Chivalry Is Not Dead—But It Is Fatal in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Spoilers, of course, are the coin of the realm in Westeros—and episode five of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, titled “In the Name of the Mother,” spends every last one lavishly.
In a television landscape starved for operatic spectacle, this week’s installment delivered a sequence as sumptuous as it was savage: the long-awaited Trial of Seven. Our unlikely hero, Ser Duncan the Tall—Dunk to those who underestimate him—finds himself pitted against the incandescently cruel Prince Aerion Targaryen in a clash that feels torn from illuminated manuscript and dipped in blood.
Dunk’s crime? A singular act of chivalry. After daring to shield an innocent girl from Aerion’s sadism, the hedge knight is arrested, his fate dangling by a thread finer than Valyrian steel. The punishment for striking a prince is medieval in its poetry: the loss of a hand and a foot. Yet Dunk, stubborn in both honor and survival instinct, invokes the sacred right of trial by combat. In Westeros, the gods are said to render their verdict on the battlefield.
Aerion, ever theatrical, escalates. He demands not a duel, but a Trial of Seven—a near-mythic, seven-against-seven reckoning invoking the gods of the Faith. The calculation is exquisite in its cruelty. Dunk, an orphan with no sigil and no fortune, should be friendless.
And yet, in one of the episode’s most stirring reversals, champions gather. Among them: the thunderous Ser Lyonel Baratheon and Prince Baelor Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne and uncle to Egg—Dunk’s loyal squire, secretly a dragon prince himself. It is a convergence of legacy and loyalty that would make even the most jaded maester weep into his parchment.
Behind the scenes, showrunner Ira Parker revealed that the sequence nearly suffered the fate of so many grand ambitions: the budgetary blade. Compared to its predecessor, Game of Thrones, this prequel operates on a leaner purse. There was pressure, Parker confessed, to whittle the Trial of Seven down to something more economical—less pageantry, fewer bodies.
But fidelity to The Hedge Knight, the novella by George R. R. Martin, won out. The result is a melee both intimate and immense: a mud-slick ballet of armor and anguish. Bones shatter. Oaths are tested. Blood consecrates the field.
Dunk survives—barely—besting Aerion through sheer, unvarnished strength. The prince yields before death claims him. But victory is pyrrhic. Three knights fall, among them Baelor, a loss that will ripple through the realm with seismic force.
In a series defined by quieter stakes and smaller rooms, “In the Name of the Mother” dares to go grand—and in doing so, reminds us that in Westeros, honor is as lethal as any blade.
