trude

Raymond didn’t die! But if we finally let a black man live, we must kill a white woman in a really, really creepy way? And possibly kill another one for good measure. OK show!

Apart from this and a few other missteps, I loved this episode. I guess that not watching the show for the bromance and the bromance alone helps a lot here, but it felt like it finally found it’s feet when it comes to mixing stand-alone episode plots with some more serialized elements (even if the rooster of recurring characters was somewhat decimated).

I have this pet theory that the entire show is just a collection of stories about “Aramis the sexy musketeer” that book-verse!Aramis wrote while he was stuck in a convent between the end of The Three Musketeers and the beginning of Twenty years after, to fight boredom and annoy Bazin. One time Bazin asked if Aramis the sexy musketeer couldn’t meet a nice pious nun and make some life-changing decisions, and the resulting story was “Knight Takes Queen” with rather violent nuns and burnt fish and sleeping with the queen in Mother Superior’s bed and Bazin sulked until Aramis promised to write another story about faith and the result was this one with smelly peasants and drugs and more making out with the queen, and then Bazin stop asking for stories. At least for a while.

OK, that was a long-winded way to say that I have no idea how religious, or in what way, show!Aramis really is supposed to be. Still, I liked his mostly-platonic report with Emelie, and that several of the things he did during the episode was not actually totally stupid. And I liked Emelie, period. (Her mom was creepy, but really well cast when it came to physical resemblance.) Interestingly enough, this episode did NOT kill the fanon that Aramis is part spanish. Hmm…

Constance!!!!! My girl has yet another excellent episode! My favorite part was her scene with d’Artagnan (darling, you’re way to hot together to remain “just friends”), but everything was good! Actually being sort of BFF:s with Anne! Going on field trips! Finding out the queens secrets! Having drug-induced hallucianations! (I guees the reason it was about Anne and Loius and DEATH!!!! was that she was thinking about that before she fell asleep, but how could evil mom know that she wouldn’t have a dream about Monsiuer Bonacieux strangling her with fabric swaths or something? Those must be some very good mushrooms.)

Milady continues to enjoy life as a royal favorite, and I continue to enjoy watching her. Shame about Rochefort trying to spoil her fun, not to mention using physical force against her, and I hope that she will have a big part in his inevitable downfall. And I’ve forgotten how good Maimie McCoy and Tom Burke are together. More scenes from the De La Fere-marriage, please.

Really, really good episode for Queen Anne. Lovely white/gold dress in the beginning and an interesting discussion about her marriage with Constance (that she is fond of Louis, is trying to be a good queen consort and is frustrated with how little he values her, but that she has never been in love with him the way she’s in love with Aramis was hardly surprising stuff, but things that I really think needed to be vaguely confirmed instead of just vaguely hinted). I like that she’s pro-active and resourceful but not infallible. And while I still wish that her relationship with Aramis could have gotten more build-up in S1, what is (not) done is done and their scene in the tent worked for me, even if I was yelling at them that someone would walk in on them the entire time.

Porthos gets an inheritance from General Plot Point and immediately guesses that it has something to do with his mysterious father! And that Treville knows more than he lets on! Not the most subtle way to keep this plot going, but at least it is going somewhere. Will it matter in the future that Porthos suddenly has some money (how much)?

Goodbye Perales, we knew you maybe a bit more than we wanted to. Though I guess I’ll like you better when I re-watch the season with the knowledge that you wont be around to repeat the same plot forever. And I almost started shipping you with Treville there at the end. (Mm, oranges.)

Doctor Sir Hallam is back and joins CSI 17th century Paris, risking his life in the process! I still think he’ll be more long-lived than Lady Persie Boylen, if only because the BBC insist on pre-empting this show in favour of sports.

Also back: Father Allard and his own special breed of creepyness! I love you too, though not quite as much as Doctor Sir Hallam.

Marguerite/Aramis continues to be so badly written that I’m just waiting for the whole thing to reach it’s inevitable messy end, but “thanks” to Rocehfort’s creepy blackmailing at least Marguerite is emerging a bit as a person in her own right. (Still, to be able to live through this storyline, I’ve come up with the crack theory that “Marguerite” actually perished from small-pox on her father’s estate a few years ago, and the woman we are seeing is her identical cousin, Marie de Rohan, who had to fake her own death to escape Richelieu’s wrath and has spent the last couple of years annoying puritans in England and stuff, but now is back in France to…I don’t know. Shag sexy musketeers?)