‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Episode 5 review: “In the Name of the Mother”

There is a moment, roughly twenty minutes or so into A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 5 when the show returns to the present tense. We’ve spent the better part of half an hour in the past. Specifically in Flea Bottom, in the mud and rot of King’s Landing’s lowest rung. We watched a boy scavenge teeth from dead men and follow a drunk knight across a countryside just to have something to follow after losing his best friend. And then we’re back. Aerion’s morningstar hangs in the air. Dunk is on the ground. The battle has been waiting for us. So we must talk about how that return feels, because it’s doing something the discourse around this episode has largely missed in its rush to argue about whether the flashback was a mistake. If anything, it feels like the show itself waking up.

The weight of what you started.

The debate around A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 5 has arranged itself around a deceptively simple question. Was it a good idea to interrupt the season’s climactic battle sequence with twenty minutes of Flea Bottom backstory? The critics who say no — and there are thoughtful ones — argue that the penultimate episode of a six-episode season has no business spending more than half its runtime on material that isn’t in the source novella and doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. The critics who say yes argue that the flashback is doing essential thematic business. Both camps are perhaps slightly missing the point.

To be clear, the flashback isn’t really there to give us information. And it isn’t there to interrupt the battle and pad out an episode that couldn’t sustain a half hour of pure violence. Though it absolutely does that, too. It’s there to replicate the experience of what happens to Dunk when Aerion’s morningstar sends him into the dark.

When you take a blow to the head hard enough, you don’t go blank. You go somewhere else. The brain, trying to protect itself, reaches for something. And what Dunk’s brain reaches for is the last time he was this close to dying. He tries to find the last time he lay in the mud with someone standing over him meaning to finish the job. The show is not flashing back to explain Dunk. It’s flashing back because Dunk is flashing back. The flashback is Dunk’s unconscious mind trying to find the thread that brought him here. He’s trying to remember why getting up is worth it.

The problem is that this is an entirely legitimate artistic choice that requires the audience to trust the show in a way the show hasn’t fully earned. Because we’re watching television instead of reading a novel with interiority. Because the camera does not signal this is happening in Dunk’s mind with any clarity. And because twenty minutes is a pretty long time to spend in a momentary blackout. The ambition is real. The execution leaves you to do a lot of mental work the show should probably be doing for you.

The point is that the flashback is far from a mistake. It’s actually a storytelling choice that only works perfectly if you’re willing to meet it more than halfway. And prestige television — especially franchise prestige television, especially in a penultimate episode — has conditioned audiences not to do that. The show is fighting its own context.

Westeros has always been better at ruins than glory.

Nevertheless, young Dunk’s Flea Bottom is the best world-building this franchise has done since the early seasons of Game of Thrones. For my silver stags, it blows the pants off of anything we we’ve seen in House of the Dragon. And it’s interesting that it’s accomplished through absence rather than spectacle. We don’t see the Red Keep or the Iron Throne. We see a boy and a girl picking teeth out of dead men’s mouths on a battlefield and trying to sell them to a fence who doesn’t want them.

The battle they’re looting — the Redgrass Field, where the Blackfyre Rebellion ended — is already history before Dunk is old enough to have fought in it. He’s inheriting the wreckage of other people’s ambitions. And he doesn’t care who won. He cares whether he can get enough coin to leave. The show does something quite sly here. It gives us our first real look at the Blackfyre Rebellion, but not through its dramatics or Egg play-acting its events. We see it through what it left behind, which is the same thing every war leaves behind. Bodies and opportunity for the desperate.

Rafe matters here in ways that extend beyond her function as the person whose death explains Dunk’s psychology. Chloe Lea plays her with a ferocious pragmatism that makes her death hit harder than it should for a character we’ve known for only a few minutes. She is certainly smarter than Dunk. And she’s more emotionally honest, too. She knows what they are and where they stand and what their future can realistically look like. And to that end, she is not sentimental about any of it except him.

“What if this is the best there is?” Dunk asks, thinking mostly of his mother who “might” come back for him someday. “That would be quite sad,” Rafe says. Rather than feel crushed by her own answer, she’s already past it. Already planning, already looking toward the Free Cities.

A mother-flipping moment.

