At home in Westeros

The newest Game of Thrones spinoff has nothing at all to say about the Wall, the Starks, the Martells, the Tullys, the Dothraki, the Iron Islands, or the North. The only dragon we see is a handsomely constructed puppet, made, if I had to guess, of papier mache. Are we really in Westeros, the site of HBO’s multibillion-dollar fantasy IP?

The short answer — we are — is accurate but not the whole tale. Whereas the original series took as its source material thudding tomes of faux-medieval mayhem, HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is based on a modest novella. Not quite a comedy but certainly no labyrinthine saga, the show is perhaps best described as a Westerosi tone poem, a work of admirable depth