The Musketeers - 'Spoils of War'

NuMusketeer - Way more metal.

After a long break, The Musketeers are back for one final season of derring do and buckling swashes.

WAR!

Sorry. Yes, France and Spain are at war after the whole Rochefort double agent queen ravishing and just about everyone spending time on the block farrago, and Athos, Porthos and D'Artagnan are on the front lines being goddamn manly. Aramis is not, however, having followed through on his promise to God and taken orders, or at least preparing to. It turns out that the Abbot of his monastery is keeping him at lay minister and orphan-teacher level until he can get over himself enough to stop yearning for battle and let his beard get at least a little scraggly.

This is not suitably humble facial topiary for a man of God.

The Musketeers pull victory from the slavering jaws of defeat when they destroy a Spanish gun emplacement without artillery support, due to the delay of their ammunition supplies. Said supplies are then swiped by a band of mercenaries led by one of the primary villains of the season, a brooding fellow named Grimaud who gets framed with ravens and appears and disappears in the fog like he's some sort of freaking wizard. Athos spots him on the battlefield right about when he's kidnapping their general to help with the heist, and there seems to be some sort of recognition there.

There's no explicit link, but I'm already thinking of him as
'Dark Athos'.

Back in Paris, a newly fancified Treville is first minister, leaving his chief of staff, Constance, to manage the Musketeer garrison and trying to keep his cadets out of trouble with the Red Guard, under their new leader Philippe, Marquis de Feron and governor of Paris, played by Rupert Everett with a heavy, sagging face, lank, black hair, a severe limp and a painkiller dependency, all of which suggest total evilness. He is, it emerges, the King's sort-of-acknowledged bastard half-brother, and thus entirely trustworthy. He is also, it seems, moonlighting as a racketeer and fight club organiser, and effectively ruling Paris as his own fiefdom as long as the King is too busy spoiling 'his' son rotten to take an interest.

Evil.

Grimaud take the stolen weapons to a nearby monastery to await his Spanish buyers. He murders the Abbot just to prove his evil cred, and rounds up the monks while Aramis gets the war orphans out of the way. A young lad named Luke who dreams of war and all kind of reveres the Musketeers has a beef with Aramis for being too timid. He makes a break for it after ringing the bells, and meets up with the other Musketeers, on the trail of the weapons. Luke leads them in via a secret tunnel and they are reunited with Aramis, to the delight of all except Porthos, who is clearly feeling a bit abandoned by his wingman.

The Musketeers help Aramis to get the monks and orphans clear of the monastery in a massively truncated Great Escape sort of deal. Some of the mercenaries catch up with them, but Aramis proves he's still got the stuff, enabling to bond with his difficult pupil before heading back to mend bridges with Porthos by helping him steal a cart full of weapons and blow up a bridge.

The King makes the mistake of thinking that he can rock a
Van Dyke as well.

Back in Paris, Constance, Treville and Cadet Redshirt (who is totally going to die in about episode eight to signal that shit has got real, probably at the same time that Feron manages to get Constance arrested on some trumped up charge of being competent while female) set fire to the uniforms of Red Guards using a bath house in order to humiliate them and level the playing field after a number of cadets have been hammered in Feron's fight clubs. It's weirdly Revenge of the Nerds.

The Musketeers, including Aramis, report back to Treville, apart from D'Artagnan who goes to 'report back' to his wife by dropping his gear all over the floor and letting her catch him half-naked in a bathroom. I'm more than half convinced he must have been standing at the sink, washing his hands for like an hour and a half waiting for her to get in.

Fancy.

Treville reassigns the Musketeers back to Paris to counter Feron's machinations, to which Feron is all 'snark, snark, rickety old losers.' Feron, if I've not communicated this adequately, is a dick. He is also, just in case we had any doubt, working with Grimaud for reasons of, as far as we can tell so far, evil.

'Spoils of War' brings the Musketeers back to our screens in a high budget spectacular, with battle scenes, explosions and just way more homoerotic tension than previous seasons. Seriously, for a series about the manly camaraderie of men in tight leather, The Musketeers has always been rather modest in its subtext, but Feron, Grimaud and the captain of the Red Guard are significantly tense and there's definitely something more loaded betwixt Porthos and Aramis since the separation.

9th-level Seamstress/Fighter

I definitely approve of the fact that there's some actual character progression on display. Perhaps Aramis's doesn't stick, but D'Artagnan is more completely part of the gang, Constance is settling in as Musketeer den mother and Treville is delightfully out of his element as First Minister of France. Our new villains are all pretty strong, with Grimaud in particular verging on the preternatural, although yet to be tested in combat against our heroes. Feron drops neatly into the same groove as Richelieu as the all-but-untouchable powermonger, while Grimaud is obviously the more direct threat. He also has a certain physical resemblance to Athos and comes from the same sort of background as Porthos, so there may be some interest there.

Notably, Mamie McCoy is (at least for now) out of the credits, so no idea if or how Milady might appear again.