SERIES REVIEW – Is this the Westeros story we actually need right now? With the real world getting grimly more Game of Thrones-adjacent by the week, a gentler underdog ride about a big-hearted knight and his strangely luminous squire might be the rare kind of comfort fantasy that earns its keep. Sometimes it’s nice to watch a fable where the question isn’t who dies next, but who manages to stay human under the armor.

“They’re kind of cute, actually.” That’s not a sentence you expect to say about anyone in Westeros, the home of Game of Thrones and its blood-soaked, ruthless, incest-tinged, often downright rotten moral climate. But the latest franchise spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, pulls exactly that surprised softness out of you – its central duo is so inherently likable that rooting for them feels less like a choice than an involuntary reflex.

Their names – as in the George R. R. Martin novellas the series is based on – are Dunk (short for Ser Duncan the Tall) and Egg. Dunk (Peter Claffey, a satisfyingly imposing former Irish rugby player, most recently seen in Bad Sisters) was taken in by a roaming “hedge” knight with no noble title, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb). Ser Arlan raises the boy, but dies before he can ever formally knight the man. We first catch up with Dunk as he buries his mentor under an old elm, takes up his arms, and walks straight into the kind of trouble that only looks avoidable from a distance. He’s a simple soul – perhaps aggressively so: he has the silhouette of a medieval action hero, but the temperament of an eager, slightly baffled Labrador – and he sets off to find a lord worth serving as a hedge knight.

Two outsiders on the back roads

Luckily, one of his earliest stops is a tavern that drops him into the orbit of Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), a bald, almost otherworldly-looking kid with a roaming, razor-bright intelligence – a tiny frame with a surprisingly massive screen presence. Egg volunteers to become Dunk’s squire (“You look like you need me the most”), and suddenly the two long shots – one brawny, one brilliant – are moving through Westeros’s side roads about a century before Game of Thrones. The Targaryens still sit the Iron Throne, familiar surnames drift in and out of conversations, and a jousting tournament ahead might finally give Dunk the win – and the patron – he needs.

Within the Game of Thrones ecosystem, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms plays like a deliberate exhale. If House of the Dragon arrived partly to keep the franchise’s engine running after the original series’ ending left fans yelling into the void, this new show feels built for a different purpose and a different tempo. What that means for anyone still clinging to hope about A Song of Ice and Fire reaching a definitive finish is probably not a topic worth staring at for too long.

The contrast is obvious in the pacing. Where Game of Thrones burned through story like wildfire, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms often lets an episode (around the half-hour mark, not the heavy hour of its predecessor) breathe until you realize just how little has “happened” in the conventional sense. The real engine is the growing bond between knight and squire – even if Egg’s sharper understanding of how the world works sometimes makes it unclear who’s mentoring whom – and the emotional investment the show quietly tricks you into placing on them. It’s the kind of attachment that, in Game of Thrones terms, would have been a rookie mistake the moment you saw what the story did to Ned Stark.

Less cold calculation, more heart

That doesn’t mean it’s a kids’ show. There’s plenty of swearing, some inventively nasty torture (more described than lingered on, but still), and a moment of full-frontal male nudity that… raises questions. Later, there’s an episode with enough gore to make it a bad idea for unsupervised, non-Egg-sized viewers. Still, it’s dramatically gentler than either Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon. Instead of severed body parts, you get Dunk repeatedly smacking his head on low beams. Instead of infamous weddings, you get averagely drunken tavern nights. Instead of people being served up in pies, you get the reassuring absence of people being served up in pies. It’s oddly restful – and there’s no Ramsay Bolton, except in the corners of your memory where he belongs.

Which inevitably raises the question: who is this for? Not children, who might otherwise fall for the tale of a bumbling adult periodically rescued by the wise kid at his heel. Not epic-fantasy fans itching for the next major chapter of A Song of Ice and Fire (dragons are still within living memory here, but this stretch of early Westeros is largely free of overt magic and sorcery). And while the series gestures toward bigger ideas – innocence corroding, the trade-offs of feudal thinking – it doesn’t dive deep enough into them to fully lure in audiences beyond the hardcore Martin faithful.

Maybe that’s the point. It isn’t trying to set anything on fire, on-screen or off. The real world has become too Westeros-like as it is. The land of legendary violence is now our safe space. We’re all Dunk, hoping for protection – even if it comes from something as fragile, and as stubbornly bright, as an Egg.

-Gergely Herpai „BadSector”-