From the Battle of Blackwater Bay to Battle of the Bastards, and countless others, Game of Thrones has aired some of the greatest battle sequences in TV history. And while the trial of seven in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 5 didn't carry the same scale of others, it was just as brutal and chaotic.
In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the "trial by seven" is evoked by Aerion Targaryen, almost in a bid to embarrass Ser Duncan. The trial must see both of them gather a team of seven knights to fight for their cause. They then gather on the battlefield and fight to the death, or until the opponent yields.
For Aerion, the trial backfires. Not only does Dunk manage to find six other knights willing to fight for his innocence, but one of them happens to be none other than Baelor Targaryen, Aerion's uncle.
The brawl itself is easily as gritty, brutal, and visceral as anything we've seen throughout the franchise.
“It was a really well-written fight," director Owen Harris said on the official Game of Thrones Podcast. "It’s got a tonality to it, mainly because you’re stuck with Dunk. Even though it’s seven-on-seven, you are with Dunk with every blow, and I think that does something very interesting. You’re not even with the person Dunk’s fighting like in most in most duels; you’ll always take both sides. Something about being stuck with Dunk throughout all of it gave it a real tonality.”
The battle is ardently stuck on one perspective. It even uses clever camera movements to place the viewer inside Dunk's helm. For A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the POV-style works best for the smaller-scale, but it’s equally as chaotic.
“It’s last man standing," Harris said. "These are 14 guys that just want to get at each other’s throats. There isn’t much order to it. That’s why we took this approach to making it chaotic.”
Of course, Harris is very much aware that he's standing on the shoulders of giants. He studied past Game of Thrones battles, and one in particular.
“I’d be lying if I said that we didn’t look at the Battle of the Bastards,” he admitted. “It’s one of the great battle sequences. What you don’t want to be doing is trying to copy it. It’s the massive men that are going to come to blows. Watching that unfold, the jaw-dropping quality of it.”
"When you get a job like this you look at all of them,” he explains. “You don’t look at them to take anything from them, you look at them to say, ‘Why does this particular action work for this character?’ And you start to hone your sequence down from there."
Suffice it to say, his studying paid off dividends. Episode 5, "In the Name of the Mother," currently stands at a wildly impressive 9.5/10 score on IMDb with over 150K ratings.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1 is now streaming on HBO Max. The hit Game of Thrones prequel is coming back for season 2 in 2027. Stay tuned for more information about the future of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.