Last week on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Dunk assembled his champions—with a huge surprise addition—in “Seven.” This week, “In the Name of the Mother” sees Dunk’s trial by combat hit the ring.
But there’s a detour to the past we must also take, as we learn more about how the hedge knight became the sort of man who’s now fighting for his life.
And, how about another giant twist? A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is low on raunchy gags this week, but it will shock you yet again.
We open immediately after “Seven” ended. Baelor, a surprise addition to Dunk’s side, gives a pep talk so terrifying Dunk and Raymun barf their way through it. Baelor says not to worry about the Kingsguard; he’ll handle them, since they’re not allowed to harm a prince of the blood. The eccentric Ser Robyn wonders if that’s honorable.
“The gods will let us know,” Baelor says, reminding us that the Trial of Seven has religious underpinnings. The guilty will fall, and the innocent will prevail, according to the judgment of the gods.
He also says “Be vigilant. Don’t die.” Everyone heads toward the ring, but Dunk has one last moment with Egg, and they do a little repeat of their “rob me, and I’ll hunt you down with dogs” bit. This time, Egg barks playfully in response, but as Dunk rides away, intense concern washes over his face.
Rightfully so. The fight begins—we get narrow POV shots looking out through Dunk’s helm, and hear his panicked, gasping breath—and it’s immediately awful. As Egg shrieks from the sidelines, Dunk rides into the fray and is quickly stabbed by our pal Aerion Targaryen. No sooner has Dunk yanked the lance tip out, Aerion wheels back around with his flail and knocks Dunk from his horse, splat into the mud.
We cut to black. But Dunk isn’t dead, obviously—he’s just drifting into the extended flashback that takes up most of “In the Name of the Mother.”
It’s honestly a relief to cut away from the agony of the battlefield, until we realize we’ve arrived on another, very different battlefield. Here, the fighting has ended, and only corpses remain.
At least, that’s what a younger version of Dunk, played by Bamber Todd (his nose and mouth covered, no doubt to block the hideous stench of death) thinks as he’s scavenging horseshoes off a fallen steed. But then the man trapped under the horse suddenly wheezes. Dunk decides the only thing he can do is suffocate the man and put him out of his misery.
But suddenly, a girl appears—similarly masked against the smell—and stops him. He’s highborn, she points out. If they can drag him off the battlefield, someone might pay them for his return.
This new character is played by Chloe Lea, a familiar face to anyone who watched HBO’s Dune: Prophecy series. (She was also on Apple TV’s Foundation, so: a genre superstar in the making.) Her A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms character is named Rafe, and she’s Dunk’s best and only friend.
The kids are unable to get the man out from under the horse, and he soon breathes his last. We can see this is happening just outside of King’s Landing, with the Red Keep looming in the background. Followers of Westeros history will realize we’re seeing the aftermath of the first Blackfyre Rebellion—a Targaryen vs. Targaryen bastard war for the throne that saw Daeron II, who’s in power during A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, emerge victorious.
They won’t be collecting any ransom on the rich guy, alas, but it was still a successful outing for Dunk and Rafe, who head back to the city to transform what they’ve scavenged into cash. There’s urgency, at least according to Rafe, because their goal is to raise enough money to get the hell out of Flea Bottom, and Westeros for that matter, as quickly as possible.
Dunk is more hesitant. “The war is over,” he reminds her. “The Black Dragon is dead!”
Her worldview, though, is far more cynical. Rafe may be tiny, but she’s made of much tougher stuff than Dunk. “Nothing’s over,” she insists. “No one forgets shit. You hurt someone, they hurt you back.”
Once they’re in Flea Bottom, you understand why Rafe’s come up with a plan to flee. It’s a crowded, grimy maze and danger lurkes around every corner. Alester, an opportunistic bully, makes a move on Dunk and Rafe’s bag of spoils. But the quick-fingered Rafe steals his aleskin flask before he can rip them off, and they escape down an alleyway.
After pawning their stash, Rafe says they finally have enough to secure passage across the narrow sea. Dunk has concerns. “What if the Free Cities are no better than here? What if they’re worse?” he wonders.
And more poignantly: “What if my mother comes back for me?”
Rafe is unmoved. Even if his mother is alive, which seems unlikely, she’s not going to suddenly start looking for her son. What’s more, “I never got nothing by waiting around.”
Rafe and Dunk agree, though: they love each other—it’s a brother-sister vibe more than anything romantic—and want to stick together. But when they go to buy the tickets, they find out the price has increased. They’re still short the necessary amount.
“You’re not the only ones who mean to get the fuck out of here,” the unsympathetic ticket merchant informs them.
Rafe is furious. “We’ll find a way,” Dunk reassures her, weakly. But the moment gets even more dark when Alestar appears, still salty about that stunt Rafe pulled earlier. “No one forgets shit,” as Rafe herself said, and that comes back to haunt her.
Alestar and his equally odious friend corner them against a pig pen, and he demands the return of his aleskin at knifepoint. Rafe no longer has it, of course, so Alestar instead goes for her coin purse, containing the hard-earned silver she was going to use on the tickets.
“Stealing from dead nobles is still stealing,” Alestar tsks.
“What’s stealing from us?” Dunk shoots back.
“That’s life,” the thug shrugs.
