Warning: this article contains spoilers
Baelor’s death ended the Targaryens’ last, best hope – and reshaped Westeros.
At the end of episode five of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Baelor Targaryen dies from injuries sustained during the trial of seven at Ashford Meadow. The Hand of the King and heir to the Iron Throne had entered the melee to defend Ser Duncan the Tall. In the chaos, he is struck by his own brother, Maekar. He never recovers.
The stirring finale opens with his funeral. Court and kingdom absorb what that means. The succession shifts. Authority consolidates elsewhere. A different temperament now sits closer to the throne.
For Bertie Carvel, the actor who plays him, Baelor was always defined as a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders – past, present and future.
“He’s a thinker,” Carvel tells The National. “He reads history in order to try to understand the present and maybe to project the future.” Baelor is, in Carvel’s words, a kind of historian – a man aware that he will one day shape the “abstract and brief chronicles of the time”.
That awareness gives him weight. “He spends much of every day thinking about what kind of king he will be,” Carvel says. “It gives him unrest.” The crown is not ambition. It is inevitability. “If I knew I was going to become the head of state one day, you’d never sleep, would you?”
Carvel describes the character through contradiction. He likens him to a silverback gorilla – a figure capable of immense strength, but also of restraint. “He's a Targaryen. So, we come with certain preconceptions about that family and where they might sit in the pantheon of Westeros.
“But one of the things I really love about this world is that there's more to almost all the characters than meets the eye, and it feels quite humane and recognisable to me in that way,” says Carvel.
“The characters are all quite rich. They're quite real, and nothing is what it is at first glance. So, even with Baelor, you're not sure if he'll wrap his arms around you or tear your arms off.”
That ambiguity matters in a dynasty known for fire and blood.
The Targaryens Baelor stands to inherit are diminished from their height. The dragons are gone. Their claim rests on myth and fear. “All they really have in their arsenal is fear,” Carvel says. Baelor understands that. “He knows that he needs to be feared in order to be an effective ruler,” he says. “But he would rather be loved.”
Carvel calls it a kind of chiaroscuro – light and shadow in the same frame. “Here’s this essentially good man who wants to be a good king,” he says, “whose only weapon is a reputation for cruelty.”
Ashford Meadow becomes the first public test of that philosophy. Dunk’s case forces Baelor to decide how power should be exercised. He intervenes not out of sentimentality, but out of conviction that justice must be seen to be done.
“How do you rule justly in a world that doesn’t seem to value kindness?” Carvel asks. “A hard-bitten world of iron and rain and mud – how do you bring kindness and truth and heroism and chivalry?”
Baelor answers that question by riding. The consequence of that answer extends beyond his own life. With Baelor gone, the succession begins to tilt towards Maekar’s branch.
His reign will be firmer, more martial. Years later, Maekar’s own son – the boy known in these episodes as Egg – will inherit a kingdom shaped by those choices. This is a story we are likely to see play out in future seasons of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
In George R R Martin’s broader chronology (which he plans to reveal more about with his new play this summer), Egg becomes Aegon V, a reform-minded king who attempts to improve the lives of the smallfolk and curb the excesses of the nobility. His reign is marked by ambition and tragedy in equal measure.
And that path does not end there. Because Baelor dies, the succession moves sideways before it moves forward. The branch of House Targaryen that ultimately produces Aerys II – the Mad King deposed during Robert’s Rebellion which sets up Game of Thrones – only reaches the throne because Baelor does not.
It would be simplistic to argue that his reign would have prevented that collapse. Westeros has never been a realm shaped by one temperament alone. But the strain Baelor represents – reflective, lawful, uneasy with cruelty – is not the one that ultimately defines the dynasty’s fall.
Baelor was not destined to be a revolutionary. He was preparing to be something steadier – a ruler who understood the mechanics of fear but did not rely on it alone. A prince aware that authority without legitimacy is corrosive.
“What is it to be upright?” Carvel asks. “What is it to be a king in a world that seems to reward cynicism? How can you live righteously?”
The finale offers no resolution to those questions. It removes the man who might have attempted to answer them from the throne itself.
Westeros continues. It always does.
But the version of kingship Baelor had begun to imagine – one balancing steel with restraint – ends at Ashford Meadow.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now streaming on OSN+ in the Middle East
