Never Say Never Watch Never Say Never Again Again

Big Gay Longcat and Expensive Luxury Cat review James Bond: Never Say Never Again

1983 was a good year for fans of Bond, James Bond. Not only was that the year that Octopussy came out, there was also a second Bond film released, starring Sean Connery again.

Its title supposedly refers to Connery saying "never again" when he was asked if he wanted to come back and be James Bond, although the addition of the "never say" suggests that it may actually have been based on what his agent said when telling Connery how much they were going to pay him.

It starts with the theme song and titles, which already seems strange because by now we cats are all well used to there being a pre-titles sequence in Bond films - this is the first one without such a sequence since Dr. No. But when the theme song continues over some scenes of Bond on a mission, it becomes clearer - this film is combining the usual pre-titles bit with the titles, perhaps to save time so we can get to the main plot sooner. That's a clever idea.

Don't get used to us saying that about this film though, mew.

Bond has some fights with a bunch of mannys, and then he rescues a scantily clad lady, but then she stabs him. It cuts to M (Edward "the Jackal" Fox, who has recently done a very good job of infiltrating British Intelligence) watching Bond's fight on video. It turns out that this was a training exercise (in which case Bond and the manny we saw him garrote were really getting into their parts) and Bond is not actually ded. M says Bond got killed twice when on the training course, while Bond argues he only got killed once - this may or may not be a deliberate reference to You Only Live Twice, we can't be sure. Then Bond gets sent to a health clinic to get the main plot started, just like in Thunderball.

To save time repeating the phrase 'just like in Thunderball' over and over, it is worth pointing out at this stage that the reason this film has so many bits that closely resemble bits from Thunderball is that that was the only James Bond story the makers had the rights to, so they had no choice but to copy Thunderball. Expensive Luxury Cat gave Thunderball a rating of Expensive and Luxury, so let's see if this film can do any better.

I think as well as having the rights to remake bits from Thunderball, they must also have had the rights to remake scenes from the BBC TV sitcom Porridge, because there's a bit at the health clinic when a nurse asks Bond to "fill this beaker" for a urine sample and Bond replies

"From here?"

There is then a shot of the nurse looking embarrassed at the corny material.

It cuts to the baddys. SECTRE Number 12 arrives at a secret underground lair and we see...

SECTRE Number One! He is being given pets by his latest Blofeld, this time played by Max von "Ming the Merciless" Sydow (no doubt Number One had to replace the last one after Bond dropped him down a big chimney). The SECTRE mannys tell each other some exposition, which we already know because we have seen Thunderball before. A rare case of the audience knowing the exposition before the characters do.

At the health clinic, Bond spots Number 12 beating up a manny. This manny is Jack Petachi, played by Gavan O'Herlihy, best known to us cats for playing Captain Leroy in Sharpe's Eagle. Bond clearly knows he's onto something - perhaps he has also seen Thunderball before?

Number 12 recognises Bond and sends a manny to kill him while he is exercising. They have a big fight which is mostly played for lols, such as when mannys appear to be cheering on the baddy but they are actually just watching TV. This is otherwise quite a traditional Bond-vs-a-big-manny fight, although this being post-Moonraker it is obviously not as good as any fight involving Jaws. It does go on for a while, though, and they do properly wreck the place before Bond eventually defeats the baddy by throwing Chekhov's his urine sample in the baddy's face, lol.

Jack does his bit in helping the baddys to steal two nuclear missiles, then Number 12 kills him by making his car crash using a snake. She then rescues the snake and blows up the car to make sure. 

The nuclear missiles look a lot more high-tech in the 1980s than in the '60s - in fact they look a lot like the big missile from Superman 3, which was made in the same year and (by a curious coincidence) also had Gavan O'Herlihy in it. They fly straight to the baddys but instead of blowing them up they just land in the water where the baddys can get to them.

Number One sends his ransom demand to NATO Headquarters, where the British are in charge for some reason. Blofeld does the talking, but as the camera is on Number One the entire time, it is clear who is really in charge. The Foreign Secretary (who, despite what his title implies, is British) orders M to put "the double-ohs" on the case.

There are some scenes with "Max" Largo and Domino, both of whom have one name the same as in Thunderball and one name different. There is quite a good moment where we see that undeneath their laughing and friendliness Domino is really Largo's prisoner, but it is not exactly played with any subtlety.

Bond meets with Algernon, who is this film's equivalent of Q. He is played by Alec McCowen, who would later get promoted to being Mr. Palfrey of Westminster. Algernon complains about the CIA being better funded than British Intelligence and having "28 flavours of ice cream in the restaurant", which is a very '80s joke. He gives Bond a watch with a laser in it, which is one of the more archetypal Bond gadgets. He says

"Good to see you, Mr Bond. Things have been awfully dull round here. Bureaucrats running the whole place. Everything done by the book. Can't make a decision unless the computer gives you the go ahead. Now you're on this, I hope we're going to have some gratuitous sex and violence."

To which Bond replies

"I certainly hope sho too."

This film has already been high on the komedy even by the standards of the Roger Moore era Bond films, but it cranks it up another notch when...

Rowan Atkinson appears. He is playing Bond's Bahamas contact, Nigel Small-Fawcett. I don't think that's a joke name, or if it is one then it obviously doesn't W-word in British English. And this film is not particularly given towards subtlety - even Largo's ship, called the Disco Volante in Thunderball, has been translated to the Flying Saucer for this version.

Number 12 water-skis into Bond and pretends not to know him, although we viewers all saw her recognise him earlier on, just before she set the big manny on Bond. She gives her name as Fatima Blush, which also doesn't sound like a joke name. Given how full of little jokes and komedy moments this film is, it seems curious that they drew the line when naming the characters - and they clearly weren't limited to only using names from Thunderball either. Bond and Blush go onto Blush's boat where they get up to some naughtiness, in what is possibly the most risqué love scene in a Bond film until Die Another Day.

They go scuba diving together, for the first of some extremely slow underwater scenes. I suppose since they were copying so much of Thunderball, they couldn't really avoid copying at least some of that, mew. Blush sends a remote control shark to chase Bond. I'm sure one of the sharks gets smaller when it is played by a glove puppet (did Alec Guinness still need the money after Star Wars?) for some shots.

Blush tries to blow Bond up in his hotel room, but he is busy getting up to naughtiness with a woman in her room at the same time and so the bomb blows up the wrong room. There is some neat misdirection where the camera cutting is intended to convince us that the bomb is in the same room as Bond, before the explosion shows it is not - simple but effective.

The scene changes to the south of France, where Bond meets Felix Leiter as well as his French contact Nicole. They spy on the Flying Saucer and see Domino, realising that she is Jack Petachi's sister. Bond poses as a masseur (well, he is in France) in order to get close to Domino and have a good old perv over her, naughty Bond! She tells him that Largo is "giving a charity ball tonight at the casino for children." I know it was the 1980s but, even so, a casino for children seems a bit much.

