‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Episode 2 review: “Hard Salt Beef”

Here’s what I keep coming back to: This show is funny. Like, genuinely, deliberately funny in ways that feel completely alien to the Game of Thrones franchise as we’ve come to understand it. And I don’t mean “funny” in the way that, say, Tyrion’s quips were funny, or the way House of the Dragon occasionally deployed gallows humor to undercut its relentless grimness. I mean funny in the way that a really good sitcom is funny. When it’s character-driven, observational, sometimes even broad.

Long story short, “Hard Salt Beef” opens with a full-frontal shot of a dead man’s enormous penis.

I need you to understand that I’m not being hyperbolic here. The episode literally begins with Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), naked and well-endowed, bathing in a river while young Dunk watches from the shore. It’s gratuitous. Unnecessary. It’s the kind of choice that makes you wonder if the writers’ room was playing a game of “how far can we push this before HBO says no?”

And yet—here’s the thing that keeps me engaged with this show despite my better instincts—it works. Not because the joke is particularly sophisticated (it isn’t), but because it’s so committed to its own tonal whiplash that you kind of have to respect it. This is a show that wants you to know it’s not Game of Thrones. It wants you to know so badly that it will literally shove a dead man’s dick in your face within the first sixty seconds.

A comedy of desperation.

But let’s back up. “Hard Salt Beef” is, structurally speaking, an episode about failure. Dunk spends the entire first act getting rejected by lord after lord—House Florent, House Hayford, House Tyrell—none of whom remember Ser Arlan of Pennytree. And the show does something really smart here by framing Dunk’s narration about Arlan’s virtues as the sales pitch he’s giving these nobles. What initially seems like character exposition reveals itself to be a desperate man trying to talk his way into a tournament he has no business entering.

This is the comedy of desperation, which is distinct from the comedy of humiliation. The show never laughs at Dunk, even when he’s at his most pathetic. When Lord Ashford’s daughter spots him trying to sneak through the castle and calls him “big and stupid,” it stings because we know Dunk isn’t stupid. He’s just out of his depth. When Egg explodes at him with that gloriously profane line about turning Longthorn Tyrell’s “arsehole into a lance-hole,” it’s funny because the kid is absolutely right. Dunk is debasing himself unnecessarily. He is a knight of the realm, even if nobody believes him.

The show understands something crucial about class that Game of Thrones often elided in favor of more operatic concerns. Being poor in Westeros means being constantly, exhaustingly aware of your own precarity. Dunk can’t just ride into the lists and demand entry because knights without money or connections don’t get to make demands. They grovel. Beg. They sell their dead mentor’s horse to buy armor, knowing they’ll probably never be able to buy her back.

That scene, by the way—Dunk selling Sweetfoot—is the emotional core of the episode, and it’s executed with a restraint that makes it all the more devastating. Peter Claffey plays it beautifully, all quiet resignation and false promises. You can see Dunk trying to convince himself that this is temporary, that he’ll win and get her back, even as he knows, on some level, that he won’t. It’s one of those small, human moments that prestige television does well when it remembers to care about people instead of just plot.

The Baelor problem (which isn’t really a problem).

The episode’s centerpiece is Dunk’s audience with Prince Baelor “Breakspear” Targaryen (Bertie Carvel), and it’s here that the show most clearly articulates what it’s actually about. See, the question driving A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms—and it’s a much simpler question than anything Game of Thrones ever asked—is this: What makes a knight?

Is it the ceremony? The witnesses? The bloodline? Or is it something less tangible, something that lives in how you conduct yourself when no one’s watching?

Dunk doesn’t have witnesses to his knighting. He has no noble house to vouch for him. His armor is literally a patchwork of borrowed pieces. By every formal metric, he’s basically cosplaying. And yet, when he stands before Baelor—one of the most powerful men in Westeros—and recounts his memories of Ser Arlan, there’s a fundamental decency to him that registers.

Bertie Carvel is doing something really interesting with Baelor. He’s playing him as neither the wise mentor figure nor the stern authority, but rather as someone who is, himself, trying to figure out how to be good in a system that doesn’t particularly reward goodness. When he gently corrects Dunk about how many lances Arlan broke in their joust (four, not seven), it’s not cruel. It’s actually kind. He’s letting Dunk know that the old man exaggerated his stories without destroying Dunk’s faith in him entirely.

And then—and this is crucial—he lets Dunk into the tournament anyway. Because Baelor recognizes something in Dunk that has nothing to do with pedigree or paperwork. He sees someone trying, genuinely trying, to live up to an ideal that most “real” knights abandoned long ago.

This is, I would argue, the show’s thesis in miniature. The system is broken. The formal mechanisms of validation are either corrupt or useless. But every once in a while, someone in power chooses to do the right thing anyway, and that small act of grace can change everything.

The joust. The joust!

After spending thirty minutes watching Dunk shuffle around trying to convince people he’s legitimate, A Knight of Seven Kingdoms Episode 2 pivots hard into spectacle with a night joust that is—let me be very clear about this—effing spectacular.

I’m on record as someone who thinks Game of Thrones often struggled with action. The show was great at intimate violence (the Red Wedding, Oberyn vs. the Mountain) but frequently underwhelmed when it tried to do large-scale battles, Season 6 aside. Too much chaos, not enough geography, a general sense that the directors didn’t quite know where to put the camera.

This is not that problem. Director Owen Harris stages the joust with spatial clarity that made me actively sit up and pay attention. You understand where everyone is. You understand what’s at stake in each pass. The camera gives you both the omniscient view from the stands and the claustrophobic, helmet-eye-view from inside the action. It’s thrilling in the way that well-choreographed action should be thrilling. Not just because things are happening, but because you care about the things that are happening.

And here’s where the show does something genuinely smart. It gives Dunk and Egg completely opposite reactions to the same event. Egg is losing his mind with excitement, screaming and cheering like any eleven-year-old boy watching knights smash into each other. Meanwhile, Dunk is having what can only be described as a panic attack. The sound design gets muffled and distorted. His breathing becomes labored. The camera pushes in on his face as the reality of what he’s about to attempt finally, viscerally hits him.

This is the moment where aspiration meets reality, and reality is terrifying.

What are we doing here, really?

I want to return to something I mentioned at the top, which is that this show is funny, and I’m increasingly convinced that’s not incidental to its success but rather central to it.

See, one of the things that always bothered me about Game of Thrones—and this is going to sound like sacrilege to some people, but bear with me—is that it took itself so seriously that it often forgot to be human. Everything was portentous. Everything was significant. Characters delivered exposition like they were reading from a history book because, functionally, they were. The show was so concerned with being Important Prestige Television that it sometimes forgot to let its characters just be people.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t have that problem. When Dunk awkwardly tries to ask Tanselle (Tanzyn Crawford) to paint his shield and stammers through his request like a teenager asking someone to prom, it’s genuinely charming. When Egg tells him that Ser Donnel of Duskendale’s family owns “half the crabbing fleets in Westeros”—thereby destroying Dunk’s brief fantasy that humble origins are enough—it’s funny because it’s true. “Humble” is always relative. The son of a crabbing magnate is still magnitudes wealthier than a hedge knight from Flea Bottom.

The show understands that comedy and drama aren’t opposites. They’re neighbors. Often, they’re the same thing viewed from slightly different angles. Dunk’s desperation is both tragic and absurd. His earnestness is both admirable and kind of pathetic. The show holds both truths simultaneously without undermining either.

This is, by the way, significantly harder to pull off than it looks. Most shows that try this kind of tonal balancing act end up feeling schizophrenic. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms makes it look easy, which means the people making it are probably working incredibly hard.

The Aziza Barnes of it all.

I need to talk about the dedication card at the end of this episode, because ignoring it feels wrong.

“Hard Salt Beef” was co-written by Aziza Barnes, who died by suicide in December 2024, just weeks before the show premiered. I didn’t know Barnes personally, but I’m familiar enough with their poetry to know we lost someone with real talent and vision. The episode ends with a simple title card: “In Memory of Aziza Barnes.”

And I find myself thinking about what it means to watch what might be someone’s final creative work, knowing they didn’t live to see it received. Television is such a collaborative medium that it’s impossible to say exactly which parts of this episode are Barnes and which are Ira Parker or Owen Harris or any of the other dozens of people who touched the script on its way to screen. But there’s something in the way the episode balances absurdity and pathos, in the way it finds humor in desperate circumstances without making those circumstances less real, that feels like a specific sensibility.

Barnes helped create something that makes people laugh and care and feel things. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s pretty close to everything.

Things I’m worried about.

Okay, let’s talk about the problems, because there are some.

First: The runtime. Episode 1 was 42 minutes. This is 31. That’s a significant drop, and while I appreciate that the show isn’t padding itself out unnecessarily, it also means we’re losing opportunities for the quieter character moments that made the premiere so effective. The Dunk/Egg campfire scene at the end of this episode is lovely, but it’s also about ninety seconds long. I want more of that. I want to sit with these characters when they’re not hustling from plot point to plot point.

Second: The crude humor is starting to feel like a crutch. I get it! This show isn’t Game of Thrones, we’ve established that. But did we really need the full-frontal Ser Arlan shot? Sure, it worked for me overall. I’m in a good enough mood. But did that add anything to our understanding of the character or Dunk’s relationship with him? Or was it just shocking for shock’s sake?

There’s a version of this show that’s funny and character-driven without feeling like it’s constantly trying to prove how irreverent it is. I’d like to see that version emerge more clearly as the season continues.

Third: We’re two episodes in and the supporting cast is still pretty thin. Tanselle is charming but barely present. Steely Pate (Youssef Kerkour) gets one scene. The Fossoway cousins are wholly absent. I understand that this is Dunk and Egg’s story, but Game of Thrones at its best made you care about even minor characters. Right now, the show is so focused on its leads that everyone else feels like set dressing. Well, except for Lyonel, as we do get to see Daniel Ings show up for a brief, but cathartic rope-pulling scene where Dunk is (obviously) “at the end of his rope.”

What I ‘think’ this show is becoming.

To be clear, I’m increasingly invested in this show despite my reservations. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is becoming something we don’t actually see very often in prestige television. It’s a show about someone trying to be good.

Not trying to win. Not trying to survive. And not trying to avenge or protect or conquer. Just…trying to be good. Trying to live up to an ideal that everyone else has dismissed as naive or outdated.

There’s a moment near the end of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 2 where Dunk, having finally secured his place in the tournament, sits with Egg and admits that maybe Ser Arlan wasn’t the legendary knight he always believed him to be. Maybe nobody remembers him because he wasn’t worth remembering. Maybe Dunk’s entire foundation is built on sand.

And then—and this is what makes the show work—Dunk decides it doesn’t matter. On the morrow, he’ll show them what Arlan’s hand has wrought. He’ll prove his worth through action, not credentials.

This is, in its way, a radical thing to say. In a franchise built on the premise that honor is a weakness and idealism gets you killed, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is arguing that trying to be good has value independent of outcome. That the attempt itself matters.

I’m not sure if the show can sustain that argument over six episodes, let alone multiple seasons. The genre it’s working in—medieval fantasy, specifically the Game of Thrones flavor of it—has powerful gravity pulling it toward cynicism and tragedy. But for now, in this moment, watching a too-tall hedge knight and his precocious squire figure out how to build a life together on the margins of Westeros? Yeah. I’m in.

Even if that means enduring the occasional gratuitous shot of a dead man’s enormous penis.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.

---

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.