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!

The Musketeers - 'To Play the King'

There's something so creepy about dressing children as tiny, fancy adults. The
wig makes it much worse.

It's the Dauphin's sixth birthday, which means it's time for Paris to par-tay!

Of course, when I say Paris, I mean the prisoners of the Chatelet, and when I say par-tay, I mean jailbreak. As the Red Guard flail and the Musketeers track down escaping convicts, Grimaud leads a team into the prison to kidnap a defaulting locksmith and force him, at threat of his wife's life, to open the impenetrable door he created to protect the King's treasury.

The Musketeers track a group of inmates to one of Sylvie's interminable rallies, at which she and her cohorts once again agree that it's terrible and something needs to be done. The convicts take hostages, but the Musketeers kick them in and Athos covers for Sylvie's sedition. Then D'Artagnan goes after another inmate, who turns out to be an ex-soldier who thinks he's the King, and whom he leaves in the care of some nuns instead of returning him to the garrison, where the escapees are being held until the Red Guard restore order. Aramis, meanwhile, goes with Constance to track one of her worthy causes, the moneylender's wife, letting them uncover the plot.

"I am untouchable!"

The Dutch moneylender from last episode delivers final notice on the loan Feron secured 'for the King', revealing the Governor's treachery to Treville, but the King is completely obsessed with the Dauphin's party. Treville leaves the letters for the king to find, and Feron's attempts to remove them are thwarted by the Prince and the Queen, pushing him to murder the moneylender in his own chambers, which in turn distracts him from alerting his captain that Grimaud needs more time. Feron has the devil's own luck, however, as the mad man breaks into the palace to kill the 'imposter', burning the letters and providing a handy scapegoat for the murder before being shot while trying to kill the Queen. Feron then brazens it out with Treville, telling him he'll let all Paris know of the King's impending mortality if his position is threatened.

On the upside, Grimaud's men are caught before they can take the money, although Grimaud himself escapes. Athos' growing dissatisfaction with the status quo leads him back towards Sylvie. Treville squares up for a showdown with Feron, while Grimaud prepares himself to take revenge on the Musketeers for interfering with his plans. The whole thing is building up towards a proper downer of an ending to this final season.

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.

The Musketeers - 'The Hunger' and 'Brother in Arms'

"Oh look, trouble. My hubbie must be back in town."

Buckle your swashes and swash your bucklers, for a double bill of The Musketeers.

D'Artagnan is disappointed that a morning with his wife involves less fooling around and more fetching the garrison grocery order. This inevitably runs them into trouble, as the Duke of Beaufort announces that his grain has been stolen and an angry mob of already hungry Parisians turn on a nearby camp of war refugees. D'Artagnan rallies the cadets to defend the camp, but the Red Guard appear to round up the usual suspects, including D'Artagnan. It quickly emerges that the Duke is in cahoots with Feron and Grimaud - although he despises the latter - to disappear the grain, using the refugees as scapegoats, then resell it to the King at double the price.

Remember, all sympathetic supporting male characters in this series a) are
doomed, and b) must have hot relatives the Musketeers' age.

The Musketeers sally forth to try to prove the innocence of the refugees, including Sylvie, an outspoken young woman who is initially distrustful of any soldier. As the Red Guard and their plant in the camp work to incriminate the refugees, Aramis and Porthos trace the wagon used in the theft and Porthos finds the stolen consignment. It's always good to have a reminder that this Porthos isn't a fool.

Captain Marchaux kills the plant and blames him for everything. The Duke doesn't get his payday, and Feron narrowly dissuades Grimaud from murdering him for being a snobby tosser. The refugees are released, but not before Sylvie's father dies in custody. All in all, a distinctly qualified win. Grimaud pops up to taunt the Musketeers in person, and Aramis and Porthos recognise the horse he took from a wagon owner he murdered. We also see the first rumblings of popular revolution, as the refugees espouse opposition to the absolute monarchy which destroys lives with its wars.

The Queen is unhappy to see her son encouraged to play with murderous
psychos.

This latter theme is continued in 'Brother in Arms'. The Musketeers are sent to retrieve the King's rebellious brother , the Duke of Orlean, from exile, only for him to flip out during a rest stop and stab three dudes after he misses his wallet. The pub where this happens is a veterans' bar, populated by disgruntled, pensionless ex-soldiers, who demand justice of the aristo-hanging variety, and are of course to be disappointed.

