Review: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, "The Morrow" | Season 1, Episode 6
Stylistic musical bookends broadcast disruption around a quiet, affecting finale
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“A true knight always finishes a story.”
Narratively, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gradually worked its way closer to its franchise forebears. It ends with a momentous event for the ruling Targaryens, as Baelor is laid to rest by his family and the realm faces a less certain future. As Maekar notes to Dunk, now whenever someone else becomes the leader of Westeros and something bad occurs, “the fools will say Baelor wouldn’t have let it happen.” Despite where this story began, by the end it was a record of a crucial footnote in the history of the seven (nine) kingdoms.
It feels notable, then, that “The Morrow” begins and ends with a stylistic insistence that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is very much its own beast. If we left last week’s episode thinking that we would be embroiled in a game of thrones, the jazz instrumental that welcomes us back to the story is a striking reminder that this is a show with its own voice and tone set within the same world. And lest we leave the episode feeling that Aegon Targaryen’s new role as Dunk’s squire would continue to embed them into royal affairs, Tennessee Ernie Ford’s coal miner anthem “Sixteen Tons” reinforces this as a working man’s story.
They’re stylistic choices that Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon never would have made, and that is—I would argue—their purpose. If you were to take out both pieces of music, nothing about “The Morrow” would be significantly impacted. This would still be the story about a man who wakes up having survived an unexpected trial, unsure why the gods would have spared him and taken a good man who was serving the realm with honor and decency. Dunk's a man who is being given numerous options to enter into the world he was desperate to be a part of, but can’t accept any of them because he doesn’t believe he has earned it. And ultimately, this is what the needle drops reinforce: this is never going to be a show about a man who rides off into the sunrise to Ramin Djawadi.
