Review: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, "In the Name of the Mother" | Season 1, Episode 5

Friend of the newsletter Kathryn VanArendonk recently wrote an essay for Vulture proposing “death to the penultimate flashback episode,” targeted at a rash of dramas that use the device as a way to reframe a show’s narrative. She argues they end up feeling like “unnecessary homework,” a structural choice that prioritizes the past over the present and future.

Naturally, Kathryn’s article was my first thought when we are thrust back into Dunk’s past in the chaos of the trial of seven. It’s a narrative invention of the TV show—flashbacks could happen in a novella, of course, but they don’t exactly fit into the linearity Martin seems invested in there. Pulling us out of this climactic moment seems counter to the intensity Owen Harris achieves in the tilt’s opening moments as well, placing a heavy burden on the contents of that flashback to feel worth the diversion.

Until the postmortems arrive (I don’t have access to the “Inside the Episode” features), my best argument for the flashback is that its purpose is to transform “In the Name of the Mother” into a climax within the confines of a thirty-minute television show. The nature of the trial of seven is that it could never sustain an entire episode in its own right. It’s hard to say exactly how long the battle takes, but it isn’t very long, and even in the novella Martin uses Dunk’s injuries to blur out much of it. To extend this into a half-hour, you could either show us more of the battles around Dunk featuring characters we aren’t as invested in, or you could take Martin’s interest in Dunk’s state of mind during the battle and explore how his altered consciousness pulls him back to his past.