Game of Thrones fans who tune in to the premiere of HBO’s latest spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, will see something they’ve never seen before in a show based on George R.R. Martin’s work: a nervous protagonist projectile-pooping.
Just four minutes into the episode, former squire Dunk (Peter Claffey) decides to enter his first jousting tourney, shortly after burying the elderly knight who trained him. Even thinking about the tourney terrifies him enough to upset his stomach. Director Owen Harris cuts directly from Dunk looking nobly determined, as the Game of Thrones theme rises majestically behind him, to Dunk half-squatting behind a tree, pants around his ankles, bare ass hanging out, spraying out pressurized feces as if he had a garden hose in his guts.
It’s a memorable declaration of intent for a show where the stakes are consistently smaller than they were in Game of Thrones or its other prequel spinoff, House of the Dragon. Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is mostly straightforward fantasy-drama about the grim side of clinging to honor and humanity as a hedge knight without wealth, land, or a place in a lord’s household. But it also features the occasional sharp veer into bodily-function humor, including a couple more poop gags throughout the show’s six half-hour episodes.
“I swear to God, I only use three poop jokes this entire series, [but] everybody keeps asking questions about these,” showrunner and executive producer Ira Parker said at a press day. “And I promise they’re all character-based.”
“We’re an unpolished show,” Parker continued. “We’re showing it as it is, and this is a part of life. Dunk has a shpilkes Jewish stomach, like me. So every now and then, he hears that call to greatness, and his nerves get the better of him. Come on, people. We don’t have to be so high[-minded] all the time — we have plenty of [serious drama] in this show. We are an earthy show. We are a gritty show.”
That said, Parker did decide one planned defecation scene was going too far. “There was going to be another one — hey, I probably shouldn’t bring this up, because […] that’s all people are going to be quoting me for,” he said.
“But very early on in the writer’s room, we were talking about where people [in the medieval era had] to go to the bathroom during a tournament, because they’re all out camping in the middle of nowhere. Back in the day, trough trenches were dug, in just a big long line, and there were also these things set up — like if you did it in the woods, [there were] ropes attached to trees so you could lean back in sort of a crouch, squatting-ish position over the top of this trench, hopefully going downhill.”
Parker says the plan was to have Dunk and Egg — the young boy who spends season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms following Dunk and trying to become his squire — having a conversation near the public latrines, “and somebody’s rope snaps, and they fall into the [trench]. That was too far for us. So there is a limit as to how much poop and fart jokes we will allow in this show. But [that idea was] funnier than a fart — come on, people!”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, poop jokes and all, airs on Sunday nights on HBO through Feb. 22.
