Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Tom Burke, Santiago Cabrera, Howard Charles, Luke Pasqualino, Alexandra Dowling, Ryan Gage, Tamla Kari, Hugo Speer, Maimie McCoy, Marc Warren, Phil Rowson, Peter Sullivan, Alex Giannini, Charlotte Salt.
When the world turns on a single fateful decision to topple a King, the fall out is never going to be pretty, the lives that become embroiled in the plot, whether they know about it or not, are going to change, perhaps even ruined and the ultimate measure in Trial and Punishment is set, the pawns and the people placed in it all will feel the wrath of the King.
The second series of The Musketeers has been such a resounding success that it is not difficult to see why there has been a third series commissioned. The height of any popularity for a programme has to have the effect of the viewers not only believing in the characters but recognising a facet of themselves in one of them. The popularity of the programme even stretches as far to have had two of the most interesting villains in French literature become household names once more. In Marc Warren’s Rochefort and Peter Capaldi’s Cardinal Richelieu before him, the two series have proved that good story lines, excellent characterisation and praise, does not just extend to the hero of the piece.
It is for this that the second series has been such a remarkable leap in progression. With Cardinal Richelieu in series one, the villainy, the treachery was to be seen as unsurpassed but the man’s one redeeming feature was he was always thinking of the country in the long run. In Rochfort, Marc Warren played him so well that any chance of redemption was to be lost in the wickedness of the character’s heart. His actions were never for his country, nor for that of France’s enemies but instead for his own selfish needs and the overwhelming desire he felt for his fantasy figure of the Queen.
Trial and Punishment, the last of the current series, deals with the fall of many of the series regulars, their crimes, imagined or the deal they have struck with the Devil in order to survive, need to be reckoned with. For the master lover Aramis, his one true crime of being a lover to Queen Anne, is to suffer the loss of the woman he seduced to see his son. The makers of the programme dealt with this moral religious quandary of 17th Century France with dignity. In any other television series there may have been great delight taken by showing the suicide of an interesting character, it would have perhaps even been overblown but dignity is a powerful tool in television and it is so rarely deployed.
With the issue of the lengthy game of treachery resolved and war declared on Spain, the third series of this tremendous programme should be an absolute knock out in which to look forward to, the anticipation alone will be agony to endure.
Ian D. Hall