The Musketeers - The rest of Season 3

"We shall brood like it was Season 1!"

After a bit of a blitz, here are my thoughts on the tail end of the BBC's men in leather spectacular, The Musketeers.

We follow 'To Play the King' with 'Death of a Hero', which bowls us a googly because the 'hero' in question is Feron, who dies on Grimaud's blade after a change of heart about assassinating his half-brother. We're then left with Grimaud as our principal villain, which is promising with his dark swagger and impenetrable plots, but the problem is that moving him front and centre requires allowing the audience to see how the sausage is made, and he just can't quite draw the water he's been built up for and he becomes ever more of a thug.

And Porthos finally gets a love interest for more than one episode! (She's in
two.)

In 'Fool's Gold' we get a glimpse of his upbringing as he flees to his home town. The Musketeers pursue, but fall in with a band of women and children living in the woods to avoid the depredations of deserters now that their husbands, brothers and fathers have all died in the war with Spain. Athos talks Grimaud with his tough-as-nails foster mother, while Porthos has angsty bonding time with pregnant badass archer Elodie, whose husband was part of a regiment he knows to have been wiped out to a man. A group of deserters comes looking for gold that they stashed nearby and which the women took to support their community, and the Musketeers assist in the astonishingly brutal defence of the settlement.

"Aramis for supper again?"

The rest is mostly arc plot and sort of blurs together. The Queen backs a public education programme run by Sylvie, but it gets sabotaged so that a bunch of lewd pamphlets about the Queen's lovers are printed instead. Then Grimaud intercepts Aramis carrying a letter from Anne trying to broker peace with Spain behind Louis' back. The King comes to suspect Aramis' involvement with the Queen and forbids him to see her or the Dauphin ever again. Athos does get back together with Sylvie, just in time for Milady to arrive back in town(1) and seek reconciliation through the time-honoured method of breaking into his house. With her other prospects surprisingly thin on the ground, she offers her services as a spy and assassin to Treville.

"I'm basically ginger Feron."

The King dies and Treville - declared as surprise regent - smuggles the Dauphin into hiding, with Sylvie and Constance to protect him, while he plays Gaston and the Duke of Lorraine off against one another. Grimaud manages to snatch the Dauphin by following the Queen, who has gone to great lengths to find where her son has been hidden, the location being kept from her and from Aramis. Everything falls apart and Treville is killed, although the Dauphin is rescued, and seriously, only Aramis really acknowledges that while they might not like his secrecy, Treville got within an ace of settling the whole thing without bloodshed by bluffing with a hand of nothing until the Queen screwed it up.

Awkward.

Finally, in 'We Are the Garrison', Grimaud blows up the Musketeer pub and the garrison - because at the end of the series you might as well set your big sets on fire - taking out Cadet Redshirt(2) - and then kidnaps Sylvie. The Musketeers pull off a rescue after casually swearing off honour for the occasion, with the aid of the thought-to-be-dead D'Artagnan. D'Artagnan kills Captain Whatsisname of the Red Guards and Grimaud is wounded, but escapes to be accidentally treated by Constance. Then he tries to blow up the coronation, but is thwarted and finally killed by Athos.

The Queen becomes Regent, hires Milady to shank Gaston, and then reforms the regiment as the People's Musketeers. D'Artagnan is given command of the new regiment and tasked, along with Constance, with rebuilding it. Aramis becomes First Minister and Royal Queen Snogger, putting Milady's snarky declaration that the Queen would now be alone out the window. Porthos marries Elodie before setting off to be a general, and Athos and Sylvie head off to raise their expected child somewhere else.

Season 3 of the Musketeers has been... okay. It's a shame, because Season 1 was good and Season 2 excellent, but the mid-season loss of Feron and a lack of focus meant that the personal stakes felt distinctly less, and thus the pressure to set aside honour against a foe who was less impressive the more we saw of him came off as forced. Honestly, I think that killing off one of the four at the start of the final episode might have been the better move, although I can see why they didn't want to go that way. Also, I've nothing against Sylvie, but Milady was missed, even when she was around, especially as Constance was a sadly reduced presence.

(1) Called it!
(2) Called it!