The Musketeers: A Marriage of Inconvenience

I've been pretty positive and easy-going with my reviews so far (as I try to be with most things) but this episode definitely veered heavily on the side of "meh." The A plot dealt with an assassination attempt on Princess Louise of Mantua, and the assorted subplots saw Milady get the dirt on Rochefort, Marguerite steal the Queen's crucifix from Aramis, Constance try to break up with her husband, and Treville promise to tell Porthos about his father (which judging from next week's preview seems to involve Liam Cunningham, because of course it does. The only other possibility would have been James Frain).

But anyhoo, the Musketeers are instructed to protect Princess Louise of Mantua, travelling through France on her way to an arranged marriage in Sweden, only for Spanish assassins to make an attempt on her life. This is swiftly followed by a similar attack at the cathedral, but thanks to a timely stumble, Louise is spared and the Archbishop is killed instead.

Whoops, staged fall!

It was at this moment that I realized the whole thing was a setup, though I got the motivations wrong. On seeing this guy...

..and his cute face, sad expression and doe eyes, I immediately had him pegged as Louise's true love, with this whole thing being some convoluted attempt to free her from the political marriage.

Well, I got the first half right. Turns out that the real Princess Louise was murdered, this impostor took her place, and she's been hired by Rochefort to take out some of his rivals for the king's attention.

There were some clever bits and pieces that led to this discovery. Treville is shot and a local painter killed because Fake!Louise needed to keep King Louis's wedding gift out of Musketeer hands: a portrait that would have revealed her as a fraud.

And it's Milady – now expunged from the palace grounds – who identifies the two con-artists, though to my everlasting disappointment she opts to kill Louise instead of freeing her and starting a Bad Girls Assassination and Thievery Club. I was honestly chanting: "don't kill her, don't kill her" when Milady entered the cell, and groaned when the stiletto came out.

What made it really disappointing that in her short time with us, Louise seemed pretty cool, and demonstrated more female solidarity (my favourite quality in a woman) than Milady ever has. She notices Constance's cut lip and correctly puts the blame for it on Bonacieux and so when he interrupts her about to take a killing shot, she has a good reason to dispose of him with the words: "I never liked wife-beaters."

By the time she's telling D'artagnan that she sincerely likes him and that she's done him a favour, I was actively rooting for her to get away. Unfortunately she stops for a lengthy monologue about all her evil plans and...

"Dang it. Why did I monologue??"

So backing up here for a minute, Constance decides to do the only honourable thing you can do when you're having an extra-marital affair, and arranges to meet with Bonacieux to confess everything. Any genuine sympathy we might have had for a guy who (let's face it) has a right to be rather peeved off over all this, is carefully dismantled by having him behave as awfully as possible in an attempt to get us all on the side of the young lovers.

So after back-handing Constance, no one is particularly sorry to see him dispatched by a crossbow bolt courtesy of Louise – though he hangs on long enough to curse D'artagnan and Constance with his last breath.

And goes out like a douche.

If this is meant to be foreshadowing for Constance's death then so help me BBC...

Over on the Aramis front, Marguerite is blackmailed by Rochefort into nabbing the crucifix he spots around Aramis's neck, which he then identifies as his own gift to Anne. Sadly we still know too little about Marguerite to really empathize with her in this moment, but Charlotte Salt gave it her all. She knows she's doing something that puts Aramis and the Queen in danger, and her trembling hands after she gets the crucifix off Aramis's neck was a nice touch.

I'm also sure she was trying to give Aramis as much of a warning as she could on returning it to him. Yes, be more careful Aramis. You used to be. Well, except when your carelessness got Adele killed. Shouldn't you remember that?

I'm not sure how this will end for Marguerite, but surely if Rochefort finds out about Aramis/Anne, he’ll have to be killed off, right? There's no way the Musketeers (or the writers) could successfully pull through treason and illegitimate child allegations.

So Rochefort is now elevated to Minister of Something or Other, Milady acquires leverage over him, Louis channels Howard Hughes, there's a return appearance from Hot Physician (yay!) and Treville recovers from his Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Oh right, we're shipping her with D'artagnan...

All in all, it moved things along but once again leaves the Musketeers on the back foot while Rochefort levels up. Some clunky exposition and lots of padding didn't help either.

Next week: We get context on whatever the hell THIS is about:

"I UNDERSTAND VERY WELL!" Good, cause I sure don't.