by Helen Langdon
After last week’s relative dearth of women, this week’s episode of The Musketeers was fairly bursting at the corset seams with female characters. It was a week where motherhood was the main point of interest, in various forms, with the musketeers generally just along for the ride. Generally, Musketeers adaptations aren’t kind to their womenfolk. They tend to get minor roles, romantic interests to the men, swooning and needing rescuing from every dastardly villain in France.
After last week’s relative dearth of women, this week’s episode of The Musketeers was fairly bursting at the corset seams with female characters. It was a week where motherhood was the main point of interest, in various forms, with the musketeers generally just along for the ride. Generally, Musketeers adaptations aren’t kind to their womenfolk. They tend to get minor roles, romantic interests to the men, swooning and needing rescuing from every dastardly villain in France.
But here, we had women taking charge. First, let’s talk about our regular female characters who showed up. Queen Anne was back, which was surprising, given that she’s been gone... well, she had a role in one episode and that’s pretty much been it. Here again she was just a calming influence on Louis, and had a dig made at her about the lack of heirs. Constance has obviously been keeping up her fighting lessons with d’Artagnan, going off to spy for the boys and fighting the bad guy while Aramis holds the baby. It was really good to see her being given a role beyond sheltering whatever waifs and strays the musketeers had picked up on that week’s adventures. Aside from scolding d’Artagnan, that is.
And our guest stars? Poor, poor Agnes. First her husband gets beaten to death in front of her. She gives birth alone and shunned by the community. Her child gets stolen from her. And then Aramis apparently drops him into a river in front of her. Yes, it’s all a very cunning ruse so that she and her boy can go off and live happily ever after in secrecy, but hasn’t the poor woman suffered enough? Frankly, it’s surprising that she manages to get up onto the misty moors to meet Aramis at all. None of the musketeers, or Constance, seem to notice that while they’ve ridden out to the middle of nowhere, Agnes is on foot. In appalling weather. If she got to any kind of civilisation without dying of exposure, it would be a miracle.
And our guest stars? Poor, poor Agnes. First her husband gets beaten to death in front of her. She gives birth alone and shunned by the community. Her child gets stolen from her. And then Aramis apparently drops him into a river in front of her. Yes, it’s all a very cunning ruse so that she and her boy can go off and live happily ever after in secrecy, but hasn’t the poor woman suffered enough? Frankly, it’s surprising that she manages to get up onto the misty moors to meet Aramis at all. None of the musketeers, or Constance, seem to notice that while they’ve ridden out to the middle of nowhere, Agnes is on foot. In appalling weather. If she got to any kind of civilisation without dying of exposure, it would be a miracle.
And then there was Marie de’ Medici, historical character of the week. Tara Fitzgerald’s portrayal swung between realistically haughty and manipulative, and bizarre scenes where she was trying to act penitent and scared for her life. Maybe her bad acting and abrupt wails were a deliberate choice – maybe Marie is supposed to be that bad of an actress. In that case, it’s understandable that Louis is so desperate for reconciliation that he ignores her blatant treachery, but what about everyone else? Yes, the Cardinal and Captain Treville want to get rid of her, but how would she ever have fooled anyone? Especially in that weird costume she had on, which looked like a vacuum cleaner cord wrapped several times around her.
What was happening this week with the menfolk of France? Well, apparently Louis XIII was Kevin the Teenager, a parallel picked up by the BBC’s Facebook page. If he wasn’t running away through his palace in a strangely lingering shot, he was shouting “It’s not fair!” and slamming his doors. Meanwhile, d’Artagnan had apparently cast himself as Hannibal in the musketeers’ remake of The A-Team, telling Constance that he loves it “when a plan comes together”. He is not Hannibal. He’s more like one of the A-Team’s female sidekicks. His anachronisms aside, the musketeers did rather well this week. They were detecting stuff all over the place. They didn’t miss out on the fact that Vincent killed someone who could otherwise have given them clues. Yes, OK, this wasn’t a big deduction to make, but it seems to be something most TV characters miss. These guys are halfway competent, thankfully. However, they might have realised what was happening a lot sooner if they’d used their powers of anachronism to glance at their own sequels. This was just The Man in the Iron Mask without the iron mask, or the actual man.
Next week’s episode seems to involve French suffragette witch trials. Those might be words that have never before been put together in that order.
What was happening this week with the menfolk of France? Well, apparently Louis XIII was Kevin the Teenager, a parallel picked up by the BBC’s Facebook page. If he wasn’t running away through his palace in a strangely lingering shot, he was shouting “It’s not fair!” and slamming his doors. Meanwhile, d’Artagnan had apparently cast himself as Hannibal in the musketeers’ remake of The A-Team, telling Constance that he loves it “when a plan comes together”. He is not Hannibal. He’s more like one of the A-Team’s female sidekicks. His anachronisms aside, the musketeers did rather well this week. They were detecting stuff all over the place. They didn’t miss out on the fact that Vincent killed someone who could otherwise have given them clues. Yes, OK, this wasn’t a big deduction to make, but it seems to be something most TV characters miss. These guys are halfway competent, thankfully. However, they might have realised what was happening a lot sooner if they’d used their powers of anachronism to glance at their own sequels. This was just The Man in the Iron Mask without the iron mask, or the actual man.
Next week’s episode seems to involve French suffragette witch trials. Those might be words that have never before been put together in that order.
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