Review: Reign Season 1

Over the past week I’ve been marathoning Reign (three episodes per day, give or take) and have now reached the end of its first season. It became clear to me pretty quickly that although it was too slight for me to comment on each episode individually, there was plenty to say about the show as a whole.

It’s fluffy crack. It’s cracky fluff. It’s like eating metal-flavoured candyfloss, and like all the best crack and candyfloss, it’s addictive. Buried deep within the invasive pop soundtrack and the inexplicable outfits, the half-hearted attempts at historical accuracy and the ludicrous “pair everyone up with everyone else on a rotor basis” shipping mentality, there is a formula for a fairly entertaining drama.

Described as “historical fantasy” (which makes me wonder why they didn’t jettison the history entirely and set this in a fully-blown fairytale kingdom) Reign is best described as a teen drama in which its young protagonists are looking for a husband instead of a date for the prom, where exam results are replaced with political intrigue, where nerds are represented by deformed loners who wear sacks over their heads, and Sue Sylvester is now Anne of Green Gables moonlighting as Catherine di Medici.

The only thing that bears any resemblance to the trials of contemporary youth is the girls’ acute awareness that any slip-up in regards to their virtue will result in the complete annihilation of their reputations. Other than that, you won’t find any modern teen in a morning-after scene involving the words: “I hope you’re pregnant.”

There’s a lot to get through, so let’s break it down into the pros and cons.

Pros

Obviously Catherine de Medici. Glancing over her resume on IMDB, it’s clear that Megan Follows never got the career she deserved, for her performance not only stands head-and-shoulders above everyone else’s (it’s not that they’re bad by any means, just that she eclipses them at every turn) but she plays what is easily the most entertaining character on the show.

Here’s a woman who during confession casually sandwiches her massacre of a half-dozen men in between taking the Lord’s name in vain and slapping a servant, and only regrets that last one because it was a loss of self-control. Her relationship with Mary ends up being the most important on the show, with the two women transcending the “mother-in-law from hell” cliché to become bitter enemies, reluctant allies, and an effective team. Roughly in that order.

She owns practically every scene she’s in, and even when others are in the foreground, your eyes inevitably stray to her to see how she’s reacting to whatever new chaos is emerging around her.

Yet as good as Megan Follows is, Adelaide Kane is the glue that holds all this insanity together. She’s a beguiling actress, mainly due that pair of big sad eyes, and not since Carey Mulligan have I seen such a tragic bearing in such a young woman. Treading the usual path from a naïve young girl to an astute political player, the show makes the most of Mary's position as Queen of Scots to explore the very real power (or lack thereof) she wields and the effect this would have on a teenage girl's psyche.

I’m a sucker for a good Gothic mystery, and though their take on The Phantom of the Opera (switch the deformed genius living in the sewers for a deformed spy living behind the walls) took a turn for the silly once Clarissa’s parentage was revealed, there were some genuine thrills to be had in the lead-up to figuring out what her game was. And I’ll admit that a sleepless night followed the episode in which the camera panned down beneath Mary’s bed to reveal Clarissa hiding there. Seriously, I had a nightmare about someone hiding under my bed.

Meanwhile there was something a-brewing out in the woods. Let me see if I can get this straight: there were pagans making blood sacrifices to a guy dressed in a scary Freddy Krueger costume in the hopes that he could pacify “the Darkness” which is eventually revealed to be the imminent Black Plague, as predicted by a number of visions recorded in chalk drawings in an abandoned village. Is that right?

To be honest, I still think that kid Pascal is up to something. I was getting excited actually, thinking/hoping that he was a Trojan Horse, (akin to young Mordred from Merlin) who had disguised himself as a little boy and cleverly integrated himself into the castle walls. Of course, there’s every chance that that’s the storyline for season two, but as much as I enjoyed the lead-up to the bogyman in the forest, the denouement was rather anti-climactic.

Bash and a temporary love interest that was way too cool to live.

Still, there was some nice use of Balancing Death’s Books (one of my favourite tropes) and the moral conundrum that arose around Bash’s need to find a blood sacrifice to replace the one he cut down in the woods (lest the pagans come for Mary) played out surprisingly well. That image of the pagan boy casually tipping himself off the balcony was startling, though the stag’s head that was hung over Mary’s bed made me laugh for a solid twenty minutes.

And then there's the sheer insanity of it all. Hey, remember that time the king literally killed a woman by screwing her out a window? Or when Lola pushed a guy and ended up accidentally impaling him on a wall? Or when the king’s bastard was taught a lesson by being forced to watch his brother consummate his marriage to his ex-fiancée? There are no depths (or heights) to which this show is not prepared to sink (or rise) to, and the craziness of it all ensures that the plot races along at the speed of light.

