A review of this week's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, "Hard Salt Beef" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I ask what you did when people said you were stupid...
Alan Sepinwall
After the 45-minute series premiere, Knight drops down to its more standard half-hour length for "Hard Salt Beef." It's a good format for a show that's this narratively compact — more Egg-sized than Dunk-sized. Even though the episode features the arrival of several notable new characters, we're still seeing events entirely as our heroes do, so there's no need to pad things out while we learn more about the inner life of the Targaryen princes, Baelor and Maekar. They matter only so much as they impact Dunk's quest to find glory in the tournament.
"Hard Salt Beef" opens with a montage that intercuts Dunk's travels with Ser Arlan — including a very "It's not TV, it's HBO" opening shot of Arlan pissing with a Ziggy Sobotka-sized unit — with his struggles to find anyone at the tournament who remembers his late master. When Egg wonders aloud if perhaps Arlan was a shit knight, it's hard to blame him.