The Musketeers 1x03
Feb. 9th, 2014 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trudeLate, because I wanted to make a Porthos-icon first. (Ended up technically being a Howard Charles-icon. Let's call it Modern-AU.)
Hey show, you didn’t kill the female guest star at the end of the episode! You killed her in the middle instead :-( And she had a great hairstyle. And great fighting skills. So I’ll miss her.
Improvements from previous weeks: I’m slowly getting more of a sense of who d’Artagnan is and where his strengths lie and what he brings to the group. (Now it would be nice if we knew if he’s a musketeer-in-training or employed by Treville in some other capacity or if he’s just hanging around.) Best plot yet, too. It wasn’t perfect – it felt very random that they couldn’t stitch up Porthos wounds at Meunier’s place AND that Athos chateau just happened to be nearby – but for the first time the end didn’t feel like a foregone conclusion.
Most man-painy man of the night: Athos, hands down. Yes, by the end of the episode some genuinely traumatic things had happened to him, but almost letting a friend die because you’re to busy staring in the distance and reminiscencing about your (admittedly tragic) past? Not cool. Still, the Scenes From the de la Fere Marriage continues to be just the right distance over the top, and while I would wonder how, had she been any other woman, Milady got the time to seduce the blacksmith/executioner, it’s just the kind of thing she does so I’ll let it pass.
[My inner canon purist is cool about the apparent lack of Fleur-de-lyses on Milady’s shoulder. Having flash-back!Milady calling her husband “Athos”, however, isn’t just “Look, we’re not following the book”, it’s sloppy writing. (Unless “Athos” was her private nickname for him or something, in which case that man has even larger issues than previously thought.)]
[I have no opinion about Athos newly invented dead brother Thomas, but since the show seems to have a habit of giving the musketeers’ relatives names from the Dumas family, I want a Marie-Césette and a Micaëlla-Clélie-Josepha-Elisabeth next.]
And I don’t really ship Athos/Milady or Milady/d’Artagnan or Athos/d’Artagnan in this or any other ‘verse (Athos/Milady from the first three minutes of the 2011 movie doesn’t count), but it’s fascinating seeing them slowly close in on each other.
Porthos get’s disqualified from the most man-painy man contest by actually being angry on behalf of the people Bonnaire will enslave, and not using them as an excuse for being sad about his horrible childhood and dead mother. (How do I love thee Porthos? Let me count the ways.) Yet, this part of the plot gave me a bit of whiplash, because while Bonnaire was slimy and certainly deserved his fate, he really is one little cog in a large machinery, and he will be replaced. The slave trade will continue without his participation. The African diaspora will continue. Things will get much, much worse than they are in 1630. And while I think Porthos, and the episode, needed that tiny victory of stopping Bonnaire, it made me disconnect from the show. This is not a bad thing, it’s just a thing.
New stuff we learned about Aramis:
*The possibility of Porthos dying makes him loose his shit [My inner canon purist is running around the apartment sobbing and spilling red wine on the sheets.]
*He can stitch up a wound.
* He can interrogate people in Spanish. (Which probably means that he also can flirt in Spanish. If I was a Spanish-born French queen with a husband who has understandable, but somewhat annoying hang-ups about the Spanish, I know what I would do.)
* He can deliver a super-short funeral service. [Does this mean that he has some kind of Church background? Inquiring inner canon purists want to know.]
Damn it, Ryan Gage is good. (Now I really want Scenes From a French Royal Marriage).
Next week: More Constance/d’Artagnan. Good, because I’m starting to like them.
Hey show, you didn’t kill the female guest star at the end of the episode! You killed her in the middle instead :-( And she had a great hairstyle. And great fighting skills. So I’ll miss her.
Improvements from previous weeks: I’m slowly getting more of a sense of who d’Artagnan is and where his strengths lie and what he brings to the group. (Now it would be nice if we knew if he’s a musketeer-in-training or employed by Treville in some other capacity or if he’s just hanging around.) Best plot yet, too. It wasn’t perfect – it felt very random that they couldn’t stitch up Porthos wounds at Meunier’s place AND that Athos chateau just happened to be nearby – but for the first time the end didn’t feel like a foregone conclusion.
Most man-painy man of the night: Athos, hands down. Yes, by the end of the episode some genuinely traumatic things had happened to him, but almost letting a friend die because you’re to busy staring in the distance and reminiscencing about your (admittedly tragic) past? Not cool. Still, the Scenes From the de la Fere Marriage continues to be just the right distance over the top, and while I would wonder how, had she been any other woman, Milady got the time to seduce the blacksmith/executioner, it’s just the kind of thing she does so I’ll let it pass.
[My inner canon purist is cool about the apparent lack of Fleur-de-lyses on Milady’s shoulder. Having flash-back!Milady calling her husband “Athos”, however, isn’t just “Look, we’re not following the book”, it’s sloppy writing. (Unless “Athos” was her private nickname for him or something, in which case that man has even larger issues than previously thought.)]
[I have no opinion about Athos newly invented dead brother Thomas, but since the show seems to have a habit of giving the musketeers’ relatives names from the Dumas family, I want a Marie-Césette and a Micaëlla-Clélie-Josepha-Elisabeth next.]
And I don’t really ship Athos/Milady or Milady/d’Artagnan or Athos/d’Artagnan in this or any other ‘verse (Athos/Milady from the first three minutes of the 2011 movie doesn’t count), but it’s fascinating seeing them slowly close in on each other.
Porthos get’s disqualified from the most man-painy man contest by actually being angry on behalf of the people Bonnaire will enslave, and not using them as an excuse for being sad about his horrible childhood and dead mother. (How do I love thee Porthos? Let me count the ways.) Yet, this part of the plot gave me a bit of whiplash, because while Bonnaire was slimy and certainly deserved his fate, he really is one little cog in a large machinery, and he will be replaced. The slave trade will continue without his participation. The African diaspora will continue. Things will get much, much worse than they are in 1630. And while I think Porthos, and the episode, needed that tiny victory of stopping Bonnaire, it made me disconnect from the show. This is not a bad thing, it’s just a thing.
New stuff we learned about Aramis:
*The possibility of Porthos dying makes him loose his shit [My inner canon purist is running around the apartment sobbing and spilling red wine on the sheets.]
*He can stitch up a wound.
* He can interrogate people in Spanish. (Which probably means that he also can flirt in Spanish. If I was a Spanish-born French queen with a husband who has understandable, but somewhat annoying hang-ups about the Spanish, I know what I would do.)
* He can deliver a super-short funeral service. [Does this mean that he has some kind of Church background? Inquiring inner canon purists want to know.]
Damn it, Ryan Gage is good. (Now I really want Scenes From a French Royal Marriage).
Next week: More Constance/d’Artagnan. Good, because I’m starting to like them.
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Date: 2014-02-09 09:14 am (UTC)If you want one, too, they're here:
http://videnda.dreamwidth.org/21810.html
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Date: 2014-02-09 01:30 pm (UTC)