Cons

I hate to say it, but the ladies-in-waiting. Part of the reason why I decided to give this show a shot was because I was certain that five main female characters pretty much guaranteed a lot of focus on female relationships, and in a medieval court setting there was plenty of room for strategizing and intrigue, presumably with a marked improvement in the girls’ ability to spy, manipulate and connive as they become increasingly good at the game (of thrones).
 
Unfortunately, the quartet instead ends up being remarkably crappy at their ONE job of protecting Mary. It gets to the point where they’re more of a hindrance than a help to their Queen, and though I don’t fault them for their obsession with landing a husband, it’s a pity that ninety percent of their screen-time is devoted to this goal.

I'd love to say they're scoping out the territory, but they're
really just bracing themselves for their impending husbands.

At one point Catherine describes them as: “the spy, the forger and the seductress.” Well gee, I really wish we could have seen that in the show. Imagine a show in which all of these girls have a particular skill (seduction, maternal instincts, wealth, strategy) and were set loose on the French court by Mary to work those abilities in mining out information and allies.

Occasionally it happens, but even then it’s in fits and starts. I usually hate it when female characters are dismissed as “just a love interest” as this is usually fandom code for “wah, she’s getting in the way of my perfect bromance!” but in this case I really wish the ladies had a bit more going on in their lives than husband-hunting. They’re in such a rich, fascinating environment where they could be such valuable assets to their Queen, and instead most of their screen-time is made up of Kenna’s liaison with the king, Greer’s liaison with a servant and Lola’s pregnancy (after wasting Anna Popplewell for most of the season).

In short, they comprise the soap-opera part of the show, which is not nearly as interesting as the political or the supernatural bits.

Then there’s the love triangles. To be more specific, the love dodecahedrons; to be more broad, the shipping. These days the fourth wall that used to exist between creators and fans is well and truly destroyed.  Thanks to Twitter and conventions and other venues in which creators and viewers can communicate with each other, there are no secrets between what a fandom wants and what a show is prepared to give in response to their demands.

And the one thing that creators – especially those of teen dramas – have learned is that shipping is the life’s blood of any fandom. And I honestly think this realization is one of the worst things to ever happen to storytelling. Does that sound too melodramatic? Probably, but since we’re dealing with a melodrama here, I’m going to run with it.

In its purest form, there’s nothing wrong with shipping. It’s about investing in a particular couple, enjoying their interactions, and hoping for a happy ending for them. But the recent destruction of the fourth wall and the eagerness with which network executives are willing to pander to whatever voices are yelling the loudest on-line means that an acute awareness of shipping's popularity is woven into the very fabric of the storylines.

Reign is a show that seems specifically designed for shipping wars, with at least one character invented solely to be positioned at the third point of a love triangle. Every character gets a chance to flirt with, sleep with, or get engaged to practically every other character that comes into their orbit.

Why wait until the finale? Let's get married now!

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the amount of ship teasing that goes on, the arbitrary hook-ups, the rush to present as many potential couples as possible means that the relationships ring hollow. I don’t care about any of the romantic relationships on the show as it gives me absolutely no time to invest or grow interested in any of them. This time next year Lola could be married to Leith and Kenna dating Nostrodamos and Greer engaged to Francis’s newborn bastard, and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised.

Thanks to this emphasis shipping and the feeding-frenzy that arises when shows cater to it, there’s no such thing as a slow boil anymore. Everyone just gets flung at the wall for the sake of Tumblr GIF sets and ten-page ship manifestos. Mark my words, in a few years time on-line polls organised by the networks will allow viewers to decide end-game for their favourite OTPs, regardless of whether or not such pairings make storytelling sense.  

Perhaps there’s something to be said to the way Reign chomps through its plots like a hungry, hungry hippo, ensuring that there’s a sudden swerve with each new episode, but none of the long-term relationships are crafted with care, and even when a solid relationship is established, it lacks any sense of resonance or depth.

But that’s just part and parcel of the general writing. The plotting is rather terrible, for nothing builds, characters and plots are introduced only to disappear at random (remember when Mary had a dog and Francis had a mistress?), and the relationships are all over the place. The breakage of the “show don’t tell” rule is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, with characters sharing exposition to each other in barely-veiled summations to the audience or arbitrarily explaining things that they already know.

Stuff just ... happens.

For example, at one point Aylee and Mary set up a double-blind in which Catherine catches Aylee stealing from Mary’s room and subsequently blackmails her into bringing her Mary’s letters. By the end of the episode we discover that it was a deliberate set-up by Mary in order to send a stream of carefully-controlled information into Catherine’s hands.

This is never again brought up, and when Aylee dies it’s with a complete lack of emotion considering we barely knew this girl.

