Sharpe, season two (1994)

Sharpe's Company

The second season kicks off by introducing us to the only Sharpe baddy who is more iconically series-defining than the odious Sir Henry Simmerson, and that is Sergant Obadiah Hakeswill, played by Pete Postlethwaite in what must surely be a career-defining turn from him. Hakeswill is a rapist, thief and murderer and just generally a character with no redeeming features whatsoever. He is made even more memorable by his twitch from the time he survived a hanging, leading to him being convinced he cannot die - a conviction that seems to be true, at least in this episode, since he survives various close calls with death to trouble our heroes again in a later rematch.

Over the course of this story he meets Sharpe again after years apart, but discovers that Sharpe now outranks him and so he cannot bully and mistreat Sharpe the way he used to - we learn that Hakeswill once framed Private Sharpe for a crime that saw Sharpe receive 200 lashes of military 'justice.' Hakeswill now has to take his venomous hatred of Sharpe out on the Chosen Mannys, which he does by stealing items from officers and placing them in Harper's gear, with the result that Harper gets 100 lashes and reduced back to a private.

Hakeswill also murders three British officers that we see on-screen (one of them accidentally when he was really aiming for Sharpe), rapes a soldier's wife (offscreen) and makes two attempts at raping Teresa, who is by now Sharpe's wife and the mother of his baby daughter.

Aside from Hakeswill who is the most watchable, hateable baddy of the series (and it isn't close), the best part of the episode is the battle scene at the climax, when the British army storm the French-held fortress of Badajoz. Things are looking bad for the British, with a high casualty rate, until Sharpe rallies the mannys and turns the tide - pretty much what you'd expect from the last act of a Sharpe story.

Other than Postlethwaite, other guest actors of note include Hugh "Captain Hastings" Fraser taking over from David Troughton as Wellington from this point onwards, and Michael "not Jayston" Byrne taking over from Brian "not that one" Cox as the intelligence officer - Byrne plays Major Nairn, who is a new character who basically takes the Major Hogan role from the books. I'm guessing they put in a new character instead of just recasting Hogan because Byrne either couldn't or wouldn't do the Irish accent.

There are quite a few one-off characters in this, several of which are there only to get killed off by Hakeswill, but the most notable is probably Captain Rymer, played by the before-he-was-famous Marc Warren.

There's one major problem with this episode, however, and that is with the dialogue - the entire story is written in an overblown, unnatural style. This fits Hakeswill like a sock glove, since it helps to emphasise his horrible brand of madness, and some other characters (like Hogan in season one) could get away with it, but literally every character talks like it throughout from start to finish. It seems to me like it was aiming for melodrama, but ends up coming across as very stagy, which doesn't fit the attempt at a realistic filmed nature of Sharpe at all. No wonder the best scene is one that is largely without dialogue.

Sharpe's Enemy

Probably the closest rival to Sharpe's Eagle in terms of being the very best of the series, this is another one that is packed full of multiple ideas that combine to make the whole thing stronger than the sum of the parts.

Let's start with the most obvious - this is the second (and final) story to feature Pete "Obadiah Hakeswill" Postlethwaite as Obadiah Hakeswill. He's now a deserter from the English army, seeing as his crimes in the previous episode would have given him a death sentence if he had hung around (so to speak), and is the second-in-command of a small army of deserters. They've captured a couple of English ladies, one of them played by Liz Hurley, and Sharpe is given the mission of first ransoming them and then, when that (unsurprisingly) doesn't succeed, of rescuing them.

LOL, naughty Sharpe!

The first twist of the episode is that the other English lady (the one who isn't played by Liz Hurley, I mean) is married to a French colonel, who is also trying to ransom/rescue his wife. Sharpe's joining forces with Colonel Dubreton is worthy of the Doctor and the Master, so quickly and so readily do they team up. Dubreton ends up being the one to finally capture Hakeswill, but not before Hakeswill murders Sharpe's wife Teresa.

Teresa's death puts an end to the first phase of Sharpe as romantic hero, and now he is free to have a love-interest-of-the-week for the next few instalments. The capture and subsequent execution of Hakeswill robs the series of its greatest baddy after only two appearances - something writer of the original novels Bernard Cornwell obviously regretted later, given the way he made Hakeswill the recurring antagonist of many of the Sharpe prequels. Fortunately, almost as soon as Hakeswill is captured his role as main baddy is replaced by that of the French Major Ducos, who is almost as good at being bad.

Ducos is an intelligence officer, the French equivalent of Majors Nairn or Hogan, and it is a stroke of genius to introduce him in the same story as Colonel Dubreton, because while Dubreton is shown as being upright and honourable (despite being French... and therefore on the opposite side of the war from our heroes, mew), Ducos is cold, calculating and devious. Meeting the British during a truce, he insults Sharpe's ded wife just after Sharpe has seen Teresa die in his arms, and in response Sharpe throws Ducos's spectacles to the ground in front of him and steps on them - in other words, the two mannys hate each other immediately.

