Aegon arrives from Dragonstone with three dragons and demands that the kings of Westeros submit. When several refuse, he burns their castles and armies until they surrender. And that, at least according to the existing lore, is pretty much that.
The Pendragon Cycle is a TV series executive-produced by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro exclusively for DailyWire+. If you're unfamiliar, it's the conservative streaming outlet attached to Shapiro's The Daily Wire news service. As "alternative" broadcasting like the "All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show" becomes the new normal for the MAGA faithful, The Pendragon Cycle is a discount Game of Thrones that retells the story of King Arthur's most-trusted magician during the arrival of Christianity.
For decades, we smallfolk have been told that goodness is naïve, that moral grayness is sophistication, and cynicism is cleverness. Turns out, we do not want it. Most of us can only take an endless string of villains, liars, and normalized nastiness for so long. Our battered nervous systems want a hero to root for who would not lie to us or betray us.
In the world of , you can't move for Aegons. In Game of Thrones, a much-anticipated plot twist revealed Jon Snow wasn't the bastard son of Eddard Stark. In fact, he was secretly Aegon Targaryen, son of the Mad King Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark. Then, House of the Dragon introduced King Aegon II, the son of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alicent. Finally, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms revealed its bald squire, Egg, was actually Aegon Targaryen, the future King Aegon V.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was filmed across Northern Ireland. While viewers experience breathtaking scenery through their screens, it threw up a host of issues for the cast and crew. "It's very, very rainy, and the sets were so muddy", says Dexter Sol Ansell, who plays Egg - "If you stepped in the mud and stood still for more than five seconds... you're gone. You've been submerged."
At long last, the secret behind Egg has been revealed. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now half over, but now viewers have learned the squire's true identity, something readers of the original Tales of Dunk and Egg books have known from the start. But what does this new secret mean for the future of the show - and the future of Westeros itself? The answer is a lot more complicated than you may think.
When a franchise goes big, you have two choices for what to do next. You can zoom out and reveal the wider context of the original story, or you can zoom in and spotlight a story that has lower stakes. This latter approach is high-risk, high-reward, but it could serve to completely redefine the entire property. Take, for example, the DC Universe.
"What was so beautifully done about House of the Dragon is this epic scale at which the story is told. So to have this big booming orchestral score was very important," Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker says during a roundtable interview. However, for his series, "we realized early on that we're telling a small story here - a small story about a simple person who has smaller ambitions. And so, certainly our sound had to suit that."
We don't know much about Dunk's beginnings, but to be fair, he didn't know much either. He grew up an orphan in Flea Bottom, the slum near King's Landing. He had no idea who his parents were, but figured he was an orphan and probably a bastard. (Some fans suggest he could be related to Brienne of Tarth, since he was tall just like her, but that's still unconfirmed.) He made a life by scavenging all kinds of meat for establishments that made "bowls of brown," the go-to food of Flea Bottom.
Sophie Turner has a screwball comedy vibe in real life elegant trouser suit, arch but friendly expression, perfect hair, she looks ready for some whipsmart repartee and a sundowner. She seems very comfortable in her own skin, which is unusual anyway when you're not quite 30, but especially incongruous given her various screen personas: first, in Game of Thrones.
As noted in a recent New York Times interview with Harington, nearly 2 million people signed a viral petition that called showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss "woefully incompetent," and asked for HBO to remake "a final season that makes sense." Harington was "genuinely angered" by this, he told the outlet in his profile published on Jan. 11. "Like, how dare you? Sorry, that's just how I feel. I think it was a level of idiocy that can only come about through social media."
