By the time the credits rolled on “The Morrow,” the Season 1 finale of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, I realized something a bit embarrassing: I’d been bracing for another big, bloody set piece that never came. Instead, the show sat in the wreckage of Ashford and just… let everyone feel it. After the brutality of Prince Baelor’s death, that choice landed harder than another round of jousts ever could.
Full spoilers for the Season 1 finale from here on out.
I watched the episode late at night on HBO Max, still rattled from the previous week’s trial by seven. What I got was a character study: a battered hedge knight drowning in survivor’s guilt, a prince-father suddenly human, and a boy who might be king trying to choose which man he wants to become. “The Morrow” isn’t flashy, but it’s the episode that finally answers what kind of story this show wants to tell – and more importantly, what kind of knight Dunk wants to be.
The first stretch of the episode is just raw. Dunk is wrecked, physically and emotionally, and the premiere’s goofy giant of a hedge knight feels very far away. He can’t stop circling the same question: why did a prince die so that someone like him could live? That self-loathing comes straight out of Flea Bottom. He’s internalized Westeros’ class system so hard he genuinely believes his life is worth less than Baelor’s.
What struck me is how the show doesn’t let him off the hook with some “chosen by the gods” nonsense. Ser Lyonel Baratheon, bruised and bandaged himself, pretty much smacks the guilt out of him with a verbal backhand. He reminds Dunk that Baelor was supposed to be safe, that it was their job – the seven – to risk their lives. Then he twists the knife with that brutal line: “And the gods don’t favor a fraud.”
I loved that moment because it cuts through Dunk’s martyr fantasy. He’s not cursed. He’s not magically blessed. He’s a decent man who took a risk and lived. And the episode keeps hammering that theme: the gods aren’t writing this story, choices are. Dunk choosing to stand for Tanselle. Baelor choosing to stand for Dunk. Lyonel choosing to tell him the ugly truth instead of the comforting lie.
If you’ve ever finished a FromSoftware boss fight with 2% HP and then watched your NPC ally die in the cutscene anyway, you know the flavor of this guilt. You did “everything right,” but someone better and braver falls instead. The show leans all the way into that feeling and lets it shape every decision Dunk makes in the finale.
One of my gripes with the last couple of episodes was how completely the humor drained out of the show. The Ashford tourney started as this almost cozy, low-stakes thing and then just spiraled into misery. “The Morrow” doesn’t magically “lighten up,” but it remembers that Westeros can be funny in a very human, messy way.
Lyonel’s frank, almost teasing bluntness with Dunk gives their scenes an easy charm, even while they’re talking about death and divine favor. Later, Raymun Fossoway and his newly acquired honey trap of a wife, Red, slide in with a dose of bawdy, slightly pathetic comedy that feels straight out of the books. It’s not Marvel-style quipping; it’s the kind of awkward, horny nonsense people latch onto when they’re trying very hard not to think about the prince who just died next door.
Those beats matter. They keep the finale from becoming a dirge. More importantly, they remind us who Dunk is: a man who’s always half a step away from being the joke himself, even when he’s the hero of the story. That tonal balance – grim but not joyless – is the version of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms I signed up for, and I was glad to see it again before the season bowed out.
The biggest surprise of the episode for me wasn’t about Dunk or Egg at all. It was Prince Maekar. Up to now, he’s mostly been a looming problem: the hard, cold Targaryen who hits his son too easily and radiates controlled fury. In “The Morrow,” Sam Spruell quietly turns him into one of the most interesting people in the room.
When Maekar offers Dunk a place in his service and proposes that Egg become his squire under royal oversight, it sounds like the “logical” endpoint of the season. Dunk gets legitimized. Egg is safe. The Crown keeps a close eye on this odd little bond between lowborn knight and dragon-blooded boy. But the way Spruell plays it, you can feel everything coiled under that proposition: grief for Baelor, disgust for Aerion, fear that the last son he has left will slip away or turn rotten in front of him.
The standout sequence, though, is the silent one. Egg stands over a hideously burned Aerion, dagger in hand, staring at his own white hair as it starts to grow back in. It’s the kind of moment where I stopped breathing for a second. Maekar walks in and, for the first time all season, doesn’t react like a prince or a disciplinarian. He reacts like a father.
No shouting. No threats. He just goes to Egg and gently puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders. It’s such a soft gesture that it almost doesn’t feel like Westeros. But in that one motion, you see that he understands both of his sons completely: the monster on the bed and the terrified kid deciding how different he wants to be. Later, when he tells Dunk, “He is my last son,” the line lands because we’ve seen the man behind the title, not just heard about him.
The show needed this. If Dunk is going to turn down Maekar’s offer, that choice only matters if we respect the man he’s refusing. By humanizing Maekar, the writers turn Dunk’s “no” into something much heavier than just “I don’t want a boss.”
The other crucial piece of the finale’s puzzle comes from an unexpected angle: Prince Daeron. Up to now he’s been the anxious, wine-soaked Targaryen who’d rather dream than fight. Here, he drops one of the episode’s most important truths – that Aerion wasn’t always a monster. There was a time, he says, when his brother was kind. Something in him twisted later.
This is the conversation that cracks Dunk’s self-pity wide open. Up until that point, he’s mostly bouncing between “I don’t deserve to live” and “princes ruin everything.” Daeron forces him to consider a different angle: maybe what matters isn’t the blood you’re born with, but who’s actually there to shape you. And suddenly Egg isn’t just a clever bald kid who wants adventure; he’s a Targaryen prince at a crossroads between becoming another Aerion or something entirely new.
