Full spoilers ahead for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has concluded its first season, but that’s not the end of the journey for Dunk and Egg. The towering hedge knight and his young squire will return for a second season — and likely a third — on HBO, but there’s precious little on-the-record information at this point about what’s in store for viewers. Fortunately, showrunner Ira Parker recently chatted with IGN to help shed light on what fans can expect from the next season. Read on for what we learned about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 2.

What Is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 2 About?

Like the first season, Season 2 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will consist of six half-hour episodes. It will adapt “The Sworn Sword,” the second novella in George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg series. Set a few years after the events depicted in Season 1, Season 2 brings in a new cast of characters for Dunk and Egg to encounter, most notably Lady Rohanne Webber, aka the Red Widow, and Ser Eustace Osgrey, two rivals locked in a bitter land dispute as a drought devastates the Reach. Lady Rohanne is believed to be an old witch responsible for the deaths of her first four husbands, but she is in fact an attractive young woman with political savvy and ambiguous intentions. Ser Eustace is a proud old knight and veteran of the First Blackfyre Rebellion to whom Dunk swears his sword.

If “Season 1 really is about fathers and sons and what's passed on to the next generation,” then Season 2, as showrunner Ira Parker recently told IGN, will explore the theme of “loyalty and maybe against blind loyalty.”

Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell will reprise their roles as Dunk and Egg, respectively, although the casting of Lady Rohanne and Ser Eustace has not yet been revealed.

Given how short “The Sworn Sword” is – it runs a little over 100 pages, depending on the layout of the edition you have – should fans expect additional material to be added to the show?

“We're pretty faithful to the book, again," Parker said. "I would say little flourishes here and there, but we did a lot of that in Season 1 as well. It should all feel inherent to the world and to Dunk's POV.”

When Will Season 2 Premiere?

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was renewed for a second season in November 2025, and Season 2 is expected to premiere sometime in 2027. They're currently filming interiors for these new episodes at Belfast’s Titanic Studios, where the original Game of Thrones was shot, with exteriors in Spain...although there’s been an unforeseen twist.

“We are going to drier pastures in Spain for [the drought scenes],” Parker said. “Except that the location that was meant to be our dry riverbed is now a fully flowing river after getting rain for the first time in ten years at this location, and so now has sent us scrambling and searching for changes at this late date.”

How Many Seasons Will There Be of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms?

Although Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has outlines for 12 additional Dunk and Egg novellas that would follow the duo through the rest of their lives – outlines which he’s since shared with Parker – as of right now, HBO has only expressed interest in three seasons of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms based on the the existing published novellas.

“We're working, I'd say, pretty quickly," Parker said. "I think the plan would be to do one [season] a year, and so then we'll see if the fans keep responding. But this is a very fun world to write in, there's a lot of possibilities.” Parker added that seeing Egg grow up and Dunk evolve is important to the saga. “As you go through someone's whole life, theoretically it allows us to change the location and the tone and nature of the show, just as people's lives change from childhood to young adulthood, to marriage and children and later in life.”

Season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was largely fantasy-free, since it takes place after the demise of dragons, but it still managed to work in a dark prophecy about Dunk and Egg’s distant future; it doesn’t sound like Season 2 will expand on all that, however.

“Those moments to me, especially in [Season 1], are so small and minor and unconfirmed as well,” Parker said. “I mean, [I] find a lot of people who have read the books and who think that they know the canon of where these lives go will say, ‘Oh, the fortune teller told a prophecy.’ And I'm just like, ‘Or it's what Dunk thinks it is and it's just a person there who gives one good and one bad, and that's how they make their money, because it's fun and you're at a tournament.’ So maybe, there's a lot that went into the thinking of that moment, and none of it ends up on screen, but it's there in our head. So maybe we revisit at some point, but who knows?”

Will the Targaryens Return for Season 2?

It doesn’t sound like it. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 ends with Egg explaining to Dunk that there are actually nine kingdoms and not seven, with the final title card of “A Knight of the Nine Kingdoms” popping up at the end. Showrunner Ira Parker clarified that they were just having a bit of fun with that and the series is not actually being renamed.

There’s also an end credits scene in the Season 1 finale that reveals Egg did not, in fact, get his father’s permission to become a hedge knight’s squire, as we see Prince Maekar screaming about his missing son’s whereabouts while the Targaryens ride out of Ashford.

This review contains full spoilers for this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

In “The Morrow”, a very battered Dunk wrestles with survivor’s guilt following Baelor’s death, wondering aloud why the gods spared him but took a prince’s life. Dunk’s low self-esteem, being smallfolk from Flea Bottom, makes him view himself as worth less than the highborn, even though if he’s learned anything this season it should be that knights and noble lords are full of crap.

