Well, history is just all higgledy-piggledy in this show, isn’t it? There are at least three major historical figures who should be dead already, and for over a decade, but we’re just having them all hang out together like this is some fanfic I wrote in tenth grade. I’m willing to ride with it, but no one better be out here telling all their friends that Charles V was alive in 1572 because he wasn’t.
We don’t get to see Catherine’s relationship with Alessandro, Duke of Florence, flourish in Italy because they skip all that and send her straight back to France to sit by a mortally wounded Hercule. Hercule dies, which is again very frustrating for those of us who sit there smugly knowing history because he’s supposed to live for another 12 years! It’s anarchy! Anyone can die at any moment. Is that interesting and fun? Oh, sure. But just to be clear, he died of malaria and not from a peasant throwing a rock at his head.
Catherine is extremely sad because Hercule is her favorite (“I love all my children equally. [Earlier that day …] I never cared for Anjou”), and she has a recurring dream of crushed eggs in a nest and a snake, which she takes to mean that almost all her children will die in order for her to fulfill her wish to have power. You never see men worrying about this shit. They’d be like, “I had that weird egg dream again. Probably means I should buy some more chickens. Also another son died, but I’ve got a bunch more, so it’s fine.” (These are 16th-century men.)
Imagine leaving your country for like five seconds and you come back to find your child on the brink of death, a politically divisive figure imprisoned against your advice, and a trade deal in the works that you never agreed to. Charles tells her he went with his gut. Your gut is an idiot, Charles. Also, you’re into your sister, so I can’t with you this week. Catherine wants the Duke of Guise released, but Charles is in a snit and says no, and then Catherine finds out that the Holy Roman emperor is coming, which she knows is for the purpose of machinations, and hasn’t her day been hard enough?
Meanwhile, Charles de Guise can’t stop sticking his nose into everything and tells Anjou that the Catholic League loves him; Anjou is their favorite because he murdered a Protestant, and now they’re all celebrating by murdering their own Protestants. Anjou says, “I thought they think I’m a deviant,” and Charles replies, “That was last month.” Okay, that’s a good joke. So now Charles wants Anjou to lead soldiers into the woods to try to kill the same peasants that François tried to kill. Charles says the Holy Roman emperor, a.k.a. Rupert Everett, will definitely back this plan.
Rupert Everett is here to be sneaky, and the way he achieves it this time around is to tell Catherine about Anjou and Charles’s secret plan. He does want Sister Edith gone but not martyred. Everyone has hidden agendas in this episode, and they all conflict with each other to create chaos, and it is stressing me out. Charles wants to kill Edith because of Catholicism and Anjou wants to kill Edith because of Hercule’s death and Rupert Everett wants to kill Edith because she’s making things annoying. Aabis wants to kill Edith because it will maybe save her apprentice, and Angelica wants to save Edith so that she can leave Diane de Poitiers’s service and get back to court. I’m anti-murder, but can someone just kill Edith, and we can be done with all this? She’s out here saying shit about God, like, “Let our blood water His forest.” It’s not good, Edith!
Oh, speaking of Rupert Everett, his son Philip is with him. This is Philip II of Spain, who I believe is being conflated with Philip’s son, Don Carlos, who had four great-grandparents instead of eight (royalty!) and seems to have once made a shoemaker eat his shoes. Don Carlos seems more like the Philip of this show, who, in one scene, lights a maid on fire because he’s bored (she’s okay). Philip II was just an asshole who abandoned Elizabeth I’s half-sister Mary then tried to creep on Elizabeth. He did a bunch of other bad stuff, but let’s, as always, keep our grudges centered around the Tudors.
Catherine goes to see her magician friend Ruggieri, being like, I had the egg dream again. Ruggieri acts like that friend of yours whose dream interpretations make you go, “Oooooo,” and he says, what if your dream isn’t about nine of your children dying and one surviving, but the idea that one bad apple spoils the rest. She’s immediately like, Oh, so I have to kill Anjou. This is a bit of a leap, folks, but I guess not if you’re really into magic.
Can we pause a second and think about how we’re halfway through the season and Rahima is BARELY IN IT? I really really like the new Rahima! Why is she relegated to a maximum of three lines per episode! Is it so Aabis has more time to talk about how devoted she is to her apprentice, a relationship we never saw grow and do not, therefore, care about? Last season was so wrapped up in Catherine teaching Rahima! More Rahima! More!
We also get just a smidgen of Elizabeth this week, which … look, I’ll take it, but obviously I want this whole show to be about her. Minnie Driver continues to give us an off-kilter, unhinged, but still brilliant Elizabeth I, which I love. It’s very vaguely giving Miranda Richardson in Blackadder but without the ineptitude. Louis de Bourbon shows up at the English court, and she immediately questions him about his faith (“I am as faithful as you would like me to be”). Louis is slow on the uptake, so Elizabeth finally stops insinuating and just tells him to use Edith to depose the Valois dynasty and take the French throne. This is what I want. Women in power scheming against each other, not Sister Edith covered in dirt in the woods, telling her followers to go bleed on trees for God.
To get Louis to sign an alliance pact without reading it, Elizabeth comes to his rooms and just full-on undresses in front of him. The FIT that evangelical teenage me would have thrown over this scene. I had very strong opinions about Elizabeth I’s virgin status, although I did also want her to make out with Robert Dudley. But no third-base nonsense. As a 30-something gay lady whose religious opinions now allow for a lot of gray areas, this scene is fun. That’s all the Elizabeth we get for this week, though, which is a real bummer.
To wrap up, Alessandro shows up and still has high-key flirting energy with his half-sister, Catherine. Look, man, I don’t want to ship this; I’m just calling it like I see it. He gives her a medal of the patron saint of lost causes and says it was their father’s. Rahima later calls him out for full-on lying about this, which he does not deny. Aabis tries to poison Sister Edith, but Angelica purposefully makes ineffective poison, so no one dies, and everyone is very, “Another miracle!” OH. ALSO. That thing where Catherine makes Margot ask Charles (the king, not the cardinal) to release the Duke of Guise from prison, and she says his interest in you has always been unnatural and you’ve encouraged it? This is completely out of left field! Why is there so much incest on this show?
François is released from prison, Anjou is under house arrest, and Philip II gets kicked in the chest by a horse he was trying to stab. So. Y’know. Good for the horse.