Should Fans Prepare for Disappointment with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 2?

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has renewed my love for Westeros!” “I’m finally invested again like I was in the early days of Game of Thrones!” Sound familiar? I’ve seen a lot of this sentiment over the past couple of weeks since the release of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and I don’t want to be a killjoy. I really like the show too. It’s a great adaptation full of fun and charming characters in a world usually known for being dour. But the Internet response has sparked some déjà vu. Admit it or not, this is how a lot of people reacted to the first season of House of the Dragon. But then, just eight episodes later, after a notably weaker second season, people declared they were over that show entirely.

My fear is that the same could happen, though to a lesser extent, with AKOTSK (much easier to write the cumbersome title this way, and we’re all going to call it the ‘Dunk & Egg show’ anyway). The first season was based on a truly wonderful novella which I’d consider, page for page, word for word, some of George RR Martin’s best writing. The second novella, The Sworn Sword, is not. It’s not bad but it’s certainly the weakest of the three Dunk & Egg stories and I imagine will prove to be much more challenging to adapt than the first. I think fans of the show may need to brace themselves for a safe, solid second season that doesn’t hit the highs of the first.

The remainder of this article features spoilers for The Sworn Sword and therefore the second season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Read on at your own risk…

Hoping to see Dorne in the second season? You may be disappointed. The first season ends with the same dialogue as the novella, our two heroes journeying south to Dorne, searching puppet shows for Tanselle. The next story however picks up with them a year and a half later, their quest unsuccessful. They return to the Reach and the events actually occur very close to Ashford Meadow from season 1. The show, at least at this early stage, will not be the Westerosi travelogue it was perhaps set up to be.

We hear of adventures in Dorne and it’ll be interesting to see if the show offers us flashbacks or an extended opening sequence set there, but if it does I imagine it’ll be minimal. They’ve even been to Old Town to see Egg’s brother Aemon (the old maester at The Wall in Game of Thrones) but I doubt we’ll see that because it’s not so relevant to the story at hand. Thankfully, the Reach should look different to how it was portrayed in the first season, with Spain being the shooting location instead of Ireland. There’s a disastrous drought, the ground hard and rivers dry, and it will be unique to see Westeros at the peak of summer. Winter is certainly not coming any time soon.

The first season/novella was a story about the future: how Dunk will become and embody an honourable knight and form a relationship that will define his life moving forward, saying farewell to his past. The second is all about the past and so it’ll be difficult to not make the story feel like it’s standing still. The first half of the novella is more backstory than story. It’s Martin at his most obsessive about his world and lore, characters sat around thinking and talking about past events and unseen characters rather than doing much of anything. It’s almost as if he’s tasked himself with seeing how many proper nouns he can fit in 120 pages.

This backstory does inform the present but the status quo of the present rather than the story of the present, because for the longest time it doesn’t feel as if there a story. Dunk is in the service of Ser Eustace, on old man at Standfast who is obsessed with the past. He has a room full of banners and weapons from the Blackfyre Rebellion, a war which has defined his life and many in this era of Westeros. And yet it means little to Dunk and Egg. Very much unlike the first season, this isn’t a story personal to them. It feels like Martin has used them as an outlet to explore this other story. The Blackfyre Rebellion is interesting and I’d happily watch a show about it, but I’m not so sure it should be this show.

To rest the copious backstory on some semblance of actual story, Martin falls back on a very generic narrative for the first half of the novella. Prepare for Dunk teaching some villagers how to fight because it’s going full Seven Samurai. Bring out the scarecrows to poke spears at, now we’re going to get the Game of Thrones take on the story after multiple Star Wars versions of it in recent years.

Thankfully, the novella’s second half is much improved. While the first season of the show could stick to the pacing of the book, I hope the writers are confident enough to rejig the story somewhat to move it along faster at the start and stay with the characters and ideas of the second half for longer. I know some people deem that sacrilege, that the further the distance to Martin’s work the worse the shows get, but in this instance I think it is justified. The story truly gets going once the brilliant Lady Rohanne appears and the faster that happens the better.

The issue is that to make the twist work, that Dunk has sworn his sword to Ser Eustace, a man revealed to be a traitor and who actually fought for the rebels in the Blackfyre Rebellion, the two men need to spend some time together to build a relationship. I just hope the show generates some more story there, something for them to do and bond over. The twist is what makes the story interesting but it needs to be a twist later on rather than the inciting incident. Dunk swearing loyalty to a traitor means his noble intentions once again gets him into trouble, bringing forth themes and ideas on misguided chains of loyalty and the repercussions of the past. I think the second half of the season will be strong but I am wary of the slight first.

However, what makes the stories so successful will return in abundance in the second season: Dunk and Egg together. There’s no contrived separating of them, no big rift between the two. They have some great, charming conversations that are the highlight of the story, my favourite being Egg advising Dunk on how to talk to women. Egg uses his highborn standing to help Dunk, including reading to him, which is particularly sweet, and Dunk humbles Egg, having him understand the smallfolk, part of his learning process to becoming a decent king in the future. The story isn’t as naturally humorous as the first, it’s a little dry (literally), but I trust the show’s writers to inject some well-judged levity.

No doubt exacerbating the bond between Dunk and Egg, Westeros around them has been through a lot in the eighteen months between stories. Not only is there a drought but a ‘Great Spring Sickness’ has killed off four in ten people. The king is dead, Prince Valarr from the first season is dead, and the albino sorcerer Lord Bloodraven is said to be the new true ruler of the realm, with his puppet Aerys on the throne. It does beg the question just how much the show will explore these changes. I’m sure it will remain from Dunk’s perspective but the novella doesn’t make it clear how much of the political events surrounding Egg’s family is known to him. Fans of the show loved the new Targaryens introduced in the first season but they don’t appear in the sequel novellas. How will they feel when we don’t seem them onscreen again, at least for a long time?

I also wonder if we truly have seen the last of Ser Arlan of Pennytree. The ending of the first season was touching, seeing Arlan’s spirit part company with Dunk. I don’t want to lessen that image but there are still a lot of lessons he taught Dunk that are relevant to this story. Perhaps his ghost, this imagined version Dunk sees, is gone but we could still get some flashbacks. His legacy lives on and it’d be good to contrast his teaching of Dunk with Dunk teaching Egg. We even get some interesting backstory of Arlan during the Blackfyre Rebellion where his sister’s son was his squire before Dunk. Arlan also appears in a dream, alongside Valarr and Baelor, which might be a way to get fan favourite Bertie Carvel back for an episode. They did it with Milly Alcock in House of the Dragon.

The novella ends well but it does feel repetitive to the first story. There’s another trial by combat, another one-on-one brutal fight to the death where Dunk almost loses, another bruised Dunk ending the story using a crutch and saying farewell to everyone before riding off with Egg. I think the show can improve on this by expanding the final few pages, like it did with the finale of the first season. The conflict is resolved quickly in the novella and I hope it’s a little more nuanced in the series. The fight in the water will surely be a great sequence but for me Dunk cutting his own face, wounding himself in the way Lady Rohanne’s man was hurt to try and avoid conflict, is the defining moment of the story despite being a small, less cinematic one.

Basically, fans need to prepare themselves for a perfectly fine second season. If it’s better than that, the show improving on the short story, then great, but I’m expecting season 2 to be looked on as the weakest of the bunch, just like the novella is. Thankfully the third story, The Mystery Knight, is much more engaging. And after that, into new territory, the fate of the show is with the gods…