Feron and Orleans machinate to have the veterans made an example of for daring to be stabbed by a man of quality, while Treville and the Musketeers try to maintain the rule of law and spirit of justice. There's a lot more rumbling against the King, and Sylvie pops up again, as a friend of the soldiers'. It all winds up with a hostage situation and the Red Guard attacking the Musketeers surrounding the tavern, precipitating a fight in which the Musketeers join the rebels and let them off at the end of it, doubtless leading to further consequences along the line.

Sylvie and Athos look like they're going to hook up, probably about thirty seconds before Milady returns.

"Are you getting that 'King's Landing' feeling?"

Orleans ends up in the Bastille, since his wallet contained not money, but incriminating letters, but the political game ends poorly for our heroes. The King clearly suspects that his son might not be his son, but dotes on the boy as his legacy to the neglect of all else. As we, Treville and Feron discover this episode, this is because he has contracted the White Plague (tuberculosis, I think,) and will be dead within the year. The game is now to hold the loyalty of the Dauphin, and with the boy apparently poisoned against his mother, it doesn't look good.

Season 3 is obviously going for a darker vibe even than Season 2, and a sense of impending disaster only cemented by the Omen-like creepiness of the Dauphin (which may be more to do with the wig than th lad wearing it.) For this, it's kind of odd that there was no more comeback from the fact that the Musketeers killed several Red Guards while defending accused traitors. You'd think that might at least rate a scolding, although perhaps it was forgotten what with the whole 'uncovered a plot to overthrow the King' angle.

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.

The Musketeers - 'A Marriage of Inconvenience', 'The Prodigal Father', 'The Accused' and 'Trial and Punishment'

Adorable?

After a marathon wrap up of The Musketeers, herewith my final reviews and series two round up.

In 'A Marriage of Convenience' Rochefort makes his move to corner control of the court, while an assassin stalks the king's cousin, part of a vital diplomatic wedding to cement a Swedish treaty. In a surprisingly subtle move, the episode hits us with a Romeo and Juliet dummy before revealing the old 'false victim' routine. We end with the Musketeers once more blamed for whatever seems to have gone wrong and Rochefort First Minister of France.

Constance confronts her husband over her decision to shack up with D'Artagnan. He hits her and is later killed by the assassin, dying in his rival's arms while spitting out a venomous final curse.

"Stannis?"
"Davos."
"Right."

'The Prodigal Father' wraps up an ongoing thread about Porthos' paternity. His biodaddy turns out to be the Marquis de Belgard (Liam Cunningham), who welcomes him to a home apparently dominated by Porthos' slinky, ice queen half-sister Eleanor and her racist husband. While Porthos decides if he belongs with the Belgards or the Musketeers, his comrades uncover Eleanor's trade in 'innocents'.

While the boys are thus distracted, however, Rochefort further isolates the King and, incensed to learn that he regifted a crucifix that he gave to her to Aramis, makes his move on the Queen in a rather nasty scene which is thankfully interrupted by the arrival of Constance and a hairpin to the face which secures Rochefort the eyepatch he has been missing.

'A Marriage of Inconvenience' is a good entry into the overall plot of the second series, but 'The Prodigal Father', while it brings Rochefort's pigeons home to roost and is not bad, squanders Porthos' subplot in a single hurrah. Since the crux of the story is Porthos questioning his place with the Musketeers, it was all raised and resolved a little too quickly. It might have worked better with the story salted more evenly through the series.

The blessed sisters of awesome.

Anyway, this brings us to the concluding two-parter, in which the spurned Rochefort plays his endgame. In 'The Accused' he deploys a letter he advised the Queen to write way back in 'An Ordinary Man' to accuse Anne of plotting with Spain, and when that looks set to fail to secure her execution, has Marguerite the governess testify that the Queen and Aramis are lovers and the Dauphin Aramis' son... which is actually true. The Queen is spirited away to safety, but Constance and Dr Lamait (a supporting character utterly doomed by being so gosh darned lovely) are arrested.

'The Accused' sees the return of the Blessed Sisters of St FuckYeah, the most awesome nuns ever. They don't mount a defence of the convent against bandits this time, but one of them does forge Rochefort's handwriting to lure his Spanish spymaster into a trap. Sadly, before anything can be done Lamait is executed (see, doomed) and when the Queen returns to face her accuser, Aramis is also arrested.

Serious props for using the sword and not the axe, and using it
right.

In 'Trial and Punishment', the Musketeers - including Treville and aided by Milady - go full-on maverick cop, rescuing Constance from execution before rushing to help Porthos capture the spymaster Vargas. It is then a race against time to get Vargas to Louis and reveal the plot before Rochefort can secure an execution order for Anne.