What if Aylee had brought Catherine Mary’s letters only for Catherine to legitimately grow quite fond of her? And for Catherine to be guilt-ridden when Aylee accidentally drinks the poison, believing that she has the girl’s innocent blood on her hands? Which would have been even more interesting when she finally realizes that a) she wasn’t responsible, and that b) Aylee was conning her the whole time.

Split milk, I suppose. Aylee dies and becomes a quintessential Forgotten Fallen Friend considering no one ever mentions her again.

And yet for all of that, the characters, atmosphere and situation must have gotten under my skin. There’s a scene in which Mary is challenged by a group of Scotsmen whose help she needs. After being informed of their doubts that she is a worthy Queen, she angrily tells them that she’ll do whatever it takes to protect Scotland.

There’s a brief pause – and then the men offer their swords to Mary. They bow. Bagpipes blare over the soundtrack. Their leader says: “We have waited a long, long time for you to rise.” It sent a chill down my spine. I think there may have been a few onion fumes floating around that caused a strange swelling of tears in my eyes.

It is on.

So ... I guess I’ll be back for season two. Perhaps not on a weekly basis, but for another mind-screw over the course of a day or so? Yup, definitely. "Long may she reign" is not an official internet meme for no reason.
 

Reign: Pilot

Although I plan to get back to watching/reviewing Arrow at some point in the near future, I also have a few episodes of Reign downloaded, and decided to check them out.

To sum up in a single GIF (though there’s plenty more where this came from):

That was some pretty powerful crack. Look, I’ve seen my fair share of anachronistic nonsense. I sat through the pearly whites and costume porn of The Tudors, the rubber-soled boots and crimped hair of The White Queen, the chainsaws and hang-gliding of Robin Hood, the tomatoes and beer cans of Merlin.

But there was something about the aesthetics of those shows that worked. Sure, The Tudors and The White Queen were far too pretty for the time period they depicted, but (as inaccurate as they were) there was at least a fundamental effort to capture the historical events that the characters were embroiled in. Robin Hood and Merlin was something else entirely; two fantasy-adventure shows that were never meant to be taken too seriously (until they were, and became ridiculous as a result).

But Reign is something else altogether. This is like Gossip Girl set in a simulacrum of 16^th century France. It’s like one of those documentaries where modern families are forced to live in medieval settings, except with a contemporary soundtrack and clothes borrowed from The Gap. It’s like a bunch of random cosplayers have escaped a Renaissance Fair and are staging some sort of elaborate performance art over the long weekend.

I’m not sure where to start. The hair. The clothes. The makeup. The names (Greer, Kenna, Lola, Aylee??) The casual use of the word “fantastic.” Stylistic low-motion montages of girls fluttering through the dark halls of the French court. And the fact that immersed within all these modern trappings are things like bedding ceremonies and arranged marriages and discussions over the tenuous nature of a girl’s reputation after a rape attempt.

I’m just ... bewildered by what they’re trying to achieve here. It’s like the ladies-in-waiting are in an episode of The OC and Megan Follows is in a serious costume drama. Who is this show for?

To hazard a guess at my own question, I’d say it’s Twilight meets A Knight’s Tale, combining all the self-important teen-drama of the former with the joyful “we don’t give a fuck” attitude of the latter. But in this case the two comparisons make for rather uneasy bedfellows. A Knight’s Tale got by on sheer audacity and anachronistic glee, whereas the pomposity of Twilight and all its familiar trappings: princessy wish-fulfilment, love triangles, interpersonal relationships, and dewy-eyed pretty boys, don’t quite mesh with the atmosphere the show is trying to create.

Did I mention that it also touches on French politics?

The drama centres on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Yes, that Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. So we already know this will end on the sharp edge of an axe. But that’s years away, for now she’s a bright-eyed young girl being brought out of the convent in order to reclaim her place at court and meet her fiancé Francis II, the childhood friend whom she’s been engaged to since she was six.

It springs to mind that between Game of Thrones, The White Queen and Reign, medieval courts have become a stand-in for high school hierarchies. We’ve got Mary, the nervous but spirited new girl who must negotiate this strange new environment. Her ladies-in-waiting are the lovelorn one, the nerdy one, the sexually active one, and ... the other one. There's the spoiled pretty-boy Francis, and the rugged bad-boy Sebastian (love triangle ahoy). Catherine de Medici is a little older than your usual Alpha Bitch, but still doing her best to wage war on the cheerleading squad. Heck, this story would have made just as much sense at a high-class boarding school.   

Were it not for the strangely dark edge to everything. The episode kick-starts with a vision by Nostradamus of a tree in bloom that drips blood onto his face, one that he shares with Catherine de Medici (who apparently keeps him in the basement?), warning her that Mary will be the death of her son.

