The Musketeers: "Friends and Enemies"
This is late, and I still have another two episodes to catch up on, but here are some brief thoughts about The Musketeers 1x01. Basically, it was everything I wanted it to be - and not more. That is to say, it fulfilled my expectations, but didn’t exceed them. Which sounds as though I’m damning this with faint praise, though I’m not - I really, really enjoyed this.
First I must confess that I’ve never actually read Alexandre Dumas’s novel from cover-to-cover, and it’s largely thanks to Pop-Cultural Osmosis that I know the basic storyline and the key characters. Which actually works in my favour considering it let me enjoy the new spin that this show puts on the source material, whilst still recognising various characters and their relationships to each other. It’s kind of like a prequel...only not.
Here’s what I liked most about it: that even though it’s not even remotely sophisticated or complex, it’s solidly written. If it isn’t too strange an adjective to describe this opening episode, I would call it smooth. It smoothly introduced the characters, their motives and personalities, it smoothly delivered a plot that wasn’t overly concerned with being too clever or original or packed full of twists that didn’t make sense, and it smoothly wrapped things up without any glaring plot-holes. After Sherlock, I really can’t article how refreshing this was.
The introduction of each Musketeer for example: it’s nothing that blows you away, but it establishes exactly who they are and what their relationship to one another is. Athos wakes up with a hangover and dunks his head in a bucket of ice-cold water, collects Porthos from the tavern where he’s busy cheating at cards, and together they go to fetch Aramis, who has woken up in the arms of the Cardinal’s mistress before having to leap out of a window to avoid discovery. In less than ten minutes, I feel I know each of them extremely well - they’re sneaky, they’re skilled and they’re loyal to one another. Granted, the show might have an advantage considering they’re all well-known literary characters, but I’d like to think that these particular versions are captivating on their own terms.
Plotwise, there were virtually no surprises here, and you could have had a checklist for all the familiar narrative tropes that this episode utilizes: You Killed My Father, Better Manhandle the Murder Weapon, Fake-Out Make Out, Clear My Name, Execution at Dawn (with a last-second reprieve) and Constance pulling a Dirty Harriet. Even the Cardinal shooting his mistress and offering his underling a poisoned drink was seen coming a mile away. And yet though we’ve seen it all a million times before, and even though this offered no attempt to subvert or play with the tropes, the episode somehow managed to come across as fun and even vaguely innovative. Maybe because they were all played so unapologetically straight? Maybe because they were used in ways that actually made sense?
D’artagnan was another straightforward example of a character and situation that is hardly unique, yet draws you in anyway. After the inevitable death of his father (in the rain, no less) he becomes hell-bent for revenge (with his propensity for fighting demonstrated by his antagonism toward the Spanish envoy at the inn) and then caught up in the hunt to find the real perpetrators. As a Starter Villain, that guy whose name I can’t even remember was admittedly rather bland, with the show foregoing the opportunity for a drawn-out vendetta between him and D’artagnan in favour of the usual “you’re not worth killing”/attempt at a backstab/justified self-defence killing.
But the women! How fantastic were they? Even in the little glimpses we got of Queen Anne bodes well for the future (particularly in Louis’s petulant “I’ve never known a woman with so many opinions”).
Regarding Milady, I honestly think that any version of The Musketeers will rise or fall on its portrayal of Milady, and it’s difficult to explain why without coming across as utterly misogynistic. But in many ways Milady is the foil of the Musketeers; their opposite in every respect. They are united; she is solitary. They are upstanding; she is sneaky. And of course, they have a bromance whilst she is the femme fatale whose seductive charms threaten their bond - which is why casting/writing for her is so important, emphasizing her past love for Athos and subsequent desire for revenge without demonising her, or giving the story a “bros before hoes” air.
And so far they’re doing okay. Or at least, they haven’t done anything overtly offensive. There is a gentle drawing together of Athos/Milady in the glimpses of the locket, the choker and the flashback, and a demonstration of just how far Milady is prepared to go in order to get vengeance on him. It was only Aramis’s timely intervention that prevented Athos from being riddled with bullets.
And Constance! Oftentimes I find that in the attempt to make female characters “feisty” and “no-nonsense”, writers will usually portray them as shrewish and unpleasant (see the dreadful misfire that was Kate on Robin Hood). Yet Constance gets all the familiar “strong female character” clichés (slapping, shouting, scolding) and somehow makes them totally appealing. I’m not sure whether it’s the actress or the writing or some combination of the two, but she manages to be sweet and sympathetic even when she’s perpetually irritated and/or disapproving.
Unfortunately Adele didn’t last long, but she was sufficiently established that her death packed quite a punch. In other words, although it was a fairly blatant case of a female character being Stuffed in the Fridge, the audience is actually given a reason to mourn for her instead of simply shrugging her off as the inevitable dead woman who motivates the hero. That Aramis does not yet know of her death also put the audience in an interesting position: we know that she went to her death declaring her love for him, but he might well doubt her fidelity in episodes to come (if he indeed believes the lie that she’s gone to the Cardinal’s country estate).
