Note: This story contains spoilers from “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” Season 1, Episode 6.
The “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” finale ended with Dunk, Maekar, and the rest of the Ashford Meadows attendees grappling with the loss of Baelor.
After dying at the hand of his brother defending Dunk (Peter Claffey) in the Trial of Seven, Baelor’s (Bertie Carvel) death looms large over the final episode of Season 1. Dunk spends much of the episode regretting the death — and the fact that the new King of Westeros died defending a hedge knight when he could have just had a hand or foot removed. Surely that is a better price than the death of a prince, right?
Showrunner Ira Parker told TheWrap he wanted Dunk’s growth between the premiere and finale to reside in a moment where he questions, maybe Baelor’s death was in service of Dunk needing to be around from great things to come — and that “fate and luck just need to be there to propel you forward.”
“It’s very interesting to me, because he has the line in the book, ‘might be one day I’ll need that foot,’ and for Dunk — this sh—ty wretch from the slums of Flea Bottom — to even have that thought is the biggest leap,” Parker said. “That is the biggest arc of a character, it’s almost unbelievably far for him to get there in his head. I love that he did. It just shows me a different side of him in that moment.”
While Dunk grows through the episode to accept that maybe he deserved to live and in doing so can go on to help others, Maekar (Sam Spruell) is another story. Egg’s father is directly responsible for Baelor’s death — having dealt the mortal blow himself in the previous episode. The finale shows a man preparing for his future hearing whispers that he meant to kill his brother on purpose to raise his status.
In that fear, he tries to convince Dunk to come with him to Summerhall to let Egg squire for him there. Dunk refuses but later tells the Targaryen lord he’ll take Egg on the road with him — away from the opulence of growing up highborn, he thinks there might be a chance Egg turns out different. In George R.R. Martin’s short story, Maekar is fairly quick to allow this to happen. The show’s version of the character denies Dunk, mostly because Egg represents the last chance he has at “getting it right” with one of his sons.
“At the end of the day, their dragons are all gone, they’re a family on the decline, he’s the fourth son who has always lived in the shadow of his brother, who he loves, but, is probably jealous of, and now he’s just killed him,” Parker said. “He knows his other sons are failures –nobody likes Aerion, Daeron is haunted. I do think he wants to be a good father, and I do think he wants to serve his family well, and he believes that putting good new princes into this line is important and is his duty. I think he’s got a lot of love for Egg — he’s smart, and he’s brave, and maybe he’s not as bad as his brothers — but there is something about the last kid, that all of your failed hopes and dreams sort of get heaped upon.”
The season ends with Dunk and Egg riding off to parts unknown — maybe to Dorne to see about a puppeteer — and Maekar shocked and angered his youngest son left with the Hedge Knight. The second season of the show is already shooting and set for a 2027 premiere, but Parker has much loftier designs for the structure of the series at large as the pair’s lives are chronicled. He wants to treat the series almost like Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.”
“I would love to make 12 of these,” Parker said. I’d like to do four with Egg the boy, four with Egg the Prince and four with Egg the king — but do them every 10 years. So do a pocket, Peter and Dexter can go off, have their careers, everybody goes and then in ten years we’ll come back and we’ll do another four of these. Just chart them through their whole life, because they do have such interesting lives. It does marry up with the flagship show so well at the end.”
He finished: “Honestly, there’s a decent chance we do just two of these and that’s it. And people say, this isn’t the ‘Game of Thrones’ that we love. There’s a decent chance we do three of them, and we just say, ‘OK, thank you very much.’ But I love these two so much, so we’ll see.”
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” Season 1 is now streaming on HBO Max.