Other actors of note in this include Jeremy "Howard McDee" Child (previously seen by us along with Hugh Fraser when they were both in Edge of Darkness) as the posho-who-hates-Sharpe-of-the-week who, after he has just given Captain Sharpe a slagging in front of General Wellington, gives his word that he will accept whichever Major that Wellington assigns to lead the rescue mission. Wellington then produces a letter from the Prince Regent giving Sharpe a promotion to Major, lol.

This episode also introduces Philip "Inspector Cato from The Bill" Whitchurch as Captain Frederickson, who will go on to appear again in a couple of later episodes. He probably ought to have been in more of them, since he is essentially the now-Major Sharpe's second-in-command, but this would have had a good chance of interfering with the Sharpe-Harper dynamic that is central to the series, so I can see why they only used Frederickson when he had a specific role in the plot.

The final act of the episode sees Sharpe use his cunning to convince Ducos's superior officer that he has a much larger force under his command than he does really, persuading the French to retreat. This involves the use of the "rocket batallion," that had earlier appeared as comic relief because their rockets were so inaccurate, to pretend to be both cavalry and artillery. The commander of the rocket artillery is played by Nicholas "Young Sherlock Holmes" Rowe.

The defeat is really Ducos's, since he had given his word to the French General that Sharpe's force had neither cavalry nor artillery. This leads almost directly into the next episode of the series, in which Ducos hatches a plan to have his revenge on Sharpe...

Sharpe's Honour

This continues the generally excellent quality of the second season, and ends it on a high - this feels like a proper series finale, since in one of the earliest scenes we see Napoleon himself, played by Ron "Richard III" Cook, the only time we'll see the main manny himself until the final episode of the entire series.

Major Ducos returns with a zany scheme to defeat the British. He has his own reasons for placing Sharpe at the centre of his plan, since he wants revenge for Sharpe breaking his glasses and defeating him in the previous episode, and Napoleon approves the plan when he learns Sharpe was the officer who took the Eagle in Sharpe's Eagle, which is both a lovely callback as well as a justified reason why our hero would have come to the attention of the most powerful manny in Europe.

The actual plot begins badly, with that most dreadful of clichés - Sharpe is framed for a crime he did not commit. This won't even be the last time this trope is used in the series - doesn't Bernard Cornwell know that he'll never better the one time this tired old chestnut was actually successful, that being in 1981's Dark Towers?

Anyway, a Spanish noblemanny is murdered by two henchmannys of Ducos's, one of whom is Father Hacha (as played by Nickolas "Sheriff of Nottingham" Grace), the closest Sharpe will come to meeting a member of the Spanish Inquisition. His chief weapons are surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, etc. etc. mew. Sharpe is framed and sentenced to death, but Major Nairn smells a devious French plot and (with the approval of General Wellington) fakes the execution, then sends Sharpe and Harper to discover the plot.

This leads Sharpe and Harper through a bunch of misadventures as they follow the chain of clues, eventually rescuing the Sharpe love-interest-of-the-week, "La Marquesa" the wife of the murdered noblemanny (played by Alice Krige, who would go on to be the Borg Queen in Star Trek First Contact a couple of years after this) from the convent where she was being held prisoner. Meanwhile the rest of the Chosen Mannys are relegated to a comic relief subplot where they help Harper's pregnant girlfriend Ramona give birth.

Sharpe ends up as the prisoner of Ducos, who is kind enough to explain his truly diabolical plan to Sharpe like he's auditioning to be a Bond villain - the murder of the Spanish noblemanny has opened up a wedge between the Spanish and the British that will make the Spanish king switch sides in the war, bringing enough of his supporters over to the French side to defeat the British. It's probably for the best that the episode doesn't dwell on the details of this scheme much, since it is a bit flimsy, but it is fine as a background motivator for the characters.

Sharpe is in the process of escaping when Harper turns up with the Chosen Mannys to rescue him. Ducos runs away and shoots Father Hacha himself, scapegoating Hacha for the scheme's failure, leaving Sharpe to have a climactic fight with the other henchmanny, "El Matarife" - as the one who actually did the murder Sharpe was accused of, this is poetic justice.

There's one odd decision at the end of the episode, where Ducos gets randomly shot by his own side when he encounters French troops fleeing the battle they have just lost. This scene (which is not taken from the original novel of Sharpe's Honour) makes it look as though Ducos is killed, though he isn't ded and will be back in the fourth and fifth seasons. I can only assume they put this in to give an ending to the character in case they never got round to making the later stories with Ducos in, but the fact that Sharpe isn't involved at all makes it extremely unsatisfying.

However, that small point aside, this is still an excellent episode of Sharpe and one of the series' best and most memorable episodes - the four-episode run from Sharpe's Eagle to here is most certainly the series' best and most consistent set of consecutive episodes. As for why this run doesn't continue with the next one, well...