And I haven’t mentioned Peter Capaldi yet because...well, he’s Peter Capaldi. Of course he’s going to be great - and more importantly, he’s written as intelligent. He may not have been able to discredit the Musketeers, but he still intercepted the letters and effectively covered his tracks. Mercifully this show understands that your story is only as smart as its cleverest villain.
But another standout was King Louis. Going from a diffident fop to a desperate man who pleads for the Cardinal not to abandon him makes him sound like a rather pathetic character (on paper), but the portrayal is far more nuanced than that. It’s clear that this is a young man who, despite being utterly pampered and enabled for his entire life, knows on some level that he’s in over his head when it comes to state business. It’ll be interesting to see where his character is going to go from here, for there’s great potential for him: not only as a ruler caught between the Cardinal and the Queen, the Musketeers and the Red Guard, but as a figure who is ostensibly in charge but vulnerable to manipulation - at least until the odd occasion when he decides to put his foot down.
And although I’m aware from press releases that they’re going for an Aramis/Anne ship, I’m looking forward to seeing more of how the king and queen interact with each other in private.
Miscellaneous
I wonder if the Cardinal was rethinking Adele’s value even before the pistol was found. He didn’t seem to like her astuteness when she said: “is that why you hate [the Musketeers] so much, because they’re beyond your control?”
Another nice moment opposite another woman was when it became clear that Milady is not entirely under the control of the Cardinal - she killed the Spanish envoy even after he told her not to.
Did Aramis love Adele? Sure, in the way that he loves wine and muskets and adventure - but I did like the fact that even though we don’t see how he managed to get down from the window, it did in fact presumably involve a jump at some point. Notably considering she said: “if you love me, you’ll jump.”
Sorry to keeping harping on about Adele, but it was rather sad to see Emily Beecham go so soon. She’s another of those young actresses (like Janet Montgomery) who seems constantly on the brink of renown but never quite makes it. I know her best from At Bertram’s Hotel (one of the ITV Marple episodes) and an episode of Lewis, but more recently she had a bit part in The Thirteenth Tale. And of course, Merlin fans might remember her in what was possibly that show’s tiniest role - Enmyria the back-flipping Druid girl who got approximately twelve seconds of screen-time before tragically never returning.
I love Porthos’s face. That there is controversy over the fact that he’s a POC shouldn’t surprise me, but honestly - I can’t understand how anyone can look at Howard Charles and not think “this man was born to play Porthos.”
I’m impressed that we saw Aramis load a weapon from start to finish.
The Cardinal asks Milady: “Did you enjoy killing [Spanish guy whose name I can’t remember]? Did it bring you pleasure?” I’m not sure what’s more interesting, that he asked the question or that she refused to answer it. Given that Milady confirmed they had at least one sexual encounter, it was subtle foreshadowing for the Cardinal’s execution of Adele at the end of the episode - though judging from his face, he didn’t enjoy it as much as he’d anticipated.
So in short, I liked it very much. It was packed full of familiar tropes and had little in the way of surprises, but everything unfolded so gracefully that it seems wrong to complain. The conflict is set up elegantly, and the bad guy is smart and slimy without overdoing it. It was sleek without going overboard into “look at me, look at me, aren’t I so totally cool!” territory (cough*Sherlock*cough). And best of all, it contained something I’ve been missing for a while now: likeable, decent men who uphold the law, try to do the right thing, and who are on the right side of a difficult situation. At this stage, the show concentrates more on their foibles than their virtues, but after a string of shows that asked me to sympathise with outlaws, pirates, drug-dealers, smugglers and vampires, I’m just happy to watch something in which the heroes enforce the peace and fight for something greater than themselves. How utterly refreshing. I’m so sick of anti-heroes.
But the plot. I keep coming back to the plot. I can’t get over how solid it was. Okay, there were a couple of holes (in framing Athos, how could they be sure he wasn’t elsewhere with a watertight alibi? And is it really feasible that the Musketeers would go all the way from the ruins in the middle of the night, wake Constance, get her a dress, talk her into helping them and travel all the way back? And who knows why on earth Milady went into a confession booth just to strangle the priest and tell him she wasn’t interested in absolution), but everything else was beautifully paced and slotted together.
The Spanish coin, the missing letters, the pistol - they all made for smooth (there’s that word again) Chekhov’s Guns, and the relative simplicity of the bad guy’s plan worked in the show’s favour. You could predict practically every beat of this episode, but it exercises its tropes with so much enjoyment that it’s like reading a favourite book. It was a treat after the convoluted nature of Sherlock, Doctor Who and even Sleepy Hollow to a certain extent.
Oh, and I did I mention that two out of four musketeers are played by people of colour? Oh, and the theme music! Did you hear how great it was?? And all the leather??!!
This is my new favourite show.