even debuted.) With the combatants already on the field, it feels as if we’re headed for a penultimate episode in the grand “Game of Thrones” tradition, a wall-to-wall battle, followed by an final episode of wrap-up with an eye toward the future. It’s an exciting feeling: I have never quite forgiven “Shogun” or “House of the Dragon” Season 2 for teasing battles that never arrived. (Or won’t until the next season, anyway.) That won’t be an issue here.
But it’s more than the prospect of combat that moves me. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a decency fantasy, a term coined by the comics critic Tom Spurgeon to refer heroic narratives that privilege kindness, cooperation, competence and the fundamental humanity of their heroes over individualistic derring-do or edgy anti-heroism.
Ser Duncan may or may not survive his trial of seven (though the show’s renewal feels like a tip-off). But in the same way that he most likely saved Tanselle’s life by putting himself between her and her attacker, his allies Prince Baelor, the newly minted Ser Raymun, the jocular glory hound Ser Lyonel and the others are all volunteering to try to do the same for him. It’s as if justice were contagious, spread whenever even an ordinary person like Dunk proves willing to defend the defenseless.
Tags: a knight of the seven kingdoms, fantasy, George R.R. Martin, new york times, tales of dunk and egg, TV, TV reviews