Bond goes to the casino where he discovers it has two parts - one a high class casino like he visits in what seems like most of his films (certainly he did in Thunderball), the other an arcade full of video games. Well, it was 1983... so it must have seemed cutting-edge, even futuristic, to have such a place.

Largo confronts Bond and they show off in front of Domino. Largo challenges Bond to play a video game with him - but one made of SFX rather than an actual early-80s video game. This is probably for the best, since the effects for this bit have dated less badly than the 8-bit games of the period, though this is never going to achieve the iconic status of a proper casino showdown between Bond and the baddy over Baccarat - or, for that matter, the Backgammon scene from Octopussy that same year.

The game is played for money to the winner and electric shocks to the loser. Largo has the advantage at first because he has played the game before, while Bond is more used to Jet Set Willy.

Bond loses all the games except for the last one, and Largo gets to utter the classic baddy line

"It seems I underestimated you, Mr Bond."

Bond dances with Domino and tells her that her brother is ded in an attempt to get her to turn against Largo - well, it W-worded for him last time.

When Bond returns to where he is staying he calls out "Nicole?" but there is no answering call of "Papa?" because Nicole has gone

Bond chases Blush in her car using a motorbike. Some henchmannys in cars join in the chase but Bond uses some gadgets in the motorbike to make them crash. Blush knocks Bond off his bike and captures him.

Before she kills Bond, she wants him to write her a note saying that "the greatest rapture in my life was afforded me in a boat in Nassau by Fatima Blush, signed James Bond 007." Bond writes with his gadget pen, and uses it to blow up Blush.

Bond teams up with Felix to explore the Flaying Saucer. Bond finds his way on board and gets captured in a moment that is so contrived it is as though the writers just couldn't be bothered writing a scene that moved the plot from Bond killing Blush to getting captured, so just had him turn up and get captured.

Largo treats Bond as his guest and lets him roam about the ship, so he certainly knows how to act the part of a baddy. Bond asks Domino about the "Tearsh of Allah" which is very convenient because she is the only person apart from Largo who knows about it, and she shows Bond the necklace that Largo gave her earlier on. This contrivance can't even be blamed on Bond having seen Thunderball because this bit isn't from that.

Bond kiffs Domino knowing that Largo is spying on them. Largo goes mental with an axe while Bond uses this distraction to send a message to M saying that the Flying Saucer is headed for North Africa. There's another missed opportunity for a lol here when M takes Bond's warning seriously and doesn't question why Bond is messaging him about UFOs. Or perhaps after the scene ended M was straight on to Ed Straker at SHADO?

Largo leaves Bond and Domino imprisoned, but Bond escapes with the help of his laser watch. He rescues Domino and they escape on a horse, leading to another chase scene when henchmannys pursue them on their own horseys.

This all builds up to a completely absurd bit where Bond rides the horse off the top of the castle to plunge into the water below, in what is possibly the most ludicrous use of CSO in a Bond film until Die Another Day.

Bond and Domino travel on Felix's submarine to the next part of the plot. Bond thinks that the Tears of Allah necklace must be relevant due to the Law of Conservation of Narrative Detail, and he deduces that it is really a map showing where Largo has hidden the nuclear missile. Oh, and there's only one missing nuclear missile now, because the other one got recovered off-screen, mew.

Bond and Felix use some experimental, top secret jetpacks to secretly land near Largo's base while causing as much noise and drawing as much attention to themselves as possible. To be fair, this scene is both better than the equivalent use of the jetpack in Thunderball and considerably less ludicrous than the horse scene from earlier. Mind you, almost anything would be. There's still no actual need for it, since it is followed by some tedious underwater scenes as Bond and Felix follow Largo and his henchmannys to their base.

There is a brief cutaway to Number One and his SECTRE mannys celebrating their upcoming victory, perhaps to make up for the dullness of the underwater scenes.

Number One is even prematurely drinking a toast to their success. Or maybe he was just thirsty?

Bond and Felix start a gunfight that takes care of most of the henchmannys, but Largo gets away with the missile.

Bond has a slow-motion underwater fight with Largo, and then while Bond tries to stop the missile from being launched, Domino turns up and shoots Largo. I think she had to do that only because she does it in Thunderball, since she was otherwise nowhere near this scene until the very last moment. This is a very poor climax to the film, and a rubbish ending for this version of Largo.

It cuts to Domino and Bond relaxing. They hear a manny approaching them and sinister music plays, so Bond throws him into the pool. Then it turns out it was only Nigel Small-Fawcett. Well what does he expect if he's going to have sinister music playing whenever he sneaks up on somebody? He pleads for Bond to come back because 

"M says that without you in the service, he fears for the security of the civilised world."

Is a resigned Bond really that much of a security risk? If only there was somewhere that they could put their former agents...

Bond says

"Never again."

To which Domino replies

"Never?"

It's not quite a title drop to end the film on, but it is not exactly subtle, especially as the theme song starts to play as soon as she says it, which includes the title as lyrics. But then, 'not exactly subtle' has been this film's entire modus operandi.

Bond breaks the fourth wall when he winks at the camera as the final shot.

Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Expensive but not Luxury

But who will turn doggys into cats on Halloween now?

RIP Tim Curry

The Serpent Queen, season two (2024)

This second (and final) season of the historical drama about Catherine de' Medici is, remarkably, far less historically accurate than the first season, and yet manages to be even better than it.

The writers have clearly decided to put story well ahead of any attempt at faithfulness to the actual historical events that are supposedly depicted, and you'd probably get a more accurate depiction of France in 1572 by watching the Doctor Who story The Massacre, despite the presence of a time travelling alien in that.

Or at least you could if that wasn't one of the missing 1960s stories, mew.

The season begins with a time skip of 10 years since the end of the first season. This helps to cover the replacement of a couple of key actors, although Alexandre Willaume, who they got to play Montmorency in this season, is about as different from season one's Barry Atsma as Brian Croucher was from Stephen Greif, so fair to say it wasn't entirely successful.

We are also introduced to a bunch of new characters - mostly Catherine's five surviving children, who are now young adults. There is also Minnie "Day Today" Driver as the English queen Elizabeth I, ahistorically visiting France to stir up trouble among the Valois court. The entirety of the English nobility is represented by one character, Lord Throckmorton (Alex Price), a heavily fictionalised version of either Cecil or Walsingham, or possibly an amalgamation of the two. Elizabeth, presenting as a superficial and 'ditzy' character but in reality at least as shrewd and manipulative as Catherine herself, is one of few characters we ever see get the better of Catherine without Catherine getting her own back later. Queen Elizabeth is one of the main antagonists through the middle of the season, to the point where she and Catherine have a 'we're not so different, you and I' scene.

The main antagonist throughout the season is Edith, a Protestant preacher who becomes the focal point of the Protestant opposition to the Catholic rulers of France. Even the Protestant nobles from the House of Bourbon become subordinate to her, as her faking of miracles secures her meteoric rise to power. Edith appears to be a wholly fictional creation of the series in order to give the Hugenots a figurehead and the series a 'villain.' Incidentally, the word 'Hugenot' is never used at any time during the series, it seemingly preferring to keep things simple by sticking to using the 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' labels.

Another secondary Protestant antagonist is Antoine's wife Jeanne, the Queen of Navarre, who is perhaps required to give the Bourbons an edge since the brothers we met in season one, Antoine and Louis, are mostly comic relief characters - and, to be fair, both Nicholas Burns and Danny Kirrane are very good at the comedy moments, this season playing to their strengths even more than the first did.

What makes this season particularly brilliant is the same kind of plot structure that is found in The Godfather - things look increasingly bleak for our protagonists and it appears their enemies have won, but then the tables are turned at the last moment (or in the last episode) with a carefully prepared strike or series of strikes when the enemy's guard is down.

Despite Catherine being very much an anti-hero, the series does a great job in making Edith and Jeanne even more despicable, so that their eventual comeuppances are suitably satisfying. Given that she was a real person, Jeanne's death is not historically accurate - but it is based on the way she was depicted as dying in Alexandre Dumas's La Reine Margot.

Something that had no right to succeed but somehow did was the way the unreliable narration was continued from the first season. In season one, everything bar the frame story was an in-character narration by Catherine (or sometimes by Mary or Rahima) to one of the other characters in the frame story, and so when Catherine sometimes seemed to address the viewers directly, we understood this was her speaking to Rahima. In this season, there is no frame story, yet Catherine continues to address the audience from time to time in order to explain her inner thoughts or motivations.

Who then is she really talking to?

It can only be that she really is breaking the fourth wall this time, and telling her story to us. Somehow it feels right, and it helps us to accept the deviations from history as all being part of the increasingly unreliable narration of Catherine as she attempts to justify her part in this bloody period of history.

The final episode depicts (although it does not name it as such) the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve and, like earlier depictions of Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I in the series, portrays it in a very different way from how we are used to seeing it. This is it seen from the perpetrators' point of view, and viewers are brought in and made complicit in the plotting and execution of the deaths of the Protestant leaders and their supporters, seen as necessary to prevent either a Protestant coup d'etat or a civil war in France. With Catherine as our narrator and point of view character, we see her justifying it to herself and to us.

It's a really good series, but the ending is superbe.

The Serpent Queen, season one (2022)

Made the same year as the Marie Antoinette TV series that I watched last year, this tells the story of a different Queen of France but in a quite similar style - it's another of those historical dramas that uses modern language (including copious swearing) and frequent graphic violence, sex scenes and nudity to keep a casual audience interested. The modern (21st century) incarnation of this sort of TV show can be traced to The Tudors, which began in 2007, but really this kind of tits-out edutainment goes back at least as far as I Claudius in the 1970s.

Speaking of Claudius, this is perhaps the closest that I have seen any 21st century series come to approximating the feel of that show, and this I put down to the choice of central character and the actress to play her - the titular Serpent Queen is Catherine de' Medici (Queen of France from 1547 to 1559, then Queen Mother of France until 1589), played by Samantha "Cracker" Morton. Don't get me wrong, Catherine is no Livia, because nobody is, and Morton isn't Siân Phillips neither, but that's an unfairly high bar to set anyone. Nevertheless, Catherine has that Liviaesque quality where she does terrible things to close members of her family, but we as viewers get to see why she acts the way she does, and can even sympathise with her up to a point.

Also like Claudius, the series - at least this first season, since I have not yet watched the second - uses the conceit of a central narrator telling their story in flashback, so the idea of the unreliable narrator telling a biased version of events from their point of view is baked into the show from the start. This also includes moments where the flashback-version of the narrator's character will turn to the camera, House of Cards-style, and address the audience directly.

Where this varies from the usual form of this trope is that the narrator changes to a second and then third character - in the first six (of eight) episodes, Catherine tells her life story to her new maid Rahima, then in episode seven Rahima hears events told from the point of view of Catherine's recently widowed daughter-in-law Mary, the Queen of Scotland. In the final episode the flashbacks catch up with the 'present' of the story as Rahima joins the dots and tells Catherine what must have happened for events to have gone from A to B. This is Rahima attempting to demonstrate her intelligence to impress Catherine, so it represents one of the best examples I have seen of exposition where one character tells another something they already know, really in order to inform the viewer at home.

Mary Queen of Scots is an interesting historical figure to feature so heavily in this show - she is essentially the main antagonist for the last two episodes - because this gives us a period of her life that is rarely depicted. Most dramas I know of about her - even most documentaries - concentrate on her later life, either after her return to Scotland or even after her flight to and captivity in England. Here Mary's religious fanaticism is foregrounded, and her intolerance for the large population of Protestants in France threatens the stability that Catherine seeks to maintain, and pushes the country to the brink of civil war.

This is a series in which each episode improves on the one before. The first three tell the story of Catherine's arranged marriage to a son of the French King, and the well-worn tale of her precarious political situation until she can give her husband a son and heir. Anyone who has seen a drama about Henry VIII of England has seen this story told multiple times - even if they have only watched one version. For me the main attraction of these episodes was spotting the guest actors, most notably Charles "Golden Child" Dance as Catherine's uncle Pope Clement VII, and Colm "Chief O'Brien" Meaney is Catherine's father-in-law King Francis I.

With a plot so keenly concerned about whether the main character conceives a child or not, it is unsurprising that there is rather a lot of sex in these early episodes. I think the first gratuitous sex scene appears six minutes into the first episode. But the sex is not portrayed as glamorous  - The Tudors this is not - and only titillating to those with very specialised interests, which I do not intend to detail here. The violence we see is also, in my opinion, unnecessarily graphic (and might have been more effectively conveyed if it had been more subtly hinted at instead of shown), including an execution by four horses.

Episode three ends with Catherine pregnant and her husband now the heir to the French throne (after the death of his older brother), after which there is a time-skip that ages up the main characters (so that from episode four onwards Morton plays both 'present-day' Catherine and flashback Catherine) and allows the introduction of some new ones. Notable guest actors for the second half of the season include Rupert Everett as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Nicholas "Nathan Barley" Burns as Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre and high up in the line of succession for the French throne as well. A significant plot point is how Antoine and his Bourbon family are biscuits Protestants, bringing them into conflict with the staunch Catholic de Guise family, of which Queen Mary is one.

