I'm a bit late to the musketeer crowd but you're the only musketeer blog I follow so I really need to vent my feeling after finishing it. I mean WHAT THE FUCK IS IT WITH TV AND THEIR OBSCENE OBSESSION WITH LEATHER IN SHOWS SET IN THE 17th CENTURY!!! And why must everything be so dark and edgy?!! Where did Richelieu's red disappear? And what the fuck is Grimaud wearing? Why the fuck does he want to kill the king of France? Why does every morivation ever devolve into MANPAINNNNN??!!
Again, these are great asks and don’t apologise for venting. Sometimes, like with shit like this, venting is the only way to cope.
(Everybody else, STOP READING unless you’re up for a shit ton of negativity and swearing. I mean it. Do something happy instead).
“Russian roulette” is a good way to put it. I mean, there’s plot holes in the first season, but back then the writers didn’t have to commit character-assassination of basically every single character on the show on EVERY SINGLE EPISODE to make the plot go the way they wanted to. In s3 every character is like a shittier, even stupider version of themselves, and it hurts to watch. It really, really hurts.
You are right, they are not the garrison. They aren’t even a papier mâché model of the garrison held together by spit and their own runny shit.
By the end of the show, the characters no longer acted and reacted to a plot, but were bent and broken to fit the plot of the week.
I’ve never seen a single show turn so very man immensely likeable characters into such revolting scum within the span of only a few episodes.
I’ve written much on how atrocious the world-building of this show is, but, you know, coherent world-building takes effort, but this isn’t even about world building. This is about simple continuity, but s3 can’t even keep simple continuity straight. Characters will outright contradict themselves between two episodes. And don’t look for continuity with s1 or s2. It’s not there. It’s like the writers of s3 never even rewatched any of s1 or s2 and didn’t care to at least have and editor check their scripts for that.
And I’m afraid I can’t help you with Grimaud. What is Grimaud even? Certainly not a character. A character, by my definition should have some form of motivation, or at least possess a semblance of personality, but this thing? I mean, say what you will about Rochefort, but at least he was a character (if a wasted character).
I can’t even hate him or anything, because there’s nothing there. I hate Aramis with a passion, but at least he has a character to hate.
One of the writers admitted that when Athos appears like he’s looking at Grimaud like he recognises him he doesn’t actually recognise him, but he’s looking at a metaphor for war or some shit.
This show even at its best is very terrible when it’s trying to be deep, but Grimaud really is an insult to his namesake in Dumas’ novels. They were going to give him more of a discernable motivation by having him tell Athos that the people who raped his mom were musketeers. It’s a small blessing they left that out, because, as I’ve said before, if they had kept it,you can bet our HEROES would have spent half that episode being horrified about the old, dishonourable musketeers’ war crimes before reassuring themselves that they would never commit a war crime themselves and pat themselves on the back for being so true to their pure, noble hearts, right before they go and break another frightened, tied-up man’s face until he’s bleeding out of every orifice, for not thanking them politely enough for having been expertly tortured by them.
And even that wouldn’t have added actual character to Grimaud. And his mother would still have been nothing more than a tool for more man-pain, like so many of the other women on the show. (Don’t even mention Sylvie’s whipping to me. I will claw someone’s eyes out. Preferably the eyes of the person who wrote that script.)
Even the way Grimaud is killed is infuriating, because it undercuts any last-minute redemption arc Athos may have gone through to atone for his many crimes. I used to like Athos. At the end of S3 I just wanted to beat him to death with a metal pipe.
It’s pretty vomit-inducing in general how the heroes are put above the law this series, and unlike the shady stuff that happened between Richelieu and Treville in the previous series, it’s never adressed as something bad. Athos and his friends torture people, but a couple of minutes later Porthos has the gall to go off at Marcheaux for lightly pushing a high-ranked prisoner of war.
Athos and his friends get to play judge, jury and excecutioner a lot in s3 and nobody even blinks an eye.
I throw up a little in my mouth every time I remember the s3 writers explicitly said that their version of the four musketeers end the show as heroes people in our time can still look up to.
The first series wasn’t exactly daring when it came to portraying moral nuances, but it didn’t need to. It used to be a light-hearted show that didn’t pretend to portray shining examples of humanity.
