“Get up! Get up, ser!”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Get up. Those two words echoed again and again through this week’s thrilling instalment of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, taking on a range of meanings from the despairing, to the inspiring. As I predicted last week, this was an incredibly violent episode. But, although I have now taken the opportunity to read all the books, even I wasn’t prepared for just how violent it would look onscreen.
I also wasn’t prepared for being catapulted almost immediately into a lengthy flashback to Dunk’s less than happy childhood in the squalid Flea Bottom district of King’s Landing. This is entirely new material that isn’t taken from the books – well, they’re very short, and even with the show’s short episodes and short seasons, some expansion is needed.
And very good it is too. In the books, we get hints of this backstory, so it was nice to see it fleshed out here, as we see quite how nasty Dunk’s childhood was, and how he comes to meet the dissolute hedge knight who becomes his mentor. Flea Bottom, occasionally seen in Game of Thrones (it’s where we met Gendry) is realised as a nasty place, full of scary narrow streets, with the threat of violence and murder lurking round every corner.
We first meet the young Dunk (Bamber Todd, effectively sounding like a young Peter Claffey) and his childhood sweetheart Rafe (Chloe Lea) looting the aftermath of one of the parent show’s trademark battles, and failing to sell some of their ill-gotten gains because it’s from the other side in a recent civil war – the Blackfyre rebellion. Again, I wouldn’t want this show to get so mired in the dynastic politics that often makes House of the Dragon so hard to follow, and this isn’t all that necessary to know here. But it does become a very important plot driver in the later books, so it’s good to see it being seeded here.
It’s here that we first see some of the truly nasty violence that will characterise the rest of the ep, as Rafe ends up with her throat slit graphically by corrupt watchman Alester. That leads into the drunken, barely upright Ser Arlan bursting onto the scene to rescue the boy, who then doggedly follows him wherever he goes until he’s accepted into the knight’s service – an obvious echo of how Egg got his position as squire. Great to see Danny Webb again as Ser Arlan, here just past his prime and so frequently drunk he even manages to fall asleep on his own dagger.
The flashback is vital to the main story of the trial by combat, as it’s Ser Arlan’s exhortation to the boy Dunk to “get up” that becomes his rallying cry. The trial is indeed bloody and brutal; not just courtly jousting, as most of the participants are unhorsed fairly early, but a chaotic melee of armoured men slipping and sliding in the mud as they assault each other with longswords, daggers and maces.
Credit is definitely due to director Owen Harris, on his third episode of the show, for putting the viewer square in the middle of the fray, giving a real sense of what it would be like for Dunk himself. This may be on a smaller scale than GoT’s Battle of the Bastards, but it’s no less visceral and horrific. The shots that show Dunk’s limited perspective through the narrow eyeslit of his helmet convey just how little a knight in this position would have been able to actually see. It does become difficult to make out which of the combatants is which, as all are armoured and the armour, while distinctive, is soon so mud-covered that they all look alike. But again, fair’s fair – that’s the way it would have been in a real melee.
Dunk is, of course, a very big man. But even so, the punishment he takes during the fight is so extreme that it’s easy to believe he might not make it through. He gets impaled by a lance right at the start, then stabbed with a dagger, repeatedly hit in the head by a mace, stabbed again through his helm’s eyeslit, and brutally beaten by the vengeful Prince Aerion. All credit to Peter Claffey (and the makeup artists) for making you believe just how painful all this would be – small wonder that Aerion is so eager to prematurely claim his opponent’s death.
And that’s when the flashback becomes important, as it’s a brief memory of Ser Arlan, like Egg, exhorting him to “get up” that stirs the supine Dunk up from the mud to finally vanquish the dastardly Aerion, repeatedly smashing the arrogant princeling’s helm with his shield until he finally yields. If I have one criticism here, it’s that Aerion, finally revealing his bloodied face, doesn’t look injured enough – surely he’d have lost a tooth or two.
It was a genuine surprise to me that callow young Raymun Fossoway made it through the fight alive – that’s a nice subversion of the usual cliché that the poor rookie will be the first to die. Indeed, despite the sheer brutality of the fight, it’s surprisingly low on fatalities; Dunk and Aerion survive, though we hear that one of the Ser Humfreys didn’t make it, so it looks like both sides got away lightly.
Until we get a final, tragic casualty as the victorious Baelor starts slurringly complaining that his “fingers feel like wood”, and the removal of his helmet reveals the horrific ruin that the back of his head has become before he slumps dying to the floor. It’s a well-directed moment, as the seemingly ok Baelor turns from the camera, then we see the ghastly hole in his skull. Reminiscent, for me, of that moment in Breaking Bad where the similarly ok-seeming Gus Fring turns to reveal that he only has half a face before dying.
That’s obviously going to have some pretty serious repercussions in next week’s final instalment. The heir to the Iron Throne has been killed fighting for a lowly hedge knight, and, as Baelor makes clear before dying, it was his brother Maekar’s mace that did the damage. If nothing else though, it may have reaffirmed Dunk’s faith in the chivalrous knightly code – though the brutal, chaotic fight that took up most of the ep was anything but courtly. Baelor it is who gets the final, tearful “get up”, as Dunk implores the fallen prince to no avail.
This was a storming ep. Yes, it was bereft of the comic moments that have characterised the show up till now, but how could it have been otherwise when it was half an hour of some of the most brutal conflict we’ve seen in all the shows? Egg was somewhat sidelined, necessarily since he wasn’t fighting, but even here, Dexter Sol Ansell’s agonised face watching his friend and master sold his feelings well. I enjoyed the flashback to Flea Bottom, especially Danny Webb’s return as Ser Arlan, and it was very much germane to the main plot.
All over bar the shouting, I guess. But I think there’ll be some pretty loud shouting in next week’s aftermath of all this. The heir to the Iron Throne is dead, killed by his own brother, and who do you think will be the scapegoat for that? Not to mention that said brother, the ever-surly Prince Maekar, is Egg’s father – how will the boy carry on in his role as squire to the knight who unwittingly instigated all this? I’m looking forward to the finale, but this, for me, is the real climax of the story.
Simon’s Incoherent Blog 