When Rafe dies — her throat cut in a Flea Bottom alley because she couldn’t stop antagonizing a worthless guard who had less to lose than she did — the show doesn’t linger on it. It happens fast, the way actual violence happens, and then Dunk is alone and the knife is coming for him and the drunk knight is already on his way somewhere else and has no particular reason to notice a boy about to get stabbed.

Except he does. In the name of the Mother. Leave that boy be. The show’s thesis is right there in that moment. And it’s a thesis about what knighthood actually is once you strip away the ceremony. Remarkably, Ser Arlan doesn’t invoke the Warrior or the Father. Instead, he invokes the protector. He is, in that moment, acting in the name of something that has nothing to do with swords or honor or glory. He is just a drunk man telling other people to stop hurting a child. And it changes history.

Later, the show returns to the battle and it’s good. It’s very good, actually. It’s chaotic, unglamorous, subjectively rendered fighting that the franchise has rarely attempted. Director Owen Harris uses the narrow slit of Dunk’s helmet to keep the battle comprehensible but claustrophobic. And the choice to fog everything in, to give us mud and confusion and brief glimpses of other people’s fights rather than the full spectacle, is both a practical and an artistic decision. Practically, the show has a limited budget and twelve other champions whose individual fights would require significant coverage to make coherent. Artistically, Dunk is barely conscious. He’s barely upright, operating on the barest thread of functional awareness. He’s not going to notice that Lyonel Baratheon is laughing as he fights. No, he’s going to notice Aerion’s morningstar coming right for his elm tree of a body.

A refusal to stay down.

What A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 5 is doing in the Dunk-Aerion duel is asking: what is this man made of? And the answer it keeps returning to is: he is made of the refusal to stay down. Other shows would allow for some semblance of brilliance or tactical insight to win the day. Or a moment where Dunk outthinks his opponent by using his pride against him or something. But this fight is really just the repeated, almost mechanical act of getting up again. Because the memory of a girl who wanted to cross the Narrow Sea and a drunk knight who said leave that boy be is apparently enough. When everything else is gone, those memories are enough to keep a beaten man on his feet.

The crowd’s silence when Dunk falls — when they think he’s dead and Aerion is standing over him saying it’s over and Egg is screaming and they’re about to blow the horn — is the best five seconds of sound design the show has managed thus far. Because we’ve seen what this crowd is. We watched them laugh at Dunk in Episode 4 when he appealed to them for champions and got a fart. We know they’re not on his side. And now they’re silent. They aren’t cheering for Aerion. They’re also not mourning for Dunk. No, they’re just silent, the way people go quiet when they see something that doesn’t fit the story they were telling themselves about how the world works.

Dunk does get up of course. The crowd cheers. He beats Aerion’s face until Aerion yields. He drags him to Lord Ashford and makes him say it out loud. It’s the right ending to the fight, isn’t it? It’s not triumphant exactly, more like the cessation of something terrible. And the show earns it completely.

What the episode hits us over the head with.

And then we reach the part of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 5 that will probably be most remembered for years to come. After the battle, Dunk is in the stable. He’s been cut out of his armor. He is told Beesbury is dead, Hardyng is dead, and he carries those names in the same way he will carry Rafe. Those names are evidence that other people keep paying for his decisions. And then Baelor arrives. Dunk kneels and pledges his service. Baelor says he needs good men. The realm needs good men. And then he asks Raymun to help him with his helmet.

Let’s be specific about what Bertie Carvel is doing in this scene, because it is the best performance the franchise has produced since Charles Dance told Joffrey that no king says he is the king. Baelor, in this moment, doesn’t know he’s dying. The clues are all there, of course. The slurring, the fingers that feel like wood, the peculiar gentleness of his voice. But he’s not performing his death. He’s just talking. He comments on Maekar’s strength the way you’d comment on a brother’s strength after watching him play a sport you both love. There’s no bitterness in it. There’s something that might almost be pride.

My brother’s mace, most like. He’s strong. The show has been building toward the question of what makes a true knight all season. It has answered the question in about a dozen different registers. Ceremony vs. character, oath vs. action, noble birth vs. moral integrity. And here, in its final answer, it gives us a man who is dying because he chose to fight for something right. A man who uses his last semi-coherent sentences to speak with fondness of the brother whose weapon is killing him.

The price (of honor) isn’t right.

