Summary
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms makes audiences wait in “In the Name of the Mother”, biding its time with backstory, but the brutal payoff is well worth it.
Delayed gratification is the art of making someone wait for something they definitely want, and it’s an idea very neatly displayed in Episode 5 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. “In the Name of the Mother” has everything you want, really. It’s high stakes, provides some crucial backstory, and ends on a major cliffhanger, probably the biggest one yet, at least after the revelation of Egg’s real identity.
But it makes you wait. After the brilliant setup of the previous episode, and the opening of this one, which sees the very beginning of the Trial of Seven that Aerion requested to determine Dunk’s fate, most of this half-hour takes place in the past. It gives us a snippet of how a young Dunk eventually found his way to Ser Arlan, and lingers there long enough that the eventual return to the brutal chaos of the present day feels really earned. And the action, when it arrives, is visceral and impactful, a reminder of the stakes of the world this story is set in, though the flashbacks aren’t exactly jovial either.
We should talk about those flashbacks. They’re triggered by Dunk receiving a pretty serious blow to the head after Baelor gets the party started with a good speech. He’s right that the Kingsguard will be reluctant to harm him, allowing him to keep them occupied, but that doesn’t get Dunk out of Dodge, and the point is proved immediately. But his unconscious daydreams are revealing.
As a youth, Dunk was a lowborn in Flea Bottom, scrimping and scraping with his friend, Rafe, in the aftermath of war. Their life doubles as great worldbuilding; they comb through battlefields for loot, take a highborn’s teeth when he dies. They’re saving up for passage to the Free Cities, to the dream of a life that isn’t spent cowering in hovels and stealing to get by. But the reminders of their predicament are constant. Anyone with even a little bit more money and social cache treats them like dirt.
The lives of beggars and thieves aren’t worth much, which is showcased pretty adroitly in the unceremonious death of Rafe, her throat cut for stealing the knife of a man who had taken all their money. It’s a much too petty a slight to carry the death penalty, but there you go. Rafe bleeds out on the cobbles, messily and sordidly. Dunk is left alone with a wound in his leg on account of a spear. The moment has obvious parallels to his spirited defence of Tanselle, which left him in his present-day predicament.
Much like how Egg intervened to placate Aerion, Dunk of the past is rescued, too. Ser Arlan, very drunk, bursts out of an inn and kills his attackers. It’s enough of a heroic action to compel Dunk, who begins to follow Arlan from a distance. But the travelling is hard going. He becomes ill from desperately drinking riverwater, sleeps in the open, and is almost dead by the time he catches up. But Arlan’s eventual “get up” rouses him; it’s these words, in the present day, that once again pull an unconscious Dunk from the brink and get him back into the action.
And the action! A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 5 is very chaotic and brutal. The fight is the kind of thing that even the winner loses; Dunk even seems to die at one point. But he refuses to yield or give in. He keeps answering Egg’s – and Ser Arlan’s, in his head – instructions for him to get up. At his most innermost core, Dunk is something that none of his adversaries can claim. He’s brave. Always has been.
And that bravery allows Dunk to overpower Aerion and force him to yield, loud enough for the crowd to hear. It’s a great moment, only slightly underscored by the fact that the punishment Dunk took to get to that point might still kill him. But he’s victorious. He should be off the hook. But is he? That’s brought into question by the final scene of the episode, where Baelor laughingly realises that he took a blow to the head from his brother’s mace. What he doesn’t realise, at least not initially, is that the blow caved the back of his head in entirely. Just like that, he’s dead. And who’s the most obvious scapegoat?
