Nice breakdown of everything that was going on in the background during the fight.
Interesting that Baelor’s probably death blow happened AFTER Aerion had yielded so the fight was over and Dunk was just dragging him to yield louder…
Nice detail I noticed on second watch: Humfrey Hardyng, the broken leg guy, was riding Aerion’s former black horse since I assume Aerion was disqualified and forced to surrender them to him. I imagine he sold the armor back and kept the horse to replace his.
The fight doesn’t end until the horn sounds and horn didn’t sound until they heard him yield. What Dunk did was necessary.
It makes for a good story, and I suppose that the people of this world/era don’t value human life much, but it seems odd to put 14 lives at risk to determine the guilt of one person.
It’s very rare, even by Westeros standards. That was established in a previous episode.
It also emphasizes the brutality. They don’t really bat an eye at reviving this ancient practice, and they don’t hesitate to actually try to kill each other. Two dead in the first pass, and then more as they get into the melee stage of the fight. This isn’t “jousting” to entertain the masses, it’s truly a death match. We even see it in the crowd’s reaction to the brutality.
It’s supposed to be literally the gods deciding, so if they decided several people needed to die to prove one man innocent then so be it.
I think both these points are true.
The flashback did offer some valuable insight into Dunk and the hard-learned values that shape his character. It was also too long to work in the context of where it was placed. This is because they tried to do all of Dunk’s formative backstory in one big lump.
It would have been so much better to have paced out the Young Dunk In King’s Landing material throughout the show, so that we had time to become invested in it. We didn’t have time to care about his girlfriend whose name I cannot remember, or to see how they loved each other rather than being told, or to live with their dream of another life, all of which meant that her tragic but inevitable death didn’t have the impact it could have done. It logically works as an explanation for Dunk defending the puppeteer, but the emotional impact is hugely diminished by the fact that we didn’t know she existed until two episodes later and that we hardly got to know her.
And that’s only half the story in the flashback. The second bit is Dunk pursuing the ideal of knighthood in the somewhat grubby form of Ser Arlan until he drops from exhaustion -and then gets up. But the “get up” motif wasn’t introduced until right before it became relevant, meaning that again it lacked the import and heft it could have had. Paced out, those flashbacks could have seeded the “Dunk is the guy who will always get back up” theme much better.
So yeah - valuable and insightful stuff, but crammed in late in a way that disrupted the episode flow and diminished its impact.
That’s a fair criticism, but I suspect that they may have tried that and it didn’t work as well as they might have hoped. So they did it this way as their failsafe.
Of course, I am making stuff up, but I trust that, as their instincts in every other episode have been strong, a misstep like that doesn’t seem likely, and seems more like they were left with no choice but to go with the least worst option.
Also, I thought it was fine, and have no complaints at all. It was nowhere near as bad as some here are saying.
I thought the flashback worked fine. I’m amazed the show has been this good. I expected it to be good, because the source material is so good and so straight forward, but I think they’ve nailed the characters as well as can be achieved on screen. And the acting, production design, costumes, action, stunts, cinematography, etc. has been similarly top notch. Maybe they missed a couple of small story and dialogue bits. Maybe the flashback wasn’t entirely perfect in its length or placement (though I didn’t have any problems with it). But these are just miniscule issues, IMO, on a monumental achievement.
This is as good as TV gets, IMO.
Oh yeah, if the worst thing you can say about a show is that 20 minutes of good material was in the wrong place, that’s a pretty damn good TV show.
Interesting to think about why:
- It’s short! 6 episodes, most only 30 mins.
- A small cast of characters, chiefly in one setting.
- No big name actors
All this says that the whole production focus is on telling one story and telling it well. The money that might have got you star names is getting you good writing and high quality production, sets, etc. The short format and contained world mean that it’s easier to keep a unitary vision and make sure that what we see is essential to the story. The small scale also means that we get time to invest in a small set of characters rather than keeping track of an ever-widening cast.
As a Brit who grew up wth 6 episode series, this feels to me like the natural length for TV - tell an immersive story, tell it well, then stop. Sprawling epics are all very well, but there are plenty of examples of series that outstay their welcome by trying to do too much. By contrast, you really do get the feeling that everyone involved knew what the assignment was, knew how they fitted into the whole and could do their stuff with one simple goal in mind.
More like this please!
Ha!
2 secs after hitting post on that, saw this:
Which isn’t to say I don’t want another Dunk and Egg that is also a complete story, but that this:
This environment encourages some creatives to bring everything to the table with the first season of their show, creating something original, tight and self-contained. Christopher C Rogers, co-creator of the tech drama Halt and Catch Fire, has almost admitted as much: “I think uncertainty reinforced a hold-nothing-back mindset in the storytelling that got us to our best work quickly,” he said in 2017. Conversely, “When you hold story back or try to draw it out, the audience can tell. Not knowing if there would be a metaphorical ‘tomorrow’ really saved us from that mistake.”
sums up a lot of what I’m trying to say.
Another thing to say though, is the flashback is not covered by the source material I think. It’s new. I could be wrong, it’s a couple of years since I read the novellas.
You’re correct. Rafe is mentioned in one of the later books, but there’s no extended flashback in any of them.
That does put a slightly different spin on the question of how necessary it was - I read the story ages ago, but does anyone feel that it lacked sufficient explanation of Dunk’s background? Or did the story work perfectly well without it.
That said, writing new material to pad out what you’ve got is a time-honoured tradition - Shakespeare wasn’t shy about using it when needed, as Mercutio and Macbeth’s porter can attest - so the principle is fine.
I thought the flashback worked well, but you are right and the story worked just fine without it also. You could say it was padding a very short story to fit the allotted time, but there was at least a few other scenes that they skipped that would have accomplished the same thing. Personally I would have liked to have Baelor suggest using blunt tourney lances against the real killing lances the other team were using, simply because they are four feet longer and would allow them to strike first. It helps explain why the winning side had three casualties while the losers had none. Or the small scene of the newly knighted Fossoway showing his shield with a green apple instead of the red one his house uses because his shitty cousin kept telling him he wasn’t “ripe” enough yet to be knighted. Either way, minor complaints on what is a masterful show. We still have one more episode, though it’s all denouement.
I believe every episode of this series has flashbacks.
GOT was a completely different series from this one, as they made sure to emphasize early in the first episode, where the old GOT theme song was interrupted by explosive diarrhea.
This was the first extended flashback, but if the concept of flashbacks is a deal-breaker, how did you get past the first episode?
Also, GOT was prone to sudden changes of POV between different characters. We don’t have that in this series. Instead, they have flashbacks to break up the narrative. It’s the same idea, just done differently.
I remember in the books being left with the question of whether Ser Arlan ever really got around to knighting Dunc. It came to me again when he said something like “Maybe this is my just deserts for not knowing my place” and again when he hesitated on knighting the young Fossoway - did he not know what to say?
Is it just me? Or is it so obvious no one else feels it’s worth mentioning?
The show seems to take great pains in making it clear he was never knighted.
I mean, the fact that he had to rationalize not burying Ser Arlan in his gear because it would be “wasted”, which was right at the beginning of the first episode, that tells you right away. If he’d have been knighted, I don’t think there would be any need for an excuse like that. He would have taken the arms because they’d be his by right.
Then one piece of evidence after another. Ser Arlan seeming to dismiss the idea of Dunk ever actually becoming a knight in a flashback. The comment you mentioned about Dunk figuring he was being punished for what he’d done. Not knowing how to knight another person, presumably because he had never gone through it himself. It just piles up over the series.