The hacks that took over for s3 threw all of that out of the window, sadly.
Torture? SO FUNNY when the heroes do it.
Murdering someone and making sure it’s painful and slow without any need? RIGHTEOUS AND CATHARTIC when the heroes do it.
The English queen who needed her jewels back because she needed money to protect her family? FRIVOLOUS! Better if Porthos steals one of those to throw away than to let her do something so selfish as saving her family… meanwhile the HEROIC QUEEN OF FRANCE Saint Anne Queen of ALL QUEENS can sit on her ass all day, decked out like a christmas tree, with a new dress each episode, whining about how sad it is that her people are so poor and starving, why won’t anyone do anything about it (not herself though, she’s such a poor helpless lonely snowflake).
And don’t get me started on Anne and Aramis trying to sell out the entire country, but it’s easily forgiven, because they had good reasons (*sob sob*) and the King doesn’t even get mad about it, because he’s conveniently distractly by a dastardly villain’s plan to slander poor Annikins with, uh, the truth??? Because we can’t actually have anybody think about what it would have meant if Anne had just made that treaty on her own, completely ruined her husband’s standing in the eyes of their enemies AND allies, and very likely exposed a large chunk of the poor people she loves so much to displacement and violent religious persecution they never faced before by turning their homeland over to Spain.
I really regret watching the final episode, because it was that bad. I have never felt so insulted, repulsed and disgusted by a TV show before.
Athos‘ closing monologue makes me physically recoil. He wants us to believe they’re fighting for loyalty and love and justice and honour? These guys? After we’ve seen them murder and torture and betray the people who trusted them without consequences and without remorse? Don’t make me laugh.
By the end of that episode I was rooting for Grimaud to blow all of these unlikeable asses to hell like he planned to (and himself with it, please and thank you, because, again he’s so unnecessary). It’s the greatest tragedy in contemporary tv history that he failed.
The one thing I appreciate about 3x09 (the only thing XD) is that by the end of s3 there is absolutely no doubt left that Porthos is the person Treville values and trusts the most.
And I can’t tell you how relieved I am that at least Porthos isn’t made to join the other main characers in betraying Treville during the sequence of events that lead to his death.
And Porthos even disapproves of Aramis’ angst in the beginning of the episode in question, giving me the slight hope that he would have also disapproved of how Athos and the rest threw Treville to the wolves without consideration.
The saddest thing about 3x09 IMO is that Treville dies knowing he made a mistake in having faith in the Musketeers. They failed in fulfilling the one task that they were founded for - keeping the king safe. At this most crucial time, the one time it counted more than ever, they couldn’t keep the king hidden. And to make things worse for him it’s his fault, because he was the one who entrusted the little king to them.
He didn’t train them well enough. He didn’t do his job right. He dies believing he has failed both as a politician and as a commander.
It’s his fault that it didn’t enter his head that he might be wrong to trust the king’s guard regiment to guard the king.
Maybe he’s thinking about how he should have replaced Athos as Captain long ago. How he shouldn’t have let Aramis get away with his treason in the previous episode.
When he dies, he doesn’t know why the musketeers failed. He doesn’t know about the things people did behind his back. He doesnn’t know that the musketeers betrayed him. He didn’t account for people ignoring his orders and outright calling them wrong (but never in a moment where he could have responded). He didn’t imagine they would be talking about the place the king was hidden loudly and openly enough to be overheard without taking precautions.
It doesn’t occur to him, that yes, he made a mistake in trusting the musketeers, but not because of the reasons he thinks that it was a miskate.
He doesn’t know when he dies that they didn’t fail because they weren’t skilled enough. He doesn’t know that it was because they betrayed him. He doesn’t know that the situation devolved because he didn’t trust the king’s whereabouts to two highly emotional people who had been in the process of selling out the entire country shortly before.
All he can think of with what knowldege he has of what happened as he dies is that he didn’t train the musketeers well enough not to make a hash of things when he put his life and that of the little king into their hands.
Dying, he knows that he ultimately failed. The king may be safe, but he failed in training and inspiring a body of men to be loyal and trustworthy. He dies knowing that believing in them was a mistake.
But at least, at the very least, what he doesn’t realise is how they betrayed him. How they dismissed everything he had said and done. Which might have hurt even worse.
