The following contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 6.A true knight always finishes a story. So says Ser Arlan of Pennytree at one point during the A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season finale, and that’s essentially the guiding tenet of this installment, which wrestles with the bleak aftermath of the Ashford Tourney and the Trial of Seven that changed the future of Westeros forever. It is an episode that is both an ending and a beginning, and it’s a perfect cap to a remarkable season of television that has reminded many of us why we love this fictional universe so much.Baelor Targaryen is dead, and with him, not just the hope of a dynasty but a future — most likely a better future — that Westeros will never know. This episode focuses primarily on the immediacy of it all: Valarr Targaryen’s loss of his father, Maekar’s self-recrimination over his brother’s death by his hand, the general sense of shock amongst the smallfolk, a reminder that even the greatest of dragons can fall. And Dunk’s heartfelt sense of responsibility and guilt, as he asks himself whether his life could ever possibly be worth trading Baelor’s for. cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Whether it will is a question that only future seasons of this show (or a quick search through the A Song of Ice and Fire Wiki) can answer, but there’s no doubt that Baelor’s death is a defining moment for Dunk, as both a knight and a man. It’s what drives him back to the roads he trod with Ser Arlan rather than accept a position in service to Maekar. What makes him genuinely mourn Baelor, rather than sniff at his hubris the way Lyonel does. He turns down the chance at everything he’s supposed to want — a permanent lord, a fixed future, a squire to shape in his own image — not because he doesn’t desire those things, but because he can’t accept them on the Targaryens’ terms. Peter Claffey makes playing Dunk’s simple, moral strength appear so effortless that it almost does the true quality of his performance a disservice. Making the idea of goodness — a good character, a good man — feel compelling onscreen is something our pop culture has long struggled with, and that goes double in a fictional universe where dragons, betrayals, and war crimes are commonplace. It can often seem so much more interesting to depict a character like Aerion Targaryen, who embraces his worst self without shame, or to code morally minded characters as weak or lesser in some way. (Particularly in such an aggressively cynical and self-serving world.)But Claffey quietly turns Dunk’s goodness into a superpower. Sure, he’s not the smartest or even the strongest man in Westeros. But, as we’ve seen repeatedly this season, those things don’t necessarily make you a good person. They’re not supposed to. Goodness, after all, isn’t a thing you are. It’s a thing you do. It, like love, like belief, like faith, is an active verb, a thing that requires you to choose it repeatedly. There’s effort involved. That Dunk’s choices throughout this episode are just that, choices he makes and reaffirms, paths he deliberately decides to walk down. He doesn’t want to serve in Summerhall, but he also rejects Lyonel’s offer of bro-ing out in Storm’s End. He ends the season by nailing a penny to a tree as his mentor once did and carving his own path, one alongside a young boy who’s decided to do the exact same thing.It’s not an accident that this episode is also the first in which we’ve spent any significant time with Maekar Targaryen. Sure, part of that is because Baelor’s younger brother didn’t have much of a purpose in Dunk’s story until the trial. But the other reason is that this moment marks a turning for him too—a choice, of sorts. Who will he be in a world without Baelor? How will he be changed by what he (however inadvertently) did? He’s shipping Aerion off to the Free Cities in the hopes he’ll learn how to become a better person. (Narrator voice: He will not.) He’s willing to bring Dunk on to train Aegon, despite not really wanting to do so. There’s growth here, albeit of a difficult and rough-edged kind, but maybe that’s the only way a man like Maekar ever learns. (He is not Baelor, by any stretch, but Maekar is not a bad man.) In George R.R. Martin’s original novella, Maekar agrees to let Egg go with Dunk. Here, in the show, he sneaks out, leaving his father to discover his absence only once it’s already too late. I sort of prefer the original, if only because it allows Maekar to purposefully put Aegon’s needs first in a way that it doesn’t seem he often has previously.The season ends as it probably always had to, with Dunk and Egg on the road together, looking toward adventure unknown. (Dunk even gets Sweetfoot back! Before giving her up to Raymun.) A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms could, in theory, end here, in this moment of humor and hope, with the world spread in front of them and everything still possible and only one dead prince instead of the dozens we’re regularly served on House of the Dragon or Game of Thrones itself. A hedge knight and a Targaryen heir, offbeat weirdos in their own ways, off to Dorne or any other of the seven (nine) kingdoms, is one of the most hopeful images this franchise has ever given us, and there’s so much possibility in that. I wonder what the morrow will bring.All six episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms are available to stream on HBO Max now.The post A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 6 Review: The Morrow appeared first on Den of Geek.