Dunk’s guilt also stems from Baelor, like Ser Arlan of Pennytree before him, having shown him kindness and fighting for him. But Ser Lyonel Baratheon gives Dunk a reality check early on, pointing out that as a Targaryen prince, Baelor was supposed to be safe and it was himself and the other members of Dunk’s seven knights who were actually risking their lives for him. “And the gods don’t favor a fraud,” he adds.

While Ser Lyonel’s scenes – and a later scene with Raymun Fossoway and his honey trap new wife, Red – reintroduce some humor back into A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the season finale remains largely a dramatic tale as Dunk struggles with finding meaning in what transpired at Ashford and where to go next. Egg still wants to be Dunk’s squire, something even Egg’s dad Prince Maekar is willing to allow and have Dunk swear his sword to him. Dunk declines, saying he’s done with princes. Egg is disappointed in Dunk, doubting that he’s the knight he thought he was. Sometimes a kid knows just what to say to a grown-up to hit them where it hurts most.

It’s not until Prince Daeron essentially broaches the subject of nature vs. nurture with Dunk, revealing that Aerion was a good kid once before he became a monster, that Dunk realizes he could perhaps have an influence on Egg to make sure he doesn’t end up being yet another Targaryen tyrant. If he’s to do this, though, he’ll do it on his terms, telling Maekar that Egg will learn as he did by living the life of the squire to a hedge knight. Maekar ain’t having it; royal pride and traditions demand that the Blood of the Dragon not live as a peasant. Or at least that’s his pretense.

Maekar actor Sam Spruell has his best moments of the season in this finale, revealing a wounded humanity within this father exasperated by his family. When Maekar sees Egg standing at Aerion’s bedside holding a dagger – what a great moment that was of Egg looking at his white hair growing back and not wanting to look like his cruel brother – he doesn’t respond with anger or punishment, but comfort and compassion, gently placing his hands on his youngest son’s shoulders.

He understands why Egg is doing what he’s doing at that moment and knows exactly who Aerion is. It’s an incredibly human scene and it’s all done without anyone saying a word, but it speaks volumes. As Maekar tells Dunk when he rejects his offer of taking Egg on the road, Egg is his last son. He can’t stomach anything bad happening to him.

Egg has other ideas. In the end, the impetuous scamp cons Dunk once again, running off to be Dunk’s squire by saying Maekar had given him his blessing (which we learn in the humorous end credits scene is not the case at all). Dunk and Egg are now free to wander the, ahem, Nine Kingdoms seeking adventure. And as symbolized by that bittersweet final image of the specter of Ser Arlan riding away from them, Dunk is now his own man and his own knight.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 2 can’t arrive soon enough for me.

I have played most of what is sitting below, and a few of these still live rent free in my head. This week's spread is less about filler and more about games that either defined a genre or quietly perfected it. If your backlog is already judging you, add two more and call it character building.

Contents

• Retro
• Nintendo
• Xbox
• PlayStation
• PC

This Day in Gaming 🎂

In retro news, I'm celebrating the 13th birthday of the PlayStation Vita. Though its life cycle wasn't one of roaring success, I still have a soft spot in my heart for its gorgeous OLED screen, impressive tech specs and games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Gravity Rush, and Hotline Miami.

The weekend is finally here, and new deals have popped up as a result! There are quite a few solid discounts across the board, including savings on God of War Ragnarok, Donkey Kong Bananza, Death Stranding 2, and even a Zojirushi rice cooker. Check out our top picks for Sunday, February 22, below.

Save $50 on God of War Ragnarok for PS5

It recently occurred to us that IGN’s only been around for 30 years. Movies, on the other hand, have been around for a lot longer than that, and so many of them have never been reviewed by IGN. So in the interest of remedying that, frankly, horrific oversight, here comes our first Flashback Review.

We’re starting with director Wes Craven’s genre-revitalizing, franchise-spawning, meta teen-slasher, Scream.

Scream was released in 1996, making it 30 years old today, the age over which we’re supposed to stop trusting people. As one of the most influential horror films of all time, with more ink spilled online about it than blood spilled on screen, it’s a strange thing for the movie to not have an official score here at IGN. As an exercise, it’s just as strange to go back and review a film with the kind of legacy Scream enjoys today. So, for at least this first part, I’m just going to pretend that it’s 1996.

