This is a bit of a patchy episode, the goal of which seems to be moving pieces around the board so that everyone is in place for the second half of the season. And introducing Friar Tuck, of course.
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It’s also a Four Lines, All Waiting situation, as the writers’ room is now juggling a fairly massive cast of characters, all of whom are off in their own plotlines that barely intersect.
In which Robin’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (or Week) continues, and Marian kickstarts her own plot at the court of Queen Eleanor. The showrunners promised us something like this for her, and I’m glad it looks like they’re going to try and deliver.
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This second episode of Robin Hood (which aired on the same night as the first, it’s just taken a while for me to write about) isn’t quite as good as the premiere. That was better structured, being bookended either side with scenes of Hugh: opening with him telling stories to his son, and ending with his death.
This episode probably should have ended with Robin and Marian parting in the rain given the emphasis on their relationship throughout this episode, but it decides to carry on for a bit longer and conclude with a cliff-hanger instead.
Don’t worry – this will be a much shorter review than the first.
And so it begins, a new Robin Hood show arriving with very little fanfare, virtually no promotion (I counted a teaser, trailer and a couple of interviews with the cast), on a streaming service that no one’s heard of. Still, it did have one very good poster (below), in which Robin holds the bow and Marian pulls the bowstring, which is hopefully an indicator of teamwork and equity in the episodes ahead.
Is there any point in getting invested, or will this be another one-and-done with an unresolved cliff-hanger finish?
Rebecca de Winter from Rebecca
This is the first time I’ve added an entry without an image of the woman in question, because the whole point of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel is that we never get a glimpse of Rebecca, just as we never find out the name of the story’s narrator, the second Mrs de Winter.
Rebecca is a posthumous character, yet despite being really, most sincerely dead by the time the story starts, she is the novel’s main character, her presence still looming large over Manderley and all its inhabitants. Heck, it’s right there in the title. She’s the subject of the book, and our actual protagonist is so overshadowed by her that she doesn’t even warrant a name.
SPOILERS
The new Mrs de Winter is at first cowled by tales of her predecessor, the beautiful, glamourous, vivacious Rebecca, and struggles to assert herself – especially when it comes to the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who was devoted to Rebecca and resents the arrival of her replacement. She’s convinced that Maxim could never possibly love her as much as he did his first wife, but just over halfway through the novel the truth emerges: Rebecca was a cruel and manipulative woman with clear psychopathic tendencies.
Yet once you finally get the whole story, you can’t help but admire her just a tiny bit. As it transpires, Rebecca was terminally ill with cancer, and in order to spare herself prolonged suffering, she goaded her husband into shooting her dead by taunting him with a lie about how she was pregnant with another man’s child. Her plan worked perfectly: she got her relatively painless end, and her husband was left guilt-ridden and paranoid.
Even when the reality of Rebecca’s true nature becomes public, Mrs Danvers ensures Maxim and his young wife will never enjoy her true mistress’s home without her, and burns it to the ground. Rebecca has won, did win, and was always going to win.
The allure of Rebecca is her unknowability – she’s dead before the narrative starts, so all our protagonist ever learns of her is second-hand. There are plenty of Sapphic undertones in her relationship with Mrs Danvers, and it’s made clear she was carrying on a love affair with her first cousin, as well as many others. Her husband says of her: “she was not normal,” and that she had told him things about herself that he would never repeat. To some she was a virtuous and charming woman, to others a pathological liar and narcissist. But the final word on her must simply be: “She did what she liked. She lived as she liked.” And ultimately, she died in the way of her own choosing.