After ripping off their life savings, Alestar and his pal start to let them go, but not before Alestar makes one last threatening move on Rafe, touching her hair and getting right in her face. Disgusted, she pushes past him—pick-pocketing his knife on the way.
It takes just a few seconds for him to realize it’s gone. After he grab it back, he swiftly uses it to slice her throat open.
Dunk, as we knew he would, immediately goes on the attack. He’s flung to the ground and stabbed in the leg, but just when it seems all is lost, a door opens and we hear “In the name of the Mother… LEAVE THAT BOY BE!”
Ladies and gentlemen: Ser Arlan of Pennytree. Drunk as a skunk and still out here protecting the innocent. As Dunk comforts the dying Rafe, Ser Arlan throttles Alester and his friend—killing them both and giving A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms a very satisfying decaptitation moment. As swiftly as he appeared, Ser Arlan lurches away.
Meanwhile, Dunk is despondent. His only friend is gone. His mother is (probably) dead. He has no money or future. What will he do now?
The answer arrives the next morning, when he hears a familiar voice in the alley: Ser Arlan, weaving around, knocking over baskets of apples. Dunk pulls himself out of his funk and starts limping after him, oozing leg wound and all.
After dark, Dunk creeps closer as Ser Arlan snoozes by his campfire. Tentatively, the boy admires his shield and sword and pets his horses.
It’s not unlike what Egg does years later when he pursues Dunk to Ashford Meadow, but in Dunk’s case, he has nothing to go back to. No family or friends that will be looking for him. Maybe he didn’t really want to go to the Free Cities, but he’s out of Flea Bottom now, following this inebriated yet fierce knight to points unknown.
As Ser Arlan rides farther away from King’s Landing, he’s seemingly unaware he’s picked up a tail. Dunk watches as the old knight drunkenly rants to himself alone in the dark. He huddles up, freezing and hungry, on the periphery of each campsite. But at long last Ser Arlan—who is very rarely sober—acknowledges this fellow traveler. Looking back up the trail, he sees Dunk take a few exhausted steps, then collapse.
Ser Arlan walks to the fallen boy, leans over him, and gruffly orders, “Get up!”
Get up! The command echoes—the fateful words that kick-started Dunk’s time as Ser Arlan’s squire. Suddenly, we’re back in the present, with Dunk on his back in the ring at Ashford Meadow.
We see, through the slit of his helmet, a flail coming in for another blow, and as he staggers to his feet, he’s thwacked again by a rider galloping past.
Before long, the aggressive Aerion is knocked off his horse, and we see Egg watching—very worried—as his master and his brother go at it. It’s stabby and muddy and grunty and hellaciously brutal, and continues for seemingly forever.
A very battered Dunk takes a jab through the eye slit, and he yanks his helmet off. The groaning and plunging and smacking continues; we can barely see what else is going on, but it’s clear everyone on the field is going through it. The crowd remains eerily silent against the sounds of agony and cries of anguish.
Suddenly, we can hear what Dunk hears inside his head: a muffled ringing as Aerion, who’s in just as terrible shape as his opponent, starts ordering him to yield. Dunk flops to the ground, his eyes still open. He sure looks dead. But he can’t be dead!
In the stands, Egg lifts his shrill voice in encouragement. “Get up! GET UP, SER DUNCAN!” We glimpse another vision of Ser Arlan, telling young Dunk the same thing, but a much mellower tone: “Get up.”
Aerion can’t believe it, but Dunk is indeed still alive. He heaves himself back up as the crowd gasps and begins to cheer as Aerion turns to face him. The sound is again muffled as we watch Dunk knock the prince down and straddle him, kicking his ass Flea Bottom-style. Aerion’s punchable face becomes a bloody pulp, and it is delightful.
It is glorious. It is cathartic. But the best moment comes when Dunk drags his fallen opponent to the stands and Aerion, who has agreed to yield, says what he must: “I withdraw my accusation.”
Raymun and Steely Pate help a very mangled Dunk off the field, where he gets the news that both Ser Humfreys (Beesbury and Hardyng) have died. His friends are taking stock of his injuries (Raymun seems OK, thankfully) when Baelor stumbles in.
A grateful Dunk bends the knee. “Your grace. I am your man,” he gasps.
“I need good men, Ser Duncan,” Baelor says. “The realm.”
It seems for a moment that, despite the fact that Dunk clearly has a long recovery ahead of him, everything might turn out all right. He won! Prince Baelor thinks he’s a good man! But, uh… not so fast.
Raymun and Steely Pate help Baelor remove his helm. It’s bent way out of shape, smashed by Maekar’s blows, Baelor figures. But it’s not just the armor that’s broken. Once Baelor’s head is exposed, we see his brain peeking through his caved-in skull.
There’ll be no bouncing back from that. Nothing the Maesters can do. The heir to the throne collapses as Dunk cradles him. “Your Grace! Get up, ser!”
This time, “get up” doesn’t have the same magic effect, and a sobbing Dunk repeats what he said to Rafe when she died all those years before: “I’m sorry.”
It’s absolutely devastating. A good man has perished—and the course of Westeros history has changed forever.
What will happen next, with just one episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ first season left to go? We’ll find out Sunday when the finale arrives on HBO and HBO Max.
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