The Musketeers - 'The Queen's Diamonds'

It's that man again.

The Musketeers go back to their roots this week, in a search for 'The Queen's Diamonds'.

But - aha! - it's not Queen Anne whose sparklers have been nicked, but Queen Henrietta Maria, sister to the King and wife of the beleaguered King Charles - who somehow makes Louis look grounded and sensible - and the jewels were to have been sold to a Dutch financier for money to fund Royalist troops to oppose the forces of the English Parliament, before being nicked by a daring highwayman.

Within minutes of being given the job, the Musketeers spot their old adversary Emil Bonnaire hanging around. They like him for the perp, and given his stalwart soul he immediately fesses up, but claims to have sold the rocks and given the money to his partner for safekeeping. Cue a search across the city to retrieve the various bits of bling before the financier tires of the delights of Feron's bathhouse. It's a fairly simple task, so Aramis gets leave to go off and help out a long lost friend who is about to marry well, but is being blackmailed by her past as a prostitute. Thus we learn that before his father took him in, Aramis was raised in a brothel.

Pauline is marrying a McGann, but damned if I know which one*.

In other news, Athos has a continuing flirtation with Sylvie, who has taken up her father's place at the head of the growing civil liberties movement in Paris, voicing the people's discontent with the aristocracy. Via some prodding from Grimaud, Athos' involvement in the hunt for the Queen's ice, where no-one cares if the common folk are murdered in their beds, leads to a falling out between the two, although during the course of the mission we do see Porthos lobbing a stone into a field to be found by the workers.

In the end, Sylvie gives Athos the elbow, Bonnaire gives up the last of his haul and the money for immunity for him and his partner, the Queen's handmaiden, and the Musketeers piss off Pauline's fiance by showing up to take back his intended wedding ring in a frankly baffling scene in which the phrase 'it was stolen from the Queen of England' is not used, Athos instead throwing down. Aramis also learns that the fiance's groom is the blackmailer, claiming that he is looking out for the bride as well as the groom, because society will rip them to shreds. To remove this obstacle, she murders him, but turning up to the church with blood on your gown turns out not to be a winning move.

'The Queen's Diamonds' is a bit of a dog's breakfast, in which three b-plots struggle for A status to the detriment of all.

Aramis' new backstory is frankly confusing, given that all we know of his later childhood is 'signature booze' and 'girl who then became a Blessed Sister of St FuckYeah.' The twist - the wedding isn't spoiled because he turns out to be a tyrant, but because she is a laser-guided crazy - is decent, but in many ways this feels like a plot that should feature the Comte de la Fer, given the whole 'married a woman who turned out to be a thief and look how that turned out' bit.

The development of Sylvie's subplot is obviously arc-related, but out of kilter with the rest of the episode, and prevents this being a light romp to relieve the tension between episodes of grimdark conspiracy and monarchical tuberculosis.

The actual A-plot is the best, because it's the most fun, but ends up being disappointingly simple. Bonnaire is quite fun in moderation, and I could have stood the episode committing whole cloth to a more complicated scavenger hunt.

* IMDb says Paul, who was of course also the foppish rival in the 1993 movie version of The Three Musketeers.