Some
heavy stuff going down in this episode.
For today’s main plot, our heroes are enlisted to protect Bonnaire, a
full-of-himself privateer, on his way to Paris.
Bonnaire has just recently returned from an expedition abroad and has
been greeted by a number of enemies.
Over the course of their involvement, the musketeers discover exactly
how Bonnaire acquired himself so many foes, and the discovery isn’t pretty.
There’s
also a bit of headway made on one of the ongoing series arcs – backstory on the
connection between musketeer Athos and Milady, 17th-century femme
fatale and Richelieu’s own personal weapon.
We saw from the start that there’s a past between the two, but we get
more details in this episode, far beyond the hints received until now.
I’m not
sure what I think about Milady. She’s
tough, intelligent, and deadly, that’s for sure. However, I get a little tired of the whole
female-antagonist-as-seductress trope.
It’d be nice to see a female villain – especially an attractive one like
Milady – who didn’t use sex and her “feminine
wiles” to trip up/manipulate/lure men into her trap. I’m not against it as a narrative device in
principle, but it just gets boring. I’d
love to see female baddies with more varied tricks up their sleeves. Granted, this story is set in an era when
women had far fewer educational opportunities and legal rights, which reduced
the number of tools at their disposal.
Still, a little more creativity would be great.
Not too
much Richelieu today. Aside from a
little opportunistic grasping, he chiefly advises the king. You can tell he basically feels contempt for
his monarch and gets annoyed whenever the king gets ideas in his head that
Richelieu didn’t put there.
Bonnaire,
I should tell you, is played by James Callis, better known as Gaius Baltar from
Battlestar Galactica. I’m ambivalent on the performance, though. Baltar was excellent, but he uses such a
strange, affected voice as Bonnaire that it throws me.
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