A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms finishes its six-episode first season as a triumph—and just in time for this franchise. It premiered at a moment when the broader Game of Thrones universe was foundering. Beyond the widely panned final two seasons of Thrones, its spinoff House of the Dragon had a choppy Season 2, and author George R.R. Martin hadn’t managed to add new pages to his book series in eight years. By the time A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiered last month, the memory of when Thrones was great television had largely faded, replaced by widespread frustration with bad writing—or with no writing at all.
But the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has breathed new life into the franchise. Based on Martin’s 1998 novella, The Hedge Knight, the first season wasn’t trying to be Game of Thrones again. No Iron Throne, no big battles (more or less), no dragons. Just a handful of great characters and, as showrunner Ira Parker put it last year, “a lot of heart.”
Now the challenge will be following that up. Season 2 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is already in production, with Parker and Co. at work adapting The Sworn Sword, Martin’s second novella in the Dunk and Egg saga. Immediately, we are looking at a more difficult adaptation. Without giving too much away, The Sworn Sword somehow features even lower stakes than The Hedge Knight. The general conflict of the novella revolves around a dispute about the water rights to a stream. There is much less action. Most of the novella is just characters talking—there is no tourney, for example. Viewers enjoyed the small scale of Season 1, but Season 2 may stress just how low the stakes can get before it feels like almost nothing is happening. “I think the scope will be the same, maybe even smaller,” Parker told The Hollywood Reporter in January.
Additionally, none of the secondary characters from the first season will be returning—at least they don’t in the book. You’ll get Dunk and Egg again (who were portrayed wonderfully by Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell, respectively), but that’s it. Say goodbye, in all likelihood, to Daniel Ings’s Lyonel Baratheon, Shaun Thomas’s Raymun Fossoway, and every single Targaryen outside of Egg. They may return in future seasons, but, at least according to the novella, not here. We will get a new cast of characters orbiting Duncan and Egg—including some of my absolute favorites, so stay tuned—but the figures you’ve grown attached to will likely be sidelined for some time.
Parker has confirmed that the plan is to tell another six-episode story in Season 2. But that also presents challenges, as The Sworn Sword is less suited to be broken down into TV episodes. There aren’t really any big twists on the level of Egg revealing himself to be Aegon Targaryen that serve as natural midseason climaxes, and Parker noted in January that, because they have to film in warmer locations for Season 2, their budget will be more stretched this time around. “The budget has stayed the same,” he told THR. “But everything is more expensive due to inflation. Plus, book two takes place in a drought, so we can’t shoot exteriors in Belfast. We have to go to a sunny location with no water, which costs money—that’s a major expense that we did not have in Season 1.”
There’s also a lot of lore. A lot of talk about the Blackfyre Rebellion. The first season made extensive use of flashbacks, and the show could do so again in Season 2 and show much of the rebellion, which would solve some problems around the lack of action, but it’s difficult to square how it could do so with the budgetary restrictions Parker outlined above. And show too much of the rebellion, and you start to drift too far away from Dunk and Egg. Talk too much about the rebellion at all, and viewers may start to wonder why they didn’t just make a show about that. It’s a tough needle to thread.
That’s Season 2. Then there is Season 3, which has already been green-lit. That season will presumably adapt The Mystery Knight, which comes with a bit more action than The Sworn Sword and should be more straightforward. But then we’re staring into the void—just as Thrones did more than a decade ago when it outpaced Martin’s novels.
As Arlan tells Dunk in the finale, “A true knight always finishes a story.” I don’t think that line was an accident—even if it reads a bit like a dig at Martin himself. It must be that the goal is for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms to complete the stories of Dunk and Egg.
Parker has hinted at such. He recently shared that Martin gave him outlines for “10-12 stories in addition to the first three,” and then added that “anything beyond book three (if we could ever be so wonderfully lucky) would highly involve George.” Martin has long talked about wanting to write roughly a dozen Dunk and Egg novellas that tell the entire stories of their lives, but—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—his actual publishing of them has stalled. The Mystery Knight, the most recent novella, was released in 2010. This show could be Martin’s chance to finish telling the stories of these two characters.
And yes, the potential pitfall here is obvious. Thrones nose-dived shortly after it outpaced Martin’s writing, and in retrospect, many of the worst parts of the series were when that crew decided to deviate from Martin’s work. It’s fair to be nervous.
The good news is that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms already had to extensively deviate from the novella, and did so well. Not every change worked—I found the flashback in Episode 5 to be a huge misstep, for example. But others were extraordinary. The scene in Lyonel’s tent in Episode 1 was one of the best of the season, and it was wholly original. Other highlights include the addition of the sex worker characters that Dunk interacts with, the “Alice With Three Fingers” pub song and subsequent conversation between Dunk and Egg, and Egg going off to train Thunder for the joust. Those scenes show that Parker and Co. can expand on Martin’s work and find success.
They’ll need to flex that muscle for this series to continue flourishing. Season 1 was excellent, but it was also the easiest story to adapt. It’ll only get more difficult from here. Luckily the early returns indicate that this show is up to the task.
