In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, What Is a Good Man Worth?

The season 1 finale of HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms opens with Ser Duncan (Peter Claffey) leaning against a tree, his body a catalog of damage. His face is swollen, his wounds tended as best as the traveling maester could manage. Lying next to him, Ser Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings) is doing what he does best: talking as if nothing terrible has happened. “Been a wonderful tournament,” Ser Lyonel says with a grin. “Shame it’s all over. Home is brutally dull.”

Episode 6, called “The Morrow,” unfolds in the aftermath of a victory that feels more like a funeral. Prince Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvel) is dead. So are two of Dunk’s defenders, who chose to fight for a hedge knight they barely knew. Dunk survived his trial of seven and forced Prince Aerion (Finn Bennett) to yield, but the cost has gutted him in the process. The episode spends its lean half-hour sitting with that weight—not rushing toward the next adventure but asking what kind of person emerges from a win this devastating.

Ser Lyonel’s offer to Dunk is generous: Come to Storm’s End, hunt, and hawk. Train properly. “I will love you like a brother—and if not, fuck you,” he says. “I’ll hate you like a brother.”

But Dunk can’t accept. “All I do is bring pain and suffering to those around me,” he says. Ser Lyonel pushes back: The gods don’t grant favor to a fraud, and Dunk’s survival means something. When Dunk wonders why the gods have favored him at all, Ser Lyonel glances at the state of him. He can’t resist some dark humor: “This is no favor. This is mockery.”

From a distance, Dunk watches the smoke rise from Prince Baelor’s funeral pyre. He finds Baelor’s son sitting alone on a rock and tries to offer the boy comfort, telling him that Baelor was a great man. The son agrees: Baelor would have been the greatest king since Aegon the Dragon. Then he asks the question Dunk has been asking himself: “Why would the gods take him and leave you?” Dunk has no satisfactory answer to give.

That question follows Dunk through every conversation in the finale. Walking through the Ashford encampment with Ser Raymun Fossoway (Shaun Thomas), Dunk blames himself for everything. Raymun doesn’t accept this blame. His wife, Rowan (Rowan Robinson), emerges from a tent, radiant and pregnant—“It feels like a boy,” she says proudly—and the two kiss with the easy affection of people building a life together.

But no one twists the knife like Prince Maekar Targaryen (Sam Spruell), the man whose mace struck the blow that killed his own brother. Some already whisper the death was intentional, he tells Dunk. The whispers will follow them both to the grave. “Each time a battle is lost or a crop fails, the fools will say Baelor would not have let it happen,” Prince Maekar warns. “But the hedge knight killed him.”

Dunk doesn’t argue. He tells Prince Maekar he sat under a tree that morning and asked himself whether he could have simply given up a hand or foot. “How can a foot be worth a prince’s life?” he asks.

“What answer does your tree give you?” Prince Maekar replies.

What follows is one of the season’s finest sequences, from which the episode ultimately draws its name. Dunk recalls that, every evening at Evenfall, Ser Arlan (Danny Webb) would repeat the same sentence: “I wonder what the morrow will bring.” Might some morrow come when Dunk will need that foot? Might the realm need it even more than it needs its prince’s life? Prince Maekar scoffs. The realm has as many hedge knights as hedges, he says. But the idea nevertheless lingers throughout the rest of “The Morrow.” What Dunk suggests is that an ordinary person’s life carries a worth that can’t be foreseen; a hedge knight sleeping under the trees might one day matter in ways no lord can predict.

Prince Maekar changes the subject. His youngest son has grown fond of Dunk and refuses to squire for anyone else. He offers a comfortable arrangement: Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) can squire for Dunk at Summerhall while a master-at-arms completes Dunk’s training. Ser Arlan did all he could, Prince Maekar acknowledges, but Dunk still has much to learn.

Dunk turns this proposal down. He’s done with princes. When he steps into the hallway, he finds Egg sitting there, waiting. They sit in silence until Dunk speaks. “I can’t, Egg,” he says of taking Egg as his squire.

“Maybe you’re not the knight I thought you were,” Egg replies.

The line cuts deep because it carries the weight of a child’s faith—the kind that can make a grown man reconsider everything.

In the episode’s most tender exchange, an imagined Ser Arlan appears beneath a tree, telling Dunk a story the hedge knight has already heard before. In Pennytree, soldiers heading off to war nail a penny to the oak in the village square; if they return, they take it down. “It’s a great oak tree, and yet, it’s often hard to find a spare bit to nail a new penny,” Ser Arlan says. Pennytree: a place that has sent more men to die than it has ever welcomed home.

Dunk asks the question that’s been haunting him: Why didn’t Ser Arlan ever knight him? Did the old man fear Dunk would leave? He wouldn’t have. Ser Arlan’s face goes still. Dunk says the ser’s name again, then breaks down. Tears come at last, heavy and overdue—for Ser Arlan, for Prince Baelor, for the boy in Flea Bottom who followed a drunk old knight out of the city because he had nowhere else to go. When Ser Arlan stirs, he finishes the story with a gentle nudge: “And that’s why they call it the Pennytree. A true knight always finishes a story.”

The vision of Ser Arlan is the key to the season. He wasn’t a great man by any measure the realm would recognize. He drank too much, never earning a seat at anyone’s table. But he saved a boy’s life, and that boy became someone willing to throw his own away for a stranger. The pennies on the tree are the lives spent in service of something larger than personal gain. Most never come down. But the tree stands because they were nailed there.

If the vision of Ser Arlan is about who Dunk has been, the scenes that follow are about who this family might still become. Back among the living, Dunk confronts Daeron Targaryen (Henry Ashton), telling him the dead men are dead because of Daeron himself.

Daeron sidesteps the accusation, asking instead whether Dunk will take Egg as his squire. Then he offers something unexpected. “My brother wasn’t always such a little monster,” he says. He isn’t talking about Egg, but rather Aerion. “Perhaps the seeds of madness are sown in the womb, as the maesters say,” he adds. “But Aerion was quite the glad child once. He liked fishing.” It’s a disarming detail, as well as a damning one: Somewhere between that boy with a fishing rod and the man in the helmet carved like a burning skull, something went wrong that no Targaryen stopped.

Then the episode shows us what that failure left behind. In his room, Egg stands before a mirror, running a hand over the stubble growing back on his scalp—the blond hair he shaved to distance himself from his family. Tears slip down his face. Then we see why: Aerion’s body lies in bed, injured. Egg leans against Prince Maekar, who holds him in silence. However monstrous Aerion became, he is still Egg’s brother.

When Dunk returns to Prince Maekar, everything has changed. He tells the prince he will take Egg as his squire—but not at Summerhall. He wants to bring the boy on the road, where he’ll sleep in inns and stables and the halls of lesser lords. “Maybe under a tree, if we must,” Dunk adds. Prince Maekar resists. Egg is blood of the dragon; he can’t rest in ditches and eat hard, salted beef.

“Daeron never slept in a ditch,” Dunk presses. “All the beef Aerion ever ate was thick and rare and bloody.” The implication is clear: Dunk is offering a different education.

Prince Maekar’s face softens. “He’s my last son,” he says. It’s the sentiment of a man admitting that castles and bloodlines weren’t enough to save his other children. If a hedge knight can do what royal privilege could not, Maekar might let Dunk try.

In the episode’s final stretch, Dunk says goodbye to Ser Raymun, who offers him his beloved horse Sweetfoot, believing Dunk is headed to Storm’s End. Dunk gently corrects him: He’ll do what he should have done all along and ride in the other direction. He tells Raymun to keep Sweetfoot. “I think an orchard might suit her better,” he says, a farewell that doubles as a blessing for the life Raymun is choosing.

He then proceeds to nail a penny to a tree. As Dunk readies his horse, Egg approaches. His father, apparently, finally consented. “My lord father says I am to serve you,” Egg explains.

“Serve you, ser,” Dunk corrects, already teaching. He gives Egg a horse named Chestnut and tells him not to ride Thunder unless told otherwise. As they set off, Egg asks where they’re headed. Dunk doesn’t know—maybe any of the seven kingdoms. There are nine, Egg corrects. They go back and forth. “Then everyone is wrong,” says Egg, listing them all. Egg mentions he’s never been over the Red Mountains; he hears they have good puppet shows in Dorne.

As they ride through open fields, their silent escort pulls away. The camera zooms out, widening its lens until the two figures shrink against a vast landscape, the sun dropping toward dusk. Once the show’s title card appears, there’s an unexpected cut to Prince Maekar on horseback, glancing around the encampment. “Where has Egg gone?” he wonders aloud, angry. As it turns out, Prince Maekar didn’t grant his son permission to go with Dunk. Egg made that decision for himself.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms spent its first season arguing that decency is its own form of courage—that protecting the powerless and breaking cycles of cruelty are not lesser acts but ones that hold a broken world together. The finale doesn’t reward Dunk with glory or a castle; it gives him the freedom to become the kind of knight Ser Arlan never quite managed to be…but always believed was possible.

Dunk could have gone to Storm’s End; he could have accepted Summerhall. He chose the harder, less certain path, not out of stubbornness but because he understands that knighthood isn’t simply a title you receive. It’s a practice: something you do each morning when you get up, ride out, and try again.

The road stretches ahead of Dunk and Egg, open and unknowable. For a hedge knight and a prince disguised as no one special, that’s not a punishment. It’s exactly where they belong—out where the realm is most fragile and most human. The morrow will bring what it brings. Dunk will meet it the only way he knows how: on horseback, with a story half-finished and someone beside him who believes he can be better.