Baelor is not angry. Nor is he visibly afraid. Baelor is on a higher plane than most of the characters in this universe have managed to reach even in their best moments. And the tragedy goes beyond the reality of his death. The real tragedy is that someone this good was always going to be destroyed by a world that has only occasional use for goodness. He is the answer to the question, are there no true knights among you? And the answer, the show says, is, yes, occasionally, one. And the cost of being that one is too high for most.

When the helmet comes off — when Steely Pate says a prayer and Baelor turns around — it’s important that the show refuses to cut away. It holds on the wound. The practical effects here are doing something Breaking Bad pretty much perfected with Gus Fring. They are insisting that you see what violence actually does to a human head. That you understand the price of Dunk’s exoneration. For Dunk to live, the price has to be physical and permanent and grotesque. This is not a tasteful death. It’s a man’s skull showing through the back of his head, implying his helmet was the only thing keeping his brain from falling out. And the show is asking you to look at the wound and understand that this is what you asked for when you asked for Baelor to fight for Dunk.

Dunk holds him. Says he’s sorry. Keeps saying it. Because Baelor never answers.

The flashback, full-circle.

There’s a version of this review that spends more time on the flashback debate, that takes a firm position on whether twenty minutes of Flea Bottom constitutes reckless plot indulgence or inspired thematic rhyming. That debate is real and worth having. But I keep returning to the final minutes of this episode, and I keep finding something I didn’t expect to find in a Game of Thrones property in 2026. I keep finding grief.

The grief of fans mourning a character they actually liked, for starters. But also the grief embedded in the episode’s structure, in its argument. The show is grieving Baelor even before he dies. The flashback is, among other things, the show excavating Dunk’s history in the same way you sift through someone’s belongings after they’re gone, trying to understand what led here, what made this possible. It is preparatory grief. Grief as archaeology. And it gives the death a weight that the death alone — in a 37-minute episode with no setup — would not have had.

The gods are letting us know what is honorable, Baelor said at the start. This is what they said. They said the cost of being a true knight, in Westeros, in this universe, in this story about a world that wants badly to be better than it is, is that the true knights die. The ceremony lives on. And sure, the oaths get recited at the next tournament. But Baelor — the best version of what the Seven Kingdoms could produce — is dead in a hedge knight’s arms before the crowd has stopped cheering.

The show probably lacks a solution to this. Doubtful it will pretend to have one. It just wants you to feel the weight of what you started when you rooted for people to do the right thing. You got what you wanted when you cheered last week at Baelor entering the battlefield with the theme music blaring. And this is what it cost.

Stray thoughts for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 5.

• The knighting ambiguity thread is still an open question. Dunk probably wasn’t actually knighted by Arlan. That’s why Lyonel had to step in and knight Raymun in the last episode. Dunk didn’t know the words, presumably, hence the cutaway shrug. Episode 5 is where that question hits a breaking point for me. Because Baelor dying in Dunk’s arms is the moment Dunk becomes a “true knight” in the eyes of the realm. Because Dunk is the man Baelor was willing to die for. Still, what does it mean that his technical legitimacy is still murky?

• Maekar as tragic figure, not villain. I only touched on Maekar briefly but there’s more to excavate. He’s the father who loves a monstrous son, whose mace kills the good brother… Accidentally, probably, but with that whisper of ambiguity the show plants. Sam Spruell’s work deserves more than a paragraph. The episode essentially gives Maekar his own quiet devastation in the background.

• The Fossoway split. We tracked this carefully in Episode 4. How Steffon’s betrayal founded the Red/Green Fossoway split. Does Episode 5 pay that off? Well, we see Raymun in the battle and how he fights only momentarily. But similar to the theme of knowing a battle by its ruins, we know Raymun by the fact that he survived against his cousin. Not only that, but he apparently held his own enough to remain mostly uninjured, enough to tend to Dunk and Baelor soon after. It’ll be interesting to see how the show closes the loop on Raymun (if at all) by the next episode.

• What Egg’s helplessness in the stands does.  We got into Ansell’s screaming during the review proper, but there’s a richer reading here. Egg spent Episodes 1-4 being the one who fixes things for Dunk. He recruited champions, revealed his identity to save Dunk, leveraged his position. In Episode 5 he’s stripped of all that. He can’t squire, fight, or intervene. The episode deliberately takes away his agency as a mirror to what Dunk goes through on the field. Two people, both powerless in different ways, both watching something terrible unfold.

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

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery