TV Review: THE MUSKETEERS: Season 1, Episode 9: Knight Takes Queen

BBC’s The Musketeers Knight Takes Queen TV Show Review. The Musketeers: Season 1, Episode 9: Knight Takes Queen takes the development of the character story in the series as a whole further but adds nothing new as an improvement over the previous episodes. Finally, the main villains become the Cardinal (Peter Capaldi) and Lady De Winter (Maimie McCoy) alongside a memorable impressive assassin but that doesn’t accomplishes any special dramatic effect. What it does much better is to increase the hype for the final episode of the show. The episode is beautifully shot, except of course for the fight scenes and there are some strong comedic moments, some surprises and delightful romantic atmosphere.

We have very strong new female character additions to the story. Firstly, we have the master nun from the monastery with her noble fighting character; we have an old acquaintance of Aramis and the best one being the queen of France. These three female characters are used very well and are responsible for most of the drama in the episode. We focus on Aramis (Santiago Cabrera) and Atos (Tom Burke), Aramis interacting romantically with two of the women and Atos facing head on the enemy assassin, who will straightforwardly remind you of Edward Conway from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag especially in his opening scene.

The main villains finally give it a go. Cardinal Richelieu and Lady De Winter move in more directly in the story and threaten to reveal themselves as enemies of the Musketeers. I couldn’t help but wishing that happened earlier. It is a better mix if we have the main villains, the ones we see more on screen anyway to command the supporting ones as it was the case here but in very few, if any, of the past episodes. Perhaps this is done only now in order to increase the hype for the ending tenth episode, which you can be sure from now, will be the very best of the lot.

This is perhaps the best looking episode of the entire season so far. The opening scene of the queen bathing in a beautiful pond looks wonderful. The fight scenes start to certify another weakness except poor editing and bad camerawork-it is the weak choreography. In all likelihood, this won’t change at the last episode but it became clear long ago that the show’s creators are not trying to make the fight scenes one of the best aspects of the show. Luckily one of the elements of the show that always seem to be at the same high quality are the surprises and the comedy.

The main emotional resonance in the film came perhaps from the romantic drama resolving around Aramis. One of the affairs he spins around in the episode was genuinely surprising and satisfying and the other one was suitably and in the same cinematically efficient way-surprising but this time tragic. Atos also had our eyes locked on the screen when it came down to him facing off the main assassin, the best part of their rivalry being a parlay they hold before the real battle actually begins. Sadly, the episode’s conclusion wasn’t as good as what came before it, except for the way it really set up in an exciting way the last episode of The Musketeers’ season one.

All in all, we are in for The Musketeers’ last and best episode for sure in which hopefully the main villains will depict the full range of their evil and in which our characters will go through unprecedented difficulties and challenges and hopefully the film-makers will manage to resolve some of the problems that have been stuck in the show since Episode 1.

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