The middle of the series sees Catherine's husband Henry become King Henry II, after which it mainly concerns Catherine's rivalry with her husband's mistress Diane de Poitiers. Henry values Catherine for her intellect and political skills, but Diane is the one he likes to sleep with. Catherine does not mind that so much after a while (she still has ten children with Henry), it is Diane's dabbling in politics, siding with the de Guises for her own gain, that she dislikes. This plotline is only resolved when Henry dies near the start of part seven, after which Catherine finally has the power to banish Diane from court and end her influence. But with Catherine's son Francis now king, she immediately acquires a new adversary in the form of Francis's wife Mary.

I expect I will soon watch the second season of this, which promises to be different from the first season in that it will need to have a different setup - we have already seen Catherine's backstory, so I can't see it repeating the flashback style of the first season, and Catherine is now established as Queen Mother and Regent (season one ends with her second son Charles as king, but he is only ten years old), so she has already proved herself as the political mastermind who can get to the top of the tree, and therefore I rather expect the next season to be about her attempts at staying there.

Oh, and is that snakes-and-chessboard title sequence a deliberate homage to the start of Blackadder II?

Big Gay Longcat and Expensive Luxury Cat review James Bond: Octopussy

Having brought back SECTRE Number One for 1981's For Your Eyes Only, the makers of the expensive luxury James Bond films knew they had to go the extra mile for their next film, the sixth of Roger Moore's seven expensive luxury James Bond films, 1983's Octopussy.

Like with "Pussy Galore" before it, the name "Octopussy" immediately conjures up, in the mind of the viewer, the image of many cats. And, as we all know, the only thing that is better than one cat is lots of cats.

It starts with Bond already doing a mission. He disguises himself as a manny with a moustache, which succeeds in fooling the baddy soldiers right up until he meets the real manny with a moustache. Bond gets captured while he is planting a bomb, which means he can't blow up the place he was trying to blow up, but he very quickly gets rescued by his friend when the soldiers that captured Bond can't help perving over her - naughty baddys!

Bond escapes in a tiny plane and the baddys shoot a missile at him. The missile chases Bond for a bit until Bond flies his plane into the place he was trying to blow up earlier on, and the missile blows it up for him.

Bond's plane starts to run out of petrol, so he lands and drives it into a petrol station where he says

"Fill her up, please."

with a big Roger Moore grin on his face. This is a classic opening scene - a bit of action, a bit of naughtiness, and end on a lol. Cue titles.

The title sequence is a return to the classic nudey-ladies-and-aquariums after For Your Eyes Only's slight variation on the theme. The song promises us "an all-time high" though we will be the judges of that, thank you very much. I mean, For Your Eyes Only had a cat in its pre-titles sequence, while this one didn't, which means that so far this film is behind on points. But it is called Octopussy, so let's not write it off just yet.

After the title sequence it cuts to a circus. Presumably not the circus that Jaws fell on at the start of Moonraker, or did they get the pre-titles sequences for these two films mixed up? A clown runs away and gets chased by another manny with a knife. Wow, he must really have Coulrophobia. The clown keeps unintentionally giving himself away by leaving his hat for the pursuing manny to find, or his balloon bursting. Or perhaps the clown is just such a professional that he can't help it?

It turns out there are actually two mannys chasing the clown, and they are twins. They throw their knives at the clown, and one of them gets him, but he survives long enough to burst into the British Embassy and die dramatically.

The British Ambassador is played by Patrick "Hobson from The Moonbase" Barr, and he picks up a fancy egg that the clown drops.

In London, Bond tries to be smoove with both Miss Moneypenny and her new assistant Miss Smallbone. This is a gently comic scene where the joke is on Bond, as Miss Moneypenny is wise to his ways - she should be, after six thirteen films.

Bond meets the new M (Robert Brown) and the old Minister (Geoffrey Keen) for his briefing, along with art expert Jim Fanning (Douglas "Professor Van Dusen" Wilmer). M has the fancy egg from the previous scene, which is a fake of a real fancy egg that is about to be auctioned on behalf of a mysterious seller, and so M and the Minister want to know who the seller is in case it turns out to be the film's baddy.

General Gogol (still played by series regular Walter "Chief Constable Cullen" Gotell) is at a meeting with other senior Soviet mannys, including Brezhnev and General Orlov (played by Steven "Heavy Electricity" Berkoff). Orlov gives himself away as a baddy when he immediately starts overacting disgracefully, almost from his first line. He wants to invade Europe, but Gogol says 

"NATO will counterattack with nuclear weapons!"

showing that Gogol has been playing Civilization recently. Orlov argues that they will not risk using nuclear weapons in case the Russians use their own nuclear weapons, but Brezhnev sides with Gogol. This is a crucial establishing scene that shows us that, while some Russians are the baddys in this film, not all Russians are the baddys.

The next scene shows us Orlov is connected to the fancy egg plot when he meets with one of the knifemannys from earlier, and another henchmanny who has spotted that their fancy egg is missing. Orlov's cunning plan is to buy back the real fancy egg from the auction and use it in place of their fake fancy egg, since that will be quicker than making a new fake fancy egg.

As the auction of the fancy egg begins, Bond immediately suspects the most attractive and '80s-looking woman in the room, and so keeps his eye on her. Naughty Bond!

Bond is nearly right, because she sits next to the real baddy, Kamal Khan (played by Louis "Count Dracula" Jourdan). Bond starts bidding against Khan (not that one), which makes Fanning ask

"Have you gone mad?"

when Bond bids £425,000 for a fancy egg. But Bond is just forcing Khan to pay even more for the egg, and eventually Khan has to pay half a million pounds for it, which is about twice what Fanning told Bond it was worth. Expensive Luxury Cat would like me to point out that this makes the fancy egg both expensive and luxury.

Back in M's office Bond reveals that he swapped the fake fancy egg for the real fancy egg while nobody else was looking (you can actually see Roger Moore do this bit of sleight of paw if you know to watch out for it), so Khan has the fake egg not the real one - Orlov will be pleased! M sends Bond to follow Khan to Mexico India and find out what he wants with this fancy egg.

The sight of the Taj Mahal is as good as a shot of the Eiffel Tower for France or the Temple of Artemis for Ephesus for letting us know we are now in India.

Bond meets up with Vijay, who alerts Bond to his presence by playing the Bond theme music diegetically. Bond wastes no time in going to the casino where he sees Khan and the same henchwoman from earlier. Khan is busy cheating at Backgammon, so Bond approaches the woman to remind her that they already met before in London.

"You have a very good memory for faces."

"And figures."

Smoove.

Bond plays Backgammon against Khan for high stakes. When Khan asks if Bond has enough moneys, Bond produces the real fancy egg and says that it "should provide ample security". Bond needs "a double six" to win, which he has just seen Khan get twice with his own dice, so he knows Khan is using loaded dice to cheat. He takes Khan's dice and thus wins, beating Khan at his own game. This is a great scene and one of the film's highlights - even if it is only short - in particular the way Bond knows he has won even before he looks at the dice, letting Khan know that he knows Khan was cheating.

Bond acts smug, as well he might after such a good scene, until Khan's henchmanny takes the dice and crushes them in his bare paws - an obvious call back to when Oddjob crushed the golf ball in Goldfinger, but it doesn't feel crowbarred in just for the sake of a call back.

The henchmanny then chases after Bond and Vijay, with both chaser and chased driving small taxis. There are a number of gags in this chase - both visual and verbal - to do with tennis, such as Vijay fending off baddys with a tennis racquet and saying "Game set and match" when he wins, which only really make sense when you know that the actor who played Vijay used to be a famous tennis player.

Bond meets an unnecessarily browned-up Mark Heap who is juggling sticks that are on fire, and Bond takes one of the sticks to fend off a baddy. Bond then uses the moneys he won from Khan as a distraction to allow him and Vijay to get away.

Bond and Vijay visit Q so that Bond can get some gadgets. Q puts a homing device and microphone in the fancy egg, as well as giving Bond a pen with acid in it.

Bond has dinner with Khan's henchwoman, then they go to bed together. Naughty henchwoman!

Bond notices a tattoo on the woman's back and asks her about it. She replies

"That's my little octopussy."

Clang! It looks more like an octopus than a cat though, mew. We cats are not happy about this. We were expecting at least eight cats in this film, which would indeed have made it an all time high for the series, but now we're not so sure.

In the morning the henchwoman steals the fancy egg and escapes back to Khan. But we know that this is just what Bond wanted, since the egg has Q's homing device and microphone in it. What we don't know is that Khan's other henchmanny is about to knock Bond out with the classic karate-chop-to-the-back-of-the-neck move.

Khan meets with a mysterious superior who we hardly get to see but who has fishy noms in a tank, so we are obviously supposed to conclude that this is SECTRE Number One from the similarities to his first appearance back in From Russia With Love, except that the new Blofeld manny is a woman

with an octopus instead of a manny with an expensive luxury cat. When she hears Khan has captured Bond, she asks for him to be brought to her.

Bond wakes up in Khan's palace and is taken to have dinner with Khan - this is a Bond villain who knows his business, even greeting Bond with the classic

"Good evening, Mr Bond."

Khan finally introduces Bond (and us) to his henchwoman Miss Magda. The dinner Khan serves Bond is "stuffed sheep's head" with eyeballs (we'd prefer the fish), which has a strange similarity to the dinner scene in 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - was there a wider trend for films in this part of the 1980s that were set in India to have their protagonists encounter exotic noms, or was it just these two films?

Bond uses his acid pen to escape in accordance with the law of conservation of narrative detail. This escape is such serious business that Bond only pauses for a brief moment to perv at Magda undressing as he escapes past her window. 

When Bond sees General Orlov arriving in a helicopter to meet with Khan he spies a chance to find out more about the plot, and he listens to them discussing their diabolical plot using the microphone in the fancy egg. Er, I mean Bond uses the microphone in the fancy egg to listen to them discussing their diabolical plot, not that their diabolical plot uses the microphone in their fancy egg.

At this point there is a nice little easter egg (a fancy easter egg) for those viewers who have been paying attention to which fancy egg is fake and which is real - Khan attempts to double-cross Orlov by giving him the fake egg and keeping the real one for himself, but Orlov smashes the other egg thinking it is the fake - but he really smashes the real one, lol!

No wonder Khan does a big komedy wince when he sees this. But he also sees Q's microphone, so he now knows there is a chance their diabolical plotting has been overheard.

Khan's henchmanny discovers Bond has escaped so Khan goes out hunting for Bond dressed like a big game hunter. When he sees Bond he says

"Good. Let the sport commence."

Khan is turning out to be an underrated Bond baddy, although he is obviously never going to be as good a baddy as the other Khan. He and his mannys chase after Bond while riding elephants.

The film suddenly gets a lot more expensive and luxury, even more so than it was before, when a tiger appears. This single-pawedly makes up for the lack of eight cats. Bond tells the tiger to

"Sit!"

Silly Bond! That is never going to work on a tiger, you're thinking of doggys...

Oh.

The tiger sits.

Forget Moonraker and Bond going into space, this is by far the least believable thing to have ever happened in a Bond film... and I do include Blofeld turning out to be Bond's adoptive brother in Spectre, mew mew mew. 

I can only conclude that the tiger must have been going to sit down anyway.

Bond also has encounters with spiders, and then a snake, which he tells to "Hiss off" lol. This is followed by a rubbish bit with Bond swinging through the trees to escape from Khan and his mannys, while yelling like Tarzan. This is one of the more questionable choices that must have just seemed like a good idea to the filmmakers at the time, a bit like the way the great car stunt (careful now) in The Manny With The Golden Gun was spoiled by the addition of the komedy sound effect. Or possibly it is just the law that mannys swinging through trees in films must be accompanied by that sound, because how else do you explain the same thing happening in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, made 25 years after this film so they must have known it was a mistaik by then.

Bond gets away when he finds some tourists, so Khan cannot shoot him in front of them. He gets back to Vijay and Vijay's boss Sadruddin between scenes, and asks them about the octopus tattoo on Magda... because clearly that was his top priority, naughty Bond! Sadruddin tells Bond about the mysterious woman who uses that as her sign:

"No one knows her real name, but she's known as Octopussy."

Clang! Again. When he hears from Vijay that Octopussy's island is full of beautiful women, Bond goes there immediately - he can hardly even wait for the scene to change, naughty Bond!

Bond arrives at the island disguised as a crocodile and stealths into Octopussy's base, but she sees him on the CCTV.

We only get to see Octopussy's face at the same time that Bond does - a trick that was previously used with Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, but this time without multiple films' worth of build up. Octopussy is played by Maud Adams, who was previously Andrea in The Manny With The Golden Gun (presumably this is her second life), so it is no wonder she recognises Bond.

Actually she knows Bond from the events of the Ian Fleming short story "Octopussy", since the main character in that story was her father. Octopussy summarises it in a few lines of exposition. This is a pretty neat way of incorporating the original story into the film, and we will see something similar when we get to The Living Daylights.

Khan comes in and tells Octopussy that Bond has escaped. Octopussy then introduces Khan to Bond, lol. Khan says to Bond

"You have a nasty habit of surviving."

That might not seem like the best villainous line, but Jourdan does deliver it well. Octopussy does not let Khan kill Bond, but she does keep Bond her prisoner. Bond seduces Octopussy with a couple of rather forceful kiffs - it's not quite Pussy Galore levels of instant conversion, since Octopussy had already hinted at interest before (such as shielding him from Khan) but it is close.

While Bond is getting up to naughtiness with Octopussy, Khan sends some henchmannys to kill Vijay. This disturbs the birdys on the island, and they wake Bond up - a subtle and interestingly original way to alert Bond that something is wrong, but he does not yet know what. The baddys get onto Octopussy's island and attack Bond, leading to a fight. One of the henchmannys gets nomed by Octopussy's octopus, and another falls in the water with Bond and gets nomed by a crocodile. Octopussy thinks Bond has also been nomed, but really he has used this fight as an opportunity to escape.

Bond follows the trail of clues to East Berlin, by combining what he overheard Orlov and Khan talking about with Octopussy's circus, and connecting that to the ded agent disguised as a clown at the start of the film. At the circus we see the knife twins from the start of the film. When Bond arrives we see, at the same time as he does, all the film's baddys are gathered here - Orlov, Khan, Khan's henchmanny, Octopussy, and Magda.

Bond follows them, but then we get a scene that shows us that General Gogol is also investigating the plot from the Russian side. He discovers the fake jewels, just before we see Orlov pawing over the real jewels to Octopussy for putting on her train. Orlov, Khan and Octopussy all then leave, but Khan and Orlov send their henchmannys with the train so they can then secretly load a bomb on board without Octopussy knowing about it. Bond sees the bomb getting put on the train as well as a manny explaining, presumably for the audience's benefit, how the bomb W-words.

Bond gets into a fight with one of the knife-throwing henchmannys and knocks him out with a circus cannon. The komedy inherent to Bond using such an item as a weapon means that Bond doesn't even feel the need to make a quip afterwards. Bond disguises himself in the henchmanny's clothes so that he doesn't get spotted when Orlov comes to remove the jewels.

Bond captures Orlov and finds out Orlov's plan - to smuggle an atomic bomb into West Germany and set it off there, where the NATO countries will not know it was a Soviet bomb.

Orlov says little and lets Bond do most of the talking, but his smile when Bond sees how clever the plan is says enough by itself. Also, whenever Berkoff does talk he tends to go over the top really quickly, so it might be for the best that his dialogue is kept to a minimum here.

Bond gets distracted by a soldier (not like that, naughty cats!) so Orlov gets away, and Bond chases him. But then Orlov sets his soldiers on Bond (I said not like that!) and it is Bond's turn to run away. He gets to Orlov's car and steals it, so it turns into a car chase when Orlov and his mannys pursue in another car. There are a couple of shots of Orlov in his car shouting orders at his mannys, but where we don't hear him shout we can only see it - this is perhaps even more effective than if we could hear Berkoff, because the visual image of him yelling his hed off is more than enough already.

Bond catches up to the train in his car, and there's a pretty good stunt whereby he jumps from the car to the train just before another train smashes into the car, although the quick cutting reveals more than it hides about how this was done. The train passes across the border between East and West Germany without the border guards finding either Bond or the bomb. Or, for that matter, the unconscious knife henchmanny, who is presumably still hidden where Bond left him. It is possible the border guards have been bribed to deliberately not find anything, but the film does not make this clear.

General Gogol and his mannys find the wrecked car and discovers the real jewels inside. They catch up with Orlov at the border, but he runs after the train and gets shot. Gogol still doesn't know about the bomb, so he thinks Orlov's plan was only to steal the jewels. 

"A common thief. A disgrace to the uniform."

"Yes... But tomorrow I shall be a hero of the Soviet Union..."

Confused Gogol is confused.

Bond tries disguising himself as a monkey, but Khan's henchmanny spots him so Bond escapes onto the roof of the train where he has to do stunts avoiding bridges and things the train passes under, as is traditional for action scenes set on top of a moving train, but you can easily tell that, unlike Sean Connery in The First Great Train Robbery, when asked to do his own stunts Roger Moore said lolno. And probably raised his eyebrow as well.

Bond gets into a fight with the henchmanny, who is now armed with a sword, and the remaining knife henchmanny. Bond and the knifemanny fall off the train and have a fight in a small hut, where Bond uses the knifemanny's own knife to kill him, thus avenging the clown from the start of the film.

Bond races to the circus where the bomb now is, hidden underneath the circus cannon. He hitches a lift with some komedy Germans, and we must be thankful for small mercies that they aren't Sheriff J W Pepper conveniently on holiday again. Bond steals a faster car and immediately gets into a chase with some local police... who we must presume are the German equivalent of Sheriff J W Pepper.

Khan and his henchmanny leave the bomb in place and drive away, so they don't get blowed up by mistaik. They see Bond drive past them trying to get to the bomb, and Khan hopes that the bomb will blow up Bond as well.

Bond arrives at the base and gets chased by both the police and the American mannys who think Bond is a baddy. He hides for a bit and then he disguises himself as...

...a clown, just like the manny did at the start of the film. When the American mannys realise Bond is dressed as a clown, they arrest a real clown instead, lol.

With Octopussy's help, Bond gets to the bomb just in time, and because he saw how to arm the bomb he also knows how to disarm it.

Octopussy is not at all happy at Khan leaving her behind to get blowed up, and she is now on the side of the goodys, so back in India she stealths into Khan's palace with the help of Magda and all the women from her island. But the henchmanny spots the women and does what any sensible henchmanny would do under the circumstances - starts a big fight.

Into the middle of this fight arrives James Bond in a Union Jack Hot Air Balloon, knowing that he doesn't need to be inconspicuous when the fight has already started. The balloon is piloted by Q, leading to a very weak joke that, let's be honest, probably lowers the IQ of anyone who hears it by about ten points.

"I trust you can handle this contraption, Q?"

"It goes by hot air."

"Oh then you can."

Mew. Even Roger Moore and Desmond Llewelyn look like they think this skit is a load of shit as they perform it half-heartedly.

Khan and his henchmanny escape with a captive Octopussy, who has gone from being the leader of the attack on Khan's base to a become a damsel in distress the moment Bond arrived in the scene. Bond chases after them, while Q ends up in the paws of Octopussy's lady henchmannys and is last seen considering attempting a little 're-entry' of his own with Magda, naughty Q!

Khan and his henchmanny reach their emergency escape plane and get on board with Octopussy. Bond has to do a traditional grab-onto-the-outside-of-the-plane stunt as it takes off.

Khan does a great 'whyioughtta' face when he realises Bond is still chasing him even on the plane, so he sends his henchmanny to

"Go out... and get him!"

Perhaps unwisely, the henchmanny does attempt this, but Bond wins the ensuing fight and the henchmanny falls off the plane - luckily for him he acquired a parachute just as he did so, lol.

Bond rescues Octopussy and they jump out of the plane just before it crashes and then explodes. Khan is blowed up, which is a karmically satisfying death for someone who had tried to blow up so many mannys with his bomb plan, but... it just isn't very dramatic, and features no final confrontation with Bond.

The final scene sees General Gogol visiting M and the Minister in M's London office, which seems a bit much even in these days of "Anglo-Soviet relationships." It cuts away before we see the Minister give Gogol a manly handshake. Meanwhile Bond is busy having kiffs with Octopussy. It's not a great ending, but at least it doesn't make us cringe ourselves inside out (not a pleasant feeling, even if you are made from socks) like the final scene of For Your Eyes Only did.

Far from being "an all-time high," Octopussy is a benchmark for a typical, average Bond film - still expensive and luxury, with many enjoyable moments, but there are plenty of other Bond films that are even more expensive and luxury than this one.

Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Expensive and Luxury

Eurovision 2026

Here are my top three entries from this year's Eurovision Singing Competition - there were less to choose from than in most years because some countries decided not to enter this time, but at least that made the voting quicker!

My favourite entry was from Greece, which saw a manny dressed as a cat (this was always going to go down well with the cats in the audience - maybe if they had sent an actual cat they would have won, lol) running on the spot to some computer game-inspired backgrounds... although I didn't spot any Civilization references among them.

Also good was the entry from Romania. I am guessing that Xena: Warrior Princess is still popular over there?

Also going for a similar theme of leather-clad fantasy film and TV shows of the past was Serbia, who sent the Kurgan and some Chaos Warriors.

I think this is him after he just chopped Sean Connery's hed off.

My honourable mention goes to Italy's entry, which had its song tell a story through the dancing that was comprehensible even to us cats who don't understand Italian. It told the story of a wedding in three minutes, which as we all know is the correct amount of time for a cat relationship.

The interval act contained a medley of previous Eurovision hits, to celebrate this being the 70th anniversary of Eurovision. There weren't just past winners included - we noticed a short burst of Dschinghis Khan, which came fourth in 1979.

If this only came fourth, imagine how high the standard must have been for the top three!

Actually, it was probably the case that the mannys voted for the wrong ones that year, like they usually do - stupid mannys. This year the UK's entry got only a single, solitary point and came last, and while I don't think it was good enough that it should have won, I also don't think that the gap between it and the other songs was nearly so big as the points difference made it seem.

Just like last year the song from Israel came in second place, and the stupid voting system that they for some reason insist on keeping (where it takes ages for all the countries to give out a few points at a time, and then at the end the hosts just add on massive blocks of points in one go, without us even getting to see where or who they come from) made it seem as though they might win for a while, but in the end they were beaten by a massive 173-point margin by the real winners.

The winning song was a joyful and enthusiastic - and quite silly - song from Bulgaria, which was a deserved winner even if it wasn't one of my personal favourites. Congratulations to them.

Also, the Polish singer said "shit" about 1 minute 20 seconds into her song, lol.

Sharpe, season five (1997)

Sharpe's Revenge

The final season commences with the last battle of the war, at which Napoleon is finally defeated. There's a good idea at the heart of this story, which is that after the war is over Sharpe and General Calvet have to team up against Major Ducos, who has betrayed them both. This results in a great scene at the climax of the story in which Sharpe, Harper, Frederickson, Calvet, Gaston and some of Calvet's mannys are trapped in a fort surrounded by Ducos and his army, and Sharpe has to improvise a brilliant means of escaping and turning the tables on Ducos. If the rest of this episode was even half as good as that scene then we'd be kicking off the season with a Sharpe classic.

Unfortunately...

The first significant problem with this story is that it is another Sharpe-gets-framed plot, which was already the weakest element of Sharpe's Honour (and which Ducos was also behind), and this is little more than a poor retread of the same tired, clichéd ground. There's also a major hole at the centre of the plot to frame Sharpe, which is that his motive for stealing the French gold and murdering the mannys guarding it is supposed to be, according to the tribunal that tries Sharpe, that Sharpe lost all his money to his wife when she left him. Except the sequence of events that we see goes:

• Sharpe promises Jane not to fight any more battles after the last one against the French
• Sharpe gets insulted by the posho-who-hates-Sharpe of the week and challenges him to a duel
• Sharpe gets drunk with Captain Frederickson
• The French gold gets stolen and guards murdered
• Sharpe fights the duel
• Jane finds out about the duel and, looking for an excuse to leave and take all his money, claims that the duel counts as breaking his promise and so leaves and takes all his money
• Sharpe gets charged with stealing the gold and murdering the guards

It's just very poorly plotted compared to almost any earlier episode of the series, and on top of this a number of the subplots are intensely irritating. First and foremost, there is the subplot with Jane reaching the apex of her fickle, flighty, vain, selfish, obnoxious, arrogant and downright pathetically stupid and short-sighted characterisation. She meets Lord Rossendale in London and begins an affair with him (after a literal example of the slap-slap-kiss trope). Rossendale is here played by Alexis "Angel" Denisof as a smoove seducing rake, so he might as well be a completely different character to the komedy Prince Regent's hanger-on that Alexander Armstrong played in Sharpe's Regiment. This new Rossendale is even really good* at cards, so he couldn't be more unlike Blackadder if he tried.

Other guest actors of note include John "Prime Suspect" Benfield replacing Olivier Pierre as Calvet, though with the same Gaston as his sidekick. Milton "Guy Crayford" Johns appears in one scene as the obsequious bank manager who hands over all of Sharpe's money to Jane. And it's the final appearance for three recurring characters: James Laurenson as Major General Ross gets the honour of being the only intelligence officer to cross over more than one season, but we say goodbye to him after this.

Féodor Atkine does his best to redeem the episode by making Ducos the slimiest and most hateable he's ever been - he has marginally more contact with Sharpe than he did in Sharpe's Siege, but it perhaps says something about the writer's need to keep them apart to stop Sharpe from killing Ducos too easily that in the end Sharpe kills Ducos not up close in a swordfight, as many Sharpe baddys-of-the-week meet their ends, but being shot by Sharpe from long range. Somehow this seems fitting, and is a lot better exit for the character than the unneccesary maybe-death he got at the end of Sharpe's Honour.

The final recurring character here is Captain Frederickson, who once again manages to displace Harper as Sharpe's main sidekick. They then fall out when they both fall in love with the same woman, Lucille, a French widow (I think this is Bernard Cornwell attempting irony by having our hero's final love interest be a Frenchwoman) but she only requites Sharpe's love, making her the designated Sharpe-love-interest-of-the-week, except that she will be seen again in the final episode. It does at least make sense that you wouldn't put Harper in Frederickson's role in this story, but the issue is that it takes up too much of the screentime - between Jane's subplot and Lucille's subplot, way too much of the runtime is taken up with Sharpe's love life instead of the action-adventure we watch the show for.

But, with the main part of the action-adventure part of the plot being the aforementioned framed-for-a-crime-he-didn't-commit, even that isn't up to much here, mew.

* By the Prince Regent's definition of "good" at cards.

Sharpe's Justice

This is an interesting one. Like Sharpe's Mission the year before, this wasn't based on a Sharpe novel, but this attempts to tell a different kind of story from the usual Sharpe fare, albeit it is structurally quite similar to Sharpe's Regiment even down to having Lady Anne Camoynes (again played by Caroline Langrishe) saving Sharpe's Bacon.

Sharpe's Justice tells the story of how after the Napoleonic war the British army was used to suppress and oppress the British people during the Industrial Revolution. The most obvious inspiration is the so-called Peterloo Massacre of 1819, though to maintain series continuity this is set in 1814 in between Napoleon's first exile and his return, so they can't call it "Peterloo" because the reference wouldn't make sense yet.

Sharpe finds himself dispatched to Yorkshire to lead a local yeomannyry tasked with protecting the interests of capital against the uppity W-worders who want wages they can live on and don't want their jobs replaced by machines. Or at least that's how the situation is seen by the mega-wealthy industrialists pushing for technological advancements that will increase their own profits.

The main industrialist baddy-of-the-week is played by Tony Haygarth, who was in Sharpe's Enemy as a different character. His henchmanny is the posho-who-hates-Sharpe-of-the-week, Captain Wickham, played by a young Douglas "conclusive proof the past exists" Henshall. The main guest actor of note, however, is Philip "Talbot" Glenister as Matthew Truman, the rabble rouser and wanted criminal who starts out on the opposite side to Sharpe before the twist reveal that he is Sharpe's brother.

You see, far from Sharpe being a Londoner like in the novels, TV Sharpe has been retconned to being a Yorkshiremanny - probably because Sean Bean's making absolutely no attempt to disguise his accent throughout the series made it impossible for Sharpe to be from anywhere else. The setting is Sharpe's hometown, and this makes for a fitting penultimate episode since we learn more about Sharpe's childhood and backstory here than anywhere else in the series - we didn't need this background, of course, but it is nice to have.

Less nice to have is the ongoing subplot about Jane and Lord Rossendale, which wastes a considerable amount of screentime when Rossendale happens to inherit a rundown old country house a few miles from where Sharpe is staying* and thus bringing them back into contact with each other. Cue tedious scenes of Sharpe getting insulted and gaslit by Jane, who is now so awful she is making up lies about how Sharpe used to beat her, to try and win the sympathy of a society that is treating her as the spendthrift adulteress she has proven herself to be.

There is actually one good scene involving Rossendale and Jane (although it by no means makes up for all the shit bits they're in), which is after the newspapers have pinned the blame for the massacre of civilians on Sharpe (it is actually Wickham's fault entirely) and Jane is glad that Sharpe is facing criminal charges, Rossendale has a brief attack of conscience over Sharpe being discredited in this way. For this single scene the character almost has a second dimension to him.

Harper and Hagman actually get their first significant amounts of screentime and involvement in the plot for the better part of two seasons, even if they are only involved in the plot in the first place because they are regular characters who just happen to be hanging about where Sharpe is. Still, this is a big step up, especially for Harper who used to be one of the two leads, but who hasn't had a decent episode since Sharpe's Regiment.

As with Sharpe's Regiment, the biggest problem with the episode is arguably that it strays too far from what a Sharpe story ought to be about. However I think the subject matter is successfully tied to the period enough to make it worthwhile, even if the Yorkshire setting is an extra degree of removal from the Napoleonic battles of Spain and France.

* A bit contrived, but no more so than Sharpe's brother just happening to be the very criminal Sharpe is sent to catch. Actually, when put like that, this episode does contain more than its fair share of plot contrivances.

Sharpe's Waterloo

My my.

After so many misses this finally feels like a proper Sharpe episode again. Bernard Cornwell did a really good job of weaving a Sharpe story into the well-documented actual history of the battle of Waterloo, and the TV adaptation does a creditable job of translating that to the screen in spite of the obvious limitations of budget compared to big-screen portrayals such as in the 1970 film Waterloo. This has dozens of extras collectively playing the tens of thousands of soldiers that took place in the actual battle - a bit like the way the BBC had only three daleks portraying an entire invasion force in 1972's Dave the Daleks.

The actual plot is by necessity somewhat contrived - Sharpe, Harper, Hagman and Harris, the four surviving regulars from the very beginning of the series, are reunited out of a desire to see the Emperor Napoleon in the flesh. To this end, Sharpe, Hagman and Harris have rejoined the army (Sharpe as a lieutenant colonel in the Dutch army, Hagman and Harris as sergeants) while Patrick Harper is now a horse trader supplying the British army with... well, horses. Mew.

The battle plays out almost as a series of vignettes of events from the real history of the battle - a ball held in Brussels on the eve of the battle, the preliminary battle of Quatre Bras, the struggle over the strategically important farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, and the military blunders of the Dutch commander Prince William of Orange (not that one). The latter provides the main source of the plot, as the fatuous prince (played by a young Paul "Margin Call" Bettany, though at times looking quite a lot like Robert Webb) repeatedly ignores Sharpe's tactical advice, each time getting more of his mannys killed. The last such blunder gets Hagman and Harris killed, causing Sharpe to snap. He takes a pot shot at the prince from long range, wounding him - and historically the prince was wounded at the battle.

The episode also resolves the ongoing subplot about Jane Sharpe and Lord Rossendale (as bad as this subplot is, I have to admit it would have been even worse if it had just been left hanging). Rossendale, for whom this is his first battle, proves a coward several times, contrasting himself with the veteran Sharpe, and he is eventually killed mere moments into his first proper fight with the French, lol. The last we see of Jane she is writing in her diary that she is pregnant with Rossendale's child, which might presuppose us to draw parallels with another Napoleonic-era literary character, Pierre Bezukhov's wife Helene in War and Peace, who died after becoming pregnant to her adulterous lover, freeing Pierre to marry his true love Natasha Rostova. While this is actually something that is left hanging, the ambiguity is probably the better option than wasting more screentime spelling out Jane's deserved fate resulting from her own poor life choices.

The dialogue in this episode tends towards the exaggerated and theatrical, which was something I noted about Sharpe's Company as well, and that's probably not a coincidence since they had the same screenwriter, Charles Wood. Here it succeeds better than in Company, perhaps because the vignette style combined with it being the epic conclusion to the series both help to lend it that melodramatic quality, but mainly because, I think, it helps to disguise what would otherwise need to be a lot of dry exposition about the mechanics of the battle. Hugh Fraser in particular is good at selling this sort of overblown dialogue, and he gets his best part as the Duke of Wellington for quite some time - probably since season three, I'd say.

The final ending to the series is very Sharpe, with Wellington himself cheering Sharpe on as he rejoins his old battalion, the South Essex, to "see off" the fleeing French army. Sharpe and Harper then catch a glimpse of Napoleon - not up close, like you might expect from a lesser writer delivering a final confrontation with the 'big bad' of the series, but in the distance, through the smoke of battle. That's good enough for Sharpe and Harper, and it's good enough for me.