The Evil Matriarch immediately starts plotting, roping in Lola’s young beau (though I suppose we may as well embrace the weirdness and call him her boyfriend) to offer Mary drugged wine and rape her later that night. Yikes. What Catherine had on this guy goes unexplained, and is likely to remain so considering he gets his head lopped off before the closing credits.

Elsewhere Mary realizes that her engagement with Francis is not the stuff of fairytales. Not only does he look at their relationship in purely pragmatic terms (maybe they’ll marry, maybe they won’t – it all depends on the political climate) but he’s got a mistress on the side, one that he’s not particularly interested in giving up. No wonder Mary is already casting interested glances at his bastard half-brother Sebastian, who gives her the “I understand where you’re coming from” speech and rescues her dog from the forest.

Finally, the girls experience the 16^th century equivalent of porn by sneaking away to watch the bedding ceremony between Francis’s newly married sister and her husband, watched over by dour-looking officials but ending up amazingly sensual despite this (and no, I haven’t attended any bedding ceremonies, but I’m pretty sure they were uncomfortable, awkward, perfunctory, and over with as quickly as possible for all involved).

The girls are so taken aback that they race off in slow-motion to the strains of guitar music, only for Kenna/Greer (sorry, can’t tell those two apart yet, only that both actresses look way too modern) to slip her hand southwards, get caught by King Philip, and ... well...

Oh, and in the midst of this teen-drama meets historical-fiction amalgamation, why not add a third element? The supernatural of course! It works for The Vampire Diaries and Teen Wolf, right? Only instead of vamps and wolves, Reign gets a ghost girl with a sack over her head, who warns Mary of the impending rape attempt by warning her not to drink the wine.

The mentality surrounding the attempted rape was bizarre, what with Lola sobbing that it was all Mary’s fault, Mary trying to get an audience with her rapist in an attempt to protect him, and then Francis coming out with the line “you can’t act like this” (yeah, how dare you almost get raped late at night in your own bedroom!), and very much underlines the show’s uncomfortable disconnect with itself. These girls look and act modern, but they’re trapped in the rigid social constructs/mentalities of 16^th century France.

Heck, here’s a new premise for the show: all the ladies-in-waiting are actually time-travellers who go back into the past to protect Mary Stuart from her fate and find boyfriends for themselves.

Yet despite all this snark, there are a few elements of Reign that I not only like, but which have the potential to become truly fascinating with further development:

The court dynamics are already shaping up to be a lot of fun: the lecherous king and his more-intelligent/devious wife, the mistress and her bastard son, the duality of the two half-brothers, Mary and her entourage, Nostradamus in the basement... All good stories are based not only on characters, but the way in which these characters interact with each other. Already the seeds have been sown for some interesting bonds to be either formed or broken within this cast.

There’s a lot of emphasis on the women, specifically in Mary’s coming-of-age story. Adelaide Kane is proving herself better than expected in the role, capturing youth and naivety, but also an awareness of youth and naivety. Many teenagers are convinced they know absolutely everything, but Kane’s Mary has a self-consciousness about her duties and position that she hasn’t quite figured out yet. She can’t quite curb her impetuousness or idealism just yet, but neither is she foolishly mouthing off or throwing her weight around. She wants to be friends to her ladies, but is also aware that they’re counting on her for protection. She wants a romantic connection with her fiancé, but gets a bucket of cold water thrown over her when he voices his reluctance. Hopefully we’re not just going to see her grow from girl to woman, but pawn to player.

As annoyingly clichéd as the whole mother-in-law from hell role is, Megan Follows looks as though she’s going to have a great time. It’s also nice to see Anna Popplewell again; she disappeared a bit after The Chronicles of Narnia.

Miscellaneous Observations

Geez, how old is Megan Follows? I grew up with the Anne of Green Gables adaptations and was astonished to see her age from child to grown woman so quickly throughout the trilogy. But that felt like only a few years ago – not long enough for her to now be edging towards old age. It’s like this woman has lived an entire lifetime over the course of a single decade.

Hilariously, Wikipedia also tells me that Mary’s ladies-in-waiting were called Mary Beaton, Mary Seton, Mary Fleming, and Mary Livingston. Okay, I suppose under those circumstances I can see why the names were changed to Greer, Kenna, Lola and Aylee.

Nice opening scene with Nostradamus’s vision in the woods, but also Mary locking eyes with the nun who dies as a result of the poisoned food designed for her.

So what’s out in the woods that attracted Sterling? Sebastian’s mother mentioned something about him being attracted to the blood...

I'll hang in there for a few more episodes, though my general feelings on the whole thing are captured perfectly on Faye's face: