NFL
By: Rick O’Donnell
There’s a large part of the fandom that will tell you Game of Thrones was peak tv from seasons 1-4. Once the show caught up and eventually passed the books, some would argue it was never as good. House of the Dragon was exciting in its first season, but it was met with mixed reviews in season 2. Then came the next spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and a large portion of the fandom claims, “Game of Thrones is back!” So what is it about AKOTSK that brings us back to the early glory days of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire on television? Simple, it’s Dunk & Egg.
If you had to rewind to why Game of Thrones hit so hard early on, you’d probably have a long list of reasons the show pulled you in. Something about dragons, white walkers, and faceless men might not be for everyone, but it was the characters that pulled you in. Sure, those stories hammered home the appeal, but you rooted for Robb Stark against the Lannisters, you rooted for the bastard Jon Snow, and you fell in love with Ned Stark and his nobility and honor. You had someone to root for with clear lines drawn in the sand.
So how did A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms recapture that magic where some would say House of the Dragon failed? The unlikely pairing of Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg is hard to root against. A “hedge knight” and his squire, with all the charm and odd pairing of a buddy-cop movie, brought us back to the early seasons of GoT by giving us the underdogs.
For me, the duo reminds me a bit of Ned and Arya in season 1. Ned is an honorable man, and Arya is definitely trying to find her place in the world away from family expectations. The same could be said of Dunk and Egg as Ser Duncan is trying to prove he’s an honorable knight, where Egg is avoiding some spolierish things, and we’ll leave it at that. It’s the pairing of these two and the weight of their story that makes them easy to root for just the same way we wanted to root for the Starks.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms returns us to a time when dragons didn’t dominate the story. It wasn’t cluttered with three-eyed ravens and children of the forest. The show, taken from the novellas, cuts out the bulk of the story and gets back to its roots with the battle between the good/bad guys. The reason it succeeds where it seems House of the Dragon is failing is that you know who you want to win. Throw in the big reveals that non-book readers never saw coming, and it has all the flavor of GoT season 1. Toss in the lore and backstories of some of the more noble houses