Bill Clinton just won the election for his second term in office, Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” is at the top of the charts and Wes Craven kind of needs a win. He’s coming off of Vampire in Brooklyn which was and, frankly always will be, considered a big ol’ flop. New Nightmare was just before that, and showed Craven’s willingness to break the fourth wall, or at minimum it showed an understanding that it needed to be broken. It’s telling that contemporary reviews of that film largely considered it a self-reflective breath of fresh air in a tired franchise. By and large in the mid ’90s, the bloom was to some degree off the horror movie rose.

So here comes Scream, a meta-commentary on the entire genre. It’s doing all the things we loved about slasher movies in the ’70s and ’80s and also making fun of them, but also it’s made by the guy that made most of those tropes famous in the first place with films like Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and, most iconically, A Nightmare on Elm Street. All this adds up to Scream having its cake and eating it too. And it all starts with 13 of the best opening minutes a horror fan could ask for.

There’s an argument to be made that puts the opening sequence of Scream up there with the best in film history, not just horror. It would have been a legendary short film if there hadn’t been a whole movie attached to the back of it. It all at once played the hits (preying on youthful fears of being home alone and getting a call from a stranger) and modernized the discourse (quizzing Drew Barrymore’s panicked Casey Becker with a gotcha question about Jason Voorhees’ mom).

The camera work is brilliant as well, floating around the house, subtly tilted and stalking Casey with a slow, controlled steadicam. It pushes into a close-up to punctuate the more frightened beats of her performance instead of always cutting to those close-ups. The edit is just as deliberate, patiently waiting for the right moment to attack, exactly like the actual killer is doing outside. Barrymore plays her fear with a bit of disbelief, her panic with a little anger, while Roger L. Jackson, as the voice on the phone, shifts gears from playful and sexy to deranged and dangerous as he toys with her.

And then she dies.

After being front and center in the marketing, that Drew Barrymore doesn’t make it out of the first scene is wild, but it’s just part of Craven and writer Kevin Williamson’s scheme. This opening creates a world that both loves the same movies we do, while deftly crafting a thrilling environment where anybody could be killed next.

Being denied one of the most recognizable faces from the poster for the subsequent runtime, the rest of the film is carried by an ensemble. TV stars Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox head up a group of young actors with plenty to prove on the big screen, but David Arquette’s Deputy Dewey might be the key to the whole thing. While most of the cast capably play their roles as “best friend” or “red herring” or “geeky off-to-the-side guy,” Dewey is a meek older brother, in over his head as a police officer trying desperately to be taken seriously (you could even say he’s trying to play against type). In a movie where subversion of expectations is the whole point, Arquette’s fledgling lawman embodies that theme better than anybody else on screen.

He also speaks to the true and lasting brilliance of this movie, if I can flash-forward back to the present day. The balance of comedy, horror and self-awareness created by Craven and Williamson is Scream’s real gift to cinema. It gave us a film that’s a blast to watch, yes, but that formula hides all manner of sins in a way that keeps the movie from feeling dated. Cordless landline phones and Blockbuster videos are quintessentially ’90s, but they don’t make the movie any less relevant 30 years later. Now, had the filmmakers not doused Scream with a self-referential bucket of meta corn syrup, the movie would have fallen into the same traps that had the genre gasping for its last breaths in the mid-’90s, and been more dated than any number of VHS tapes or Tori Spelling references could manage.

There are dangling logic threads to pull on, like how did one of the two killers sneak into the principal’s office to murder Henry Winkler? Ditto for Ghostface suddenly appearing in a garage that we’ve seen every corner of. And how is at least one of them not covered in beer for the rest of the night after being hit in the face and crotch with full bottles at glass-shattering force? Why is that garage door opener so damn powerful, anyway!?

Most of these questions only arise in repeat viewings. It isn’t until you know the ending and watch it again that you might even ask things like that, nor would you even bother with those questions if you’re charmed by the rest of the film. Ghostface is behind that door because that’s an effective jumpscare for us, the audience, not because it makes any sort of logistical sense in the space and time of Woodsboro. But thanks to the simple fact that these tropes are spelled out and on the nose, Scream gets away with it because that’s precisely the thing it’s making fun of.

Perhaps the most obvious beneficiary of this is Skeet Ulrich’s Billy. As one half of the movie’s central romantic pair, we meet him as he sneaks into Sidney’s room to guilt her into having sex. He holds it against her throughout the film, gaslighting her in moments of real distress and ultimately manipulating her into sleeping with him by the end. The guy is a dirtbag and, with 30 years and who knows how many repeat viewings later, it’s a damn good thing he turned out to be the killer.