Dunk initially responds to this responsibility by flinching away from it. When Egg lashes out and says he’s not the knight he thought he was, it hits like a critical strike. You can almost see Dunk reaching for the familiar comfort of low expectations: I’m just a hedge knight, I’m no one, let the princes handle princes. It takes Daeron’s quiet warning to make him realize that refusing Egg is still a choice – and maybe not the brave one.
What I appreciated is that the episode never turns Dunk into a saintly mentor figure overnight. He doesn’t suddenly know how to “fix” Targaryens. All he knows is the life he’s had: hard roads, questionable inns, a dead knight’s armor that doesn’t quite fit. When he goes back to Maekar and insists that if Egg rides with him, it will be as the squire to a hedge knight, on hedge knight terms, it feels like a genuine conviction, not a genre speech.
He isn’t just taking on a squire. He’s staking out his identity: not royal retainer, not chosen champion, just Dunk – and that has to be enough.
The emotional core of “The Morrow” is that single refusal: Dunk turning down Maekar’s offer to make Egg his ward under the Crown’s eye. In almost any other fantasy show, this is the moment the hero “levels up” – he gets lands, a banner, a place at court. Instead, he walks away.
On paper, it’s a stupid decision. Maekar’s right to be furious. Egg would be safer under thick castle walls than on dusty roads chasing glory for a man who owns one set of patchwork armor and a half-decent horse. The finale never hides that. The argument in Maekar’s chambers is loaded with that frustration – royal pride clashing with a hedge knight’s stubborn sense of how a life should be lived.
But this is where the season finally pays off the small moments we’ve spent with Dunk: his memories of Ser Arlan, his reverence for the simple (if often broken) vow of knighthood, his instinct to stand up when decent people get trampled. If he takes Maekar’s deal, he becomes another knight orbiting a dragon. If he walks out, he stays the guy who actually sees the smallfolk on the ground.
That’s what I ended up loving about this finale. It doesn’t turn Dunk into a revolutionary. He isn’t going to tear down the system. But he quietly refuses to be absorbed by it, even when that would make his life safer and easier. He chooses mentorship on his own awkward, wandering, mud-soaked terms. In a world that keeps insisting blood and birth decide everything, that’s a quietly radical decision.
Of course, Egg has no intention of staying behind. The reveal that he’s conned Dunk again – claiming Maekar gave his blessing when we later learn he absolutely didn’t – is exactly the kind of mischievous, slightly mean humor this show does well. The end credits stinger where Maekar realizes his son is gone and just seethes might be the funniest thing in the whole season precisely because it’s built on top of all that previously established pain.
Their departure itself is framed almost like a folk tale being born. Egg rattles off the “Nine Kingdoms” as they ride, a neat little wink to the in-world political nitpicking about whether you count the Crownlands and the Iron Islands separately. In some territories the show is even being marketed now with that “Nine Crowns” angle, and you can feel why: this is no longer just a story about one tourney, it’s a roaming saga about every corner of Westeros that never got screen time in Game of Thrones.
The image that stuck with me, though, is the spectral vision of Ser Arlan riding away from Dunk and Egg on the road. It’s bittersweet without being sentimental. Dunk isn’t haunted in a horror sense; he’s being gently told it’s time. Time to stop living as someone else’s apprentice. Time to accept that he is the knight now, flawed and frightened and sometimes wrong – but chosen, in a way that has nothing to do with gods or dragons.
As someone who’s been reading these stories for years, I knew, broadly, that this is where we had to end up: Dunk and Egg on the road, no tourney banners in sight. Still, seeing it actually staged after an episode spent wrestling with duty, guilt, and fear gave that final ride a lot more weight than “and then they had adventures” ever could.
Showrunner Ira Parker has talked in interviews about keeping this series locked to Dunk’s “bottom-up” perspective – no jumping into dragonlord war councils, no cutting to the big names to explain the plot. The finale really commits to that idea. Baelor’s death reshapes Targaryen politics in massive ways, but we only see the ripples that touch one bruised hedge knight and one runaway prince.
Season 2 is expected to adapt The Sworn Sword, taking Dunk and Egg south toward Dorne. On the page, that story is even smaller than The Hedge Knight: fewer lords, less spectacle, more dry fields and local grudges. After “The Morrow,” I actually feel confident the show can pull that off. The best scenes this week weren’t the court gatherings; they were three people in a sickroom, two people arguing over a boy, one giant and one drunk prince talking about whether people can change.
If Season 1 sometimes felt like it was straining to remind you that this is the same Westeros as Game of Thrones, the finale lets that pressure go. No dragons, no prophecy, no throne in sight – just a knight, a squire, and the long road ahead. That’s exactly the foundation this series needed before it starts wandering the so-called Nine Kingdoms in earnest.
By the end of “The Morrow,” I wasn’t thinking about Baelor’s broken helm or Aerion’s burns. I was thinking about one stubborn decision from a man who still doesn’t quite believe he deserves his own armor: to take a prince on the road, not as a ward of the Crown, but as a boy who might grow up better than the blood in his veins says he should.
For me, it worked. “The Morrow” isn’t the flashiest episode of the season, but it’s the one that finally commits to what A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms does best: intimate, ground-level character work set in a world that usually only cares about banners and battles. It reframes Dunk not as a pawn lucky to be alive, but as a man making a choice about what kind of knight – and what kind of mentor – he’s willing to be.
Episode Rating: 9/10. A thoughtful, character-driven finale that trades spectacle for soul, and sets Dunk & Egg up for a road-trip across Westeros I genuinely can’t wait to follow.
Get access to exclusive strategies, hidden tips, and pro-level insights that we don't share publicly.
Ultimate Reviews Strategy Guide + Weekly Pro Tips