Although all is resolved and we end with a wedding, we also end with France going to war with Spain and a salutary reminder that the Musketeers are a military regiment. Constance's honeymoon is apparently two hours in the Captain's private room at the Musketeer barracks, although when Athos didn't go to meet and run away with Milady I more than half expected her to pull a Lorna Doone on the ceremony. Aramis also departs to join a monastery, although his comrades are intent on retrieving him for the duration of war at least, having offered himself to a cloistered life if Anne should be spared the consequences of his sins.

The Musketeers continues to be a lot of fun, and much better than it has any right to be. The performances are all excellent, and while Peter Capaldi is missed as Richlieu, Marc Warren's smug snake Rochefort is a treat, a villain you love to hate and whose success never fails to enrage. Tamla Kari transforms the simpering Constance of the source into a proper character, with strength that she shows standing up to her husband's tyranny of convention and calling out her boyfriend's failure to understand why disgrace is a much bigger thing for her than for him, as much as by being a badass with a sword.

Overall, the series does an excellent job of evoking, if not the actual period, then of a time and place where there is a very marked double standard, and what seems easy for a man is colossal for a woman. This actually affects almost all of the major female characters: Milady was originally condemned in part because she hid her past from Athos, making him doubt her when she needed his faith; Athos' almost-sister-in-law rails for a lost position that she can not regain without male support; Queen Anne needs a son in order to secure her own position; even Marguerite is trapped because Rochefort's revelation of her affair with Aramis would destroy her.

In addition, the series makes no bones that the leads are devoted to the service of a vain, selfish, short-sighted and ungrateful sovereign whom they will never betray. It makes for a tense narrative as they struggle to retain their own honour alongside their duty.

The Musketeers - 'Through a Glass Darkly'

We are fucking badasses, yo!

The King is being a dick, as usual, in a manner vaguely related to a coming solar eclipse. Rochefort notes that the Great Astronomer Marmion will be putting on a bit of a show for the event, which the King declares they will attend. Shockingly, Marmion and his sinister, plague-masked attendants turn out to be setting a trap, and force the King to play a game for his life and the lives of his family, in revenge for the blockading of their village without food in a time of plague.

The Musketeers save the day, Rochefort claims the credit and, shockingly, the King fails to learn any substantial lessons.

This episode suffers from a shortage of developed background characters and an over-reliance of chance. Rochefort seemingly lures the King into this trap, but for once is no part of the skulduggery (although his guards are useless,) which kind of leaves no indication of how they were invited. It's also unclear how Marmion has managed to go from village nobody to scientific marvel of the age in a relatively short space of time, and his tragic backstory is somewhat spoiled by the fact that when making intolerable choices as to which of his sons would eat, apparently he kept himself alive. When he starts his game, Milady walks free by pure chance, and while a large number of anonymous courtiers are killed it's difficult to care when they are just faces in costumes, which kills off a lot of the potential tension in the episode. Even Aramis survives a fall from a window by dropping onto an awning, quite by chance.

And then there is the King...

We open the episode with the King demonstrating the science of a solar eclipse by simultaneously showing off that he's bonking Milady and hinting that he will eventually ditch her, and yet he wonders why people hate him. He once more poo-poos the Musketeers (including D'Artagnan, who is chided for 'encouraging Marmion to play with my life', when Marmion's original plan was just to shoot the King, and D'Artagnan had all but persuaded Marmion to hand over his gun for the chance to force a Musketeer to execute the King.) Honestly, I'm starting to get ticked off with him myself, but it's increasingly obvious that he's not likely to change any time soon.

Also, if you're looking at the middle badass in this picture and thinking that
she's shockingly mannish, there is as much wrong with your eyes as with
your priorities.

In other news, however, there is development. Milady has been ditched for running out on the King (to get help) and dressing like a man (to rescue him like a total badass) and shared peril has pushed Constance and D'Artagnan to publicly shack up. Future tensions involving Aramis are hinted at, with the Queen being a little too eager to show the rescuing Musketeer that the Dauphin is okay and just look at his little face! at the same time that he is blanking his erstwhile lover, the royal nanny Marguerite, who may well be onto them and is certainly in the pay of Rochefort. Athos clearly suspects things are hotting up again twixt Aramis and Anne, given his pointed directive for the former to get the latter out of danger and then 'hurry back'.

The Musketeers - 'The Good Traitor', 'Emilie' and 'The Return'

It seldom pays to fuck with anyone played by Colin Salmon.

We had a bit of a catch up on The Musketeers this week, starting with 'The Good Traitor', in which Spanish General Tariq Alaman (Colin Salmon) offers France a devastating new kind of gunpowder if the Musketeers can help to rescue his daughter (because all sympathetic generals in this series have sexy daughters of about the Musketeers' age.)

This episode brings up a number of interesting things about The Musketeers, most obviously that - unlike say Merlin or Atlantis, it doesn't use colourblind casting. This is because it is actually a show that is interested in race. Alaman and his daughter are Spanish Moors, betrayed by their country; Alaman's protege turned persecutor Balthazar spits racism, while his daughter Samara tells Porthos that France will one day turn on him. This dovetails with a developing subplot across these three episodes: General de Fois from 'Keep Your Friends Close' has left Porthos a bequest and Treville won't explain why. The audience knows it is about his parentage, so now we all wonder who his dad is and how that will affect his acceptance.

Next for Crusaders

As is the way with this series so far, the episode also sees the Musketeers either not actually succeeding, or by sticking to their code displeasing the King. In this case, they save the girl but not the secret formula (and of course the dad buys it; they always do,) while 'Emilie' follows the latter scenario. The Musketeers are more or less sent to assassinate a prophetess mustering a peasant militia for a war against Spain. Discovering that she is an honest woman being used as a puppet prophet, they instead persuade her to stand down her force, but the King - who wanted blood - finally dismisses Treville as Captain of the Musketeers.

'Emilie' also has a watershed moment for the Queen and Aramis, as Anne takes a risk to save lives and almost loses hers, precipitating a reunion with her Musketeer (and the ditching of the royal nanny, who is almost at once scooped up as a source by Rochefort.) Of course, the Aramis business is likely to seriously moulder Rochefort's rind, as he is clearly obsessed with the Queen well beyond his desire to rule France through her. Other than this unknown bump in his designs, things are going swimmingly for him, with the King adoring him more than anyone bar new squeeze Milady and the latter deployed to terminally terminate his deal with the Spanish.

A final development across these two episodes is in the relationship between the Queen and Constance. Kidnapping the Dauphin to see his fever properly treated almost has Constance executed, but ultimately secures her the Queen's favour. This is confirmed when she is chosen to escort Anne to visit Emilie.

"Can you not afford even a single unripped shirt on a
Musketeer's salary? Maybe you could shop where that
peasant prophet goes."

All - or from another point of view, as this is a standalone episode with character notes for Athos, none - of which brings us to 'The Return'. During a major drunk, Athos is kidnapped by the tenants of his estate and brought to defend them against his neighbours' rapacious land-grabbing. Baron Renard and his idiot son are suitably vile, at one point kidnapping the featured village girl for a ritualised rape which is thankfully interrupted. In some ways, however, the real villain of the piece is Athos' late brother's former fiancee, initially nudged in as the episode's love interest, but revealed to be exactly the same kind of elitist swine as the Baron.

Catherine is mostly there as a set-up for later, I think, as she seems determined to bring some vigilante justice to the King's mistress, and the bulk of 'The Return' is given over to the Magnificent Seven-style showdown as the villagers defend their homes and usher in a spirit of early Republicanism.

On the strength of these three episodes, the second season of The Musketeers is more than holding its own, and exceeding the standards of the first. It's really getting its teeth into the character - despite the loss of the Cardinal - and even managing some decent commentary on liberty and equality.

The Musketeers - 'An Ordinary Man'

"It's been at least nine hours since I slept on an eiderdown and d'Artagnan
won't let me use the hair and make-up trailer."

The Musketeers are snookered when the King wants to 'experience the life of the ordinary folk'. Predictably, trouble breaks out, and as bad luck would have it Louis and d'Artagnan wind up chained together to be sold as Spanish galley slaves, because the Spanish are the baddies in this series, okay? That's why they have accents and the French just sound English.

The Musketeers set out to rescue the King, but the Queen puts the blame on them for losing him and this pushes Rochefort further into her good graces. An attempt to eliminate the King and all witnesses leads to a battle royale, but d'Artagnan and Louis are saved by the intercession of an unlikely heroine, Milady de Winter.

I'm sure this good deed will go unpunished... right?"

Ordinarily, we would expect this to be the episode which turns Louis around from prancing fop to serious king. It has all the hallmarks - a bonding moment with d'Artagnan, an insight into the plight of the poor - but actually it serves merely to highlight what a dick the king is, blaming the whole thing on the Musketeers he bullied into escorting him and exacting petty revenge on his captors instead of thanking those who risked - or gave - their lives to save him.

Speaking of dicks, d'Artagnan may not be able to act like a dick to Constance this week (note that despite his dickishness last week, she is unshakable in her faith in him) but we get our weekly 'treating women like crap' quotient in with Aramis, who is absent from the initial kidnap scene visiting the royal governess, whom he has clearly seduced in order to spend time near his son.

The Musketeers - 'Keep Your Friends Close'

"You have a son, your majesty. It's totally the result of faith and not me
getting knocked up by a Musketeer at all."

As one door closes, another opens, and so even as Cardinal Richlieu is buried, having died between series of an offer of a starring role in the BBC's flagship SF series, Queen Anne gives birth to the Dauphin Louis (no sign of a twin as yet) and a new adversary arrives at court in the form of the Cardinal's former agent in Spain, the intense and brooding Comte de Rochefort (Marc Warren.)

Captain Treville drops the ball by refusing the King's offer of a position as his close adviser, leaving the way open for the returning viper Rochefort to take up his master's place, with the added twist that he is revealed to be working for the Spanish Ambassador (Patrick Malahide, looking pretty damned spruce compared to Game of Thrones.) Rochefort then leads the Musketeers on what he hopes will be a suicide mission to rescue a former fellow prisoner, General de Foix.

I have no idea why you might think I was evil.

With the loss of Peter Capaldi to the lure of the TARDIS, Rochefort is our new lead villain. He is instantly thrown in with an opposite direction by establishing him as a confidante of the Queen, whereas Richlieu was her particular enemy, and  personal rather than political beef against the Musketeers. He is also much more direct, and even in this one episode kills a lot of people (Athos identifies him as an assassin.)

Aramis has some angst-filled moments as he tries to get some face time with his unacknowledged son, with Athos having to be the voice of reason: "The Dauphin is not your son, Aramis. He can never be your son unless you confess to an act of treason and take the Queen down with you." Meanwhile Constance is appointed as the Queen's official confidante, and d'Artagnan acts like a complete dick because she wouldn't leave her husband, which given that she has just found him making out with de Foix's sister at the time is pretty fucking rich.

On the plus side, she has something to brood over now.

The Musketeers - Season 1

It's about honour, romance, and four sexy guys in a lot of leather.

Like the big brother to the network's Atlantis, last year's BBC America production of The Musketeers is a very loose adaptation of Dumas' novels, wrapped up in a sumptuous parade of vaguely period frocks and not remotely period leather jackets. Before I move on to the current second series, here is my round up of series 1.

D'Artagnan (Luke Pasqualino), a brooding and dashing minor Gascon landowner, comes to Paris and joins up with the elite King's Musketeers, here depicted as a sort of go-to special forces unit with a signature shoulder spauldron in place of an actual uniform and a sufficiently bad ass reputation that it's hard to see why people are so willing to attack them. "Kill the Musketeers!" they cry, like someone in a modern day thriller shouting: "It's the SAS! Get 'em!" The best of the best of the best are of course the brooding and tortured Athos (Tom Burke), the brooding and powerful Porthos (Howard Charles) and the brooding and soulful Aramis (Santiago Cabrera).

They also brood who only sit and wait.

Their chief is the brooding and conflicted Captain Treville (Hugo Speer) and their main adversaries the brooding and subtle Cardinal Richlieu (Peter Capaldi) and his agent the brooding and deadly Milady de Winter (Mamie McCoy.) Ultimately, they all work for the brooding and petulant King Louis (Ryan Gage) and his missus the brooding and resentful Queen Anne (Alexandra Dowling.)

D'Artagnan lodges with Constance Bonacieux (Tamla Kari) and her husband. Constance is almost unique in Paris in that she almost never broods, at least not darkly as everyone else is given to.

In case you're not into guys.

The arc of the series concerns Milady's machinations against Athos (her former husband who condemned her for murdering his brother) and his friends. Subplots include the affairs between D'Artagnan and Constance and Aramis and the Queen, and Treville's complicated history in Richlieu's affairs.

For what it is, The Musketeers is a pretty decent series. It looks gorgeous - if only vaguely in-period - and is packed with pretty people and action set-pieces. The leads are all good at what they do, and establish strong - if simple - personalities for the four heroes (Athos is dark and serious, Porthos is fierce, D'Artagnan hot-headed and Aramis loves the ladeez.) An interesting quirk is that while Porthos is once more the brawling heavyweight of the team, he is portrayed as neither fat nor drunk. He is also the everyman figure, coming up from the streets instead of being a gentleman by birth. This is especially interesting as he is also the only regular black character.