Fall of Eagles: The Secret War

The Secret War picks up from where Tell the King the Sky is Falling left off - Rasputin has been shot till he was dead, and this has encouraged the members of the Duma to further defiance of the Tsar.

One such member is David Collings, returning from all the way back in The Last Tsar to prove that the nature of Miliukov is irrepressible! He demands the resignation of the Tsar's entire government. Then Kerensky, played by Jim "Bishop Brennan" Norton, goes even further and demands the resignation of the Tsar.

The one thing the Duma agrees with the Tsar about is that they want to keep World War 1 going until they can beat Germany.

Meanwhile Kaiser Wilhelm is meeting with his generals, admirals, and his Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg (Peter Copley returning from Indian Summer of an Emperor). He is older and starting to show the strain of the BBC aging make up. The war is not going well for Germany, and the Kaiser claims

"I did not want this war."

suggesting that he has not been watching the series as carefully as we cats have. The generals and admirals have suggestions to make, one of which is to get the Americans to help out by attacking them until they join the other side... teh satires!111

Bethmann-Hollweg has a plan to get some revolutionaries to take over Russia who will want to make peace, but seeing as the wrong sort of revolutionaries are taking over Russia right now then this will mean getting Lenin and his Bolshevik friends to come back from Absolute Beginners to do it.
The Kaiser doesn't like this plan, but he has to go along with it.

Lenin is now in Switzerland with his wife and Zinoviev (John Rhys-Davies, who would later play Macro alongside Patrick Stewart's Sejanus in I Claudius), and while they want to go back to Russia to join in the revolution, they don't want any help from Germany to do it in case it makes them look like traitors.

Bethmann-Hollweg and the Kaiser make contact with Dr Alexander Helphand (Michael "Toymaker" Gough) to arrange help for the Bolsheviks from Germany without it looking like the help comes from Germany. Helphand is possibly the most cynical character in the series, as we see when he tells Glazkov, his Bolshevik go-between,

"Life is odd, isn't it? I buy coal from the Germans and sell it to the Russians. Copper, tin, aluminium and steel. German steel to make Russian guns... to kill German soldiers. This is a capitalist war, my dear Glazkov - industrialists don't care who buys from them so long as they make a profit. That is what wars are all about: profit. The only thing the Germans don't know is that most of the profit I make here finds its way, eventually, into the hands of the Russian revolutionaries."

Back in Russia the army revolts and the Tsar is forced to abdicate while trying to get home on a train (making this one of the worst commutes ever, lol). Charles Kay puts a lot of emotion into his acting for his last scene, we might almost feel sorry for him and forget how this is Nicholas's own fault for being so useless. The final shot we see of him in Fall of Eagles emphasises his loneliness as it jump-cuts three times, further and further away from him each time - sort of like the ending to Blake in reverse.

This is a great episode, but it saves the best for its last few minutes, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks are on the train to take them home to Russia. They don't know what sort of welcome to expect, and are worried they might get arrested straight away. But, in contrast to the Tsar's recent train experience, when they get to St Petersburg they receive a triumphant heroes' welcome, with hugs and kiffs from soldiers and strangers, and a band playing music for them.

Lenin even gets a freeze-frame and superimposed caption with his name and dates to end the episode on, which no other characters get.

Watching this you might take away that Lenin is the hero of the whole series, except that he didn't really do anything - the Tsar managed to bring about his own Fall through being rubbish at being an autocratic ruler. He has this in common with the other two Eagles, as we shall see next time in the final episode.