For the most part, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1, Episode 1 is a light affair, especially compared to Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Whereas those shows are known for their violence and brutality, this is a breezier look into a smaller side of Westeros. There’s fun and frivolity, drinking and dancing, and, yes, poop jokes. This isn’t the way we’re used to things, which makes sense as the same is true of George R.R. Martin’s Dunk and Egg books that it’s adapting, but it’s not all different.
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One of the running threads across the first episode, which it’ll repeat through the season, is Dunk’s interactions with a pair of sex workers, Red (Rowan Robinson) and Beony (Carla Harrison-Hodge), who are in the service of Ser Manfred Dondarrion. During the premiere, when Dunk returns to the tent looking for Manfred, he finds them dressing another female body (Daisy, played by Abigail O’Regan) with painted eye stones, the ones we’ve seen before in the franchise that are placed over dead bodies by worshippers of the Faith of the Seven. We’re meant to think she’s deceased, but that’s not entirely true, and we get the following exchange:
Dunk: “I’m not troubled with a wealth of options, am I? And if I mean to take service in a castle…”
Red: “It must put its body at hazard for the pleasure of strangers.”
Daisy: “Ain’t that our job?”
Beony: “Ah! Shut up! You’re meant to be dead.”
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms’ “Dead” Woman Scene Connects It To Game Of Thrones
Though it’s played for some laughs, the implication of the scene is lowkey the darkest thing in the episode: that Daisy is being sold into the service of a man with a necrophilia kink, being paid to pretend she’s a dead body. Even by the standards of Westeros, where incest among the members of House Targaryen is tolerated, it’s pretty f**ked up, but the roots of it are found in Game of Thrones Season 1, Episode 5.
In that installment, which, it’s worth noting, also has a tourney and is perhaps the closest thing you’ll find to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in the series, there’s a grim exchange between Varys and Petyr Baelish. The former mentions a rumor about a lord with “a taste for fresh cadavers,” and it’s clearly implied that Littlefinger, who says that “all desires are valid to a man with a full purse,” is the man who delivers these to him. While that was only spoken about in rumor, AKOTSK makes it all the more believable, unfortunately.
Still, this kind of connectivity is important. It helps ensure that this show feels part of the same lived-in world we’ve been in for the past 15 years, we’re just seeing a different corner of it at a different point in time. The names and faces may change, and so may the stakes, but many of the same rules, as horrifying as they might be, remain in place, and Westeros doesn’t change that much.
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms release Sundays at 10pm ET on HBO and HBO Max.
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