SPQR (So, plot … quick recap)
This week, we’re picking up subplots as Ania (self-proclaimed goddess of war) has lain with Phelan and absconded from the Cantii citadel. The cowardly Roman soldier Brutus has done a runner with his spaced-out friend Philo, realising his flimsy cover story is about to be blown. Queen Kerra has aided the escape of young Cait and her father, telling the young girl that she is “the one”, but elaborating no further. This episode is an Antedia, Aulus and Kerra-free zone and, I must admit, I missed them. Phelan and Ania’s joyless humping is no substitute for Aulus and Kerra’s mutual nostril-flaring or Zoë Wanamaker’s profligate swearing.
Like two raspberry puddings
Cait unwisely removes the bandages from her dad’s eyes to see how they’re healing, but is horrified to see his bloodied hollow sockets staring back at her. What did she think was under there? New eyeballs? She dodges her dad’s questions about what is going on and why they were being chased by a slavering man-beast. “I may be blind,” he says at the beginning of nearly every sentence, but not daft, clearly. The two make for what I think was once their home village before the Romans charged in and ruined it all. And we shall spend the bulk of this episode there, going between the huts occupied by Brutus and Philo, and Ania and Phelan.
By Puica’s nostrils
Puica, in the form of Divis, strides through the forest, sniffing the air on the trail of the chosen one. He spends the whole of this episode stalking Cait and then biding his time outside her hut, thinking of despicable ways to trick her. When he finally appears in the guise of her dead sister Islene, you wonder why he doesn’t just do the slavering man-beast bit and kill her like he did those Roman soldiers, in bits all over the forest floor, last week. Phelan and Ania/Brenna, goddess of war, stop in the forest for a delicious meal of grass, mud, beetles and badger shit, and Ania can’t understand why her new boyfriend isn’t enjoying it. “Does my cooking not please you?” she asks with a straight face. He retorts that he’s never crapped so much in his life thanks to her “cooking”. He points out very perceptively that she is not “Brenna, goddess of dinner” and she has to agree. Brutus and Philo have also arrived in the vicinity and make their way to the village.
The call of nature
Cait’s dad quizzes her over the queen’s words as they leave the citadel. (“You are the one,” is pretty unequivocal, no?) Little do they know that Puica/Divis has caught up with them and is standing feet away at the gates of the village, pausing dramatically to pronounce: “She’s here,” in his trademark mad whisper. Meanwhile, Brutus has found the local witch-doctor’s drug basement and goes to town trying his wares. He and Philo, who eventually awakes from his trance, spend the rest of this episode getting stoned and talking bollocks like a less amusing Bill and Ted. “So, beheading your best mate. What set you off down that particular road?” ventures Brutus to his still-mute friend, trying to get anything at all out of him.
In Ania and Phelan’s hut, the thatch is shaking to the rhythm of their desolate humping, and they seem unaware of the drama unfolding across the clearing. Puica digs up Islene’s body, breathes life back into it and takes on her form to trick Cait, but she is having none of it. “You’re not my sister,” she snarls at the apparition.
Philo concludes that the gods might be “bollocks” and thus discovers atheism. “We are alone, Brutus,” he says with sudden sobriety and some gravity. His existential crisis begins in earnest.
With Puica gone, Divis tells Cait he was wrong about her, but has trouble saying the word. “It is my mission to protect you,” he informs her, little believing it himself. He says she must destroy Loka with his help. Our stoned Roman friends try to grasp the thread of conversation again, but it slips beyond reach and they go outside to stare at the moon. “All hail Luna,” they sigh. “May she always protect us.” That atheism didn’t last long.
Notes from the end of the woad
- Those long shots of the river valley covered in mist really are beautiful and conjure an ancient time of myth and superstition. This show can look so lovely, from a distance.
- “I don’t want to talk about heads,” says Philo, quite understandably, to Brutus, referring to the friend he beheaded while high in an earlier episode. “These things happen,” says Brutus. Oh, all the time.
- The trippy visual effects (Gene Simmons’ tongue, etc) in the stoner scene sat very oddly in a show where characters are often high on some twig or another, but these visual tricks are absent. The tongue was funny, though.
- I am unconvinced by the needless delay in all these demon kings actually fighting each other. Ooh, I’ll appear before you but then I’ll go again because IT IS NOT YET TIME. Get on with it.
