Season 1 of the Game of Thrones prequel series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the entirety of George R.R. Martin’s 1998 novella The Hedge Knight almost faithfully from start to finish, with a few expansive additions, and only one really major story change. (See below for more on that.) That means there aren’t a lot of dangling loose ends by the finale: The Hedge Knight was conceived as both a self-contained, start-to-finish story, and an open-ended setup for further adventures. So what’s next for the show?
HBO renewed A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms back in November, with season 2 expected to arrive in 2027. That season will adapt The Sword Sword, Martin’s second novella about the adventures of hedge knight Ser Dunk the Tall and his squire Egg, also known as Westeros’ king-to-be Aegon Targaryen V. And after that?
“We take nothing for granted here,” showrunner Ira Parker told Polygon during a press day. “This is just Game of Thrones without all the stuff. And who knows if we’re going to connect with a wider audience that allows us to keep doing these things. [But] I love this show so much, I would make as many of these as they would let me make.”
How many seasons will A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms get?
While it remains to be seen how the entire season of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms did in the ratings, season 1 at least started strong, with Warner Bros. Discovery saying the first episode ranked among HBO Max’s top three series premieres of all time. Assuming the overall ratings justify what Parker says is a much lower per-episode budget than Game of Thrones, the series could continue for a very long time, albeit with one hitch: Martin has only written three Dunk and Egg stories. (The third, The Mystery Knight, was published in 2010.) So by season 4, the series would face the Game of Thrones problem of having to expand the story beyond Martin’s written work.
“George is writing a fourth one at least that he has some good ideas for,” Parker says. Martin has been promising to write the fourth and fifth Dunk and Egg story for well over a decade, though, and his well-documented struggles to meet deadlines and produce new material cast doubt on whether he can complete the fourth story, even given several years of lead time. But The Hollywood Reporter says Martin has given Parker brief outlines of a dozen more Dunk and Egg stories, which Parker’s writers could expand.
And Parker told Polygon that he and Martin have a plan to work together on developing season 4 and beyond, regardless of what stories Martin finishes.
“George and I have talked about very loosely that if it ever came to that, we would just go through and break seasons together, that he has a lot of ideas and we can bounce ideas off of each other,” Parker says. “Obviously, I don’t want to take him away too long from his day job, but it’s amazing how much can be accomplished in a quick amount of time with him and a couple of his favorite authors in the room. We were pretty good for season 1, so I think we could continue that and come up with some good stuff.”
What will happen in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 2?
The three existing Dunk and Egg novellas are all self-contained stories with different settings around Westeros, as the hedge knight and his squire travel the country, looking for worthy lords to serve. Martin’s outline for future stories reportedly cover the biggest events of the main characters’ entire lives. The real question is how much of Martin’s work Parker and the writers would want to change in subsequent seasons to make A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms more of a single story and less of an anthology with little connective tissue between seasons.
The show’s biggest change to Martin’s novella in season 1 is the reveal that Egg is lying when he says his father, Prince Maekar Targaryen, has given Egg permission to be Dunk’s squire. In the novellas, that claim is true. In the show, Egg has run off again, guaranteeing that Prince Maekar and the rest of the Targaryens will be pursuing Dunk as a kidnapper, and trying to force Egg to come home.
That also potentially sets up season 1’s major villain, Egg’s older brother Aerion, as an ongoing antagonist. After Dunk beats and humiliates Aerion in season 1’s Trial of Seven, it seems likely that Aerion would want revenge, and “rescuing” his little brother is a worthwhile excuse. In both The Hedge Knight and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Prince Maekar tells Dunk he’s exiling Aerion to the Free Cities, hoping time away from Westeros will mature him. Aerion doesn’t appear in The Sworn Sword or The Mystery Knight — but it’s always possible Parker could bring him back anyway. A one-and-done antagonist is fine for a series of standalone stories, but seems like a waste for a TV series that’s hoping to keep viewers connected to an ongoing story with escalating stakes, instead of one that starts from scratch every season.
Parker’s thoughts on the next few seasons may tease that he’s planning to adapt the next two novellas as faithfully as he abandoned The Hedge Knight, while looking to resolve more of the show’s newly introduced season 1 plot threads in season 4 and beyond.
“In [this] world, there’s stories that need to be told,” he says. “If we end up doing two or three of these [seasons], it’ll be nice, but it won’t have that resolution that we would have seeing where they go and how they change.”
Really, the biggest question about future seasons of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is whether any of the first season’s memorable characters will return down the line. In the novellas, they don’t. Dunk periodically thinks about fan-favorite character and love interest Tanselle the puppeteer, but she isn’t part of the existing later stories. Neither are figures like Daniel Ings’ effusive standout character Ser Lyonel Baratheon, The Laughing Storm, or Shaun Thomas’ sympathetic ally and friend, Ser Raymun Fossoway. Again, that seems fine for standalone novellas, but establishing these characters and then abandoning them is a waste of audience interest for a series whose showrunner might be ambitiously aiming at a 12-season run.
“I’ve seen the outline, which is seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 of these, something that takes them all the way through their life,” Parker says. “I really hope that we get to do it, because it’s such an interesting journey to complete. And to take these characters from beginning to end, I really think, would have a lot of longevity.”
Season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is streaming on HBO Max now.
