Sharpe's Regiment
Here we are in season four, and we already have a very atypical Sharpe episode. Almost all of it, save for bookending scenes at the start and end, is set in England, and the plot sees Sharpe and Harper investigating the mystery of what happened to Sharpe's regiment(clang!)'s missing reinforcements.
There's not as much action as in most episodes of the series, and a lot more political shenanigans. There are no French antagonists (and the French only appear at all in the aforementioned bookending scenes), and instead of a posho-who-hates-Sharpe of the week we have a trio of equally obnoxious poshos who all hate Sharpe.
The baddy-of-the-week is Lord Fenner, a politician and mastermind of a scheme to recruit soldiers for the South Essex regiment but then sell them off to other regiments instead. He is aided in this by the vain, cowardly and incompetent Colonel Girdwood, who has all the hateable qualities of Sir Henry Simmerson, and I might have wondered if Girdwood was no more than a stand-in for Simmerson, except that the third member of their trio is Sir Henry Simmerson.
The return of Simmerson is perhaps something of a mistake coming straight after his appearance in Sharpe's Sword, though at least on original broadcast there would have been a year's gap in between them. Watched back-to-back it feels a touch disjointed to have him go straight from one scheme to another. To make matters worse, in neither episode do we see a proper resolution of the antagonism between him and Sharpe, and since this will be the last appearance of Simmerson in the main series, we would have to wait until the later specials before we get that. Mew.
All three baddys are equally loathsome in their own ways. To counterbalance that we have three love-interests-of-the-week for Sharpe. The first is his (never before mentioned) old flame Maggie, played by Julie T "She-Devil" Wallace. The second is Lady Anne Camoynes, played by Caroline "Lovejoy" Langrishe, who is instrumental in helping Sharpe bring down Lord Fenner. The third is Jane Gibbons, niece of Simmerson, who Sharpe properly falls in love with and he asks her to marry him. Sharpe's complicated relationship with Jane begins here and will carry on until the end of the series, testing the patience of viewers and casting something of a wet blanket over the final two seasons.
Other characters we are introduced to include James Laurenson as Major General Ross, the fourth (and final) intelligence officer - he will have a bigger part in later episodes, but for this one he just appears at the start to give Sharpe his mission, and then again at the end for the final bookending scene.
There's a subplot involving Sharpe meeting the Prince Regent, played by Julian Fellowes in a foppish manner not a million miles from depictions of that character in The Scarlet Pimpernel or Blackadder. Fellowes, of course, was in the first episode of Sharpe as a different character, but as that was eight episodes ago (or three years, if judging by original broadcast times) I think you just have to let that sort of thing pass.
Alexander "Pointless" Armstrong appears as Lord Rossendale, the Prince Regent's more competent minion - sort of the Blackadder role, then. I shall have more to say about Rossendale when he returns in the fifth season, but as he will be played by a different actor and have a completely different personality, he might as well be a different character who just happens to have the same name.
The main part of the plot involves Sharpe and Harper faking their own deaths and then joining the army again under false names, to see where they get sent. The scenes showing the way the recruiting sergeant tempts poor mannys to join with tall tales about moneys and adventures, which then immediately meets the harsh life of brutal army discipline as soon as they accept, are very well done, and it is great to see the contrast between Sharpe and Harper, who are both experienced soldiers, and the actual raw recruits who suffer from their inexperience.
This is then paid off when Sharpe and Harper reappear in their real ranks and turn the tables on the officers and sergeants who treated them badly when they thought they were just private soldiers. This payoff ought to have been the satisfying dramatic climax to the episode, but there is another section after that in which Lord Fenner has Sharpe put on trial. The trial is presided over by a General played by John "Old Star Killer" Savident, which can't help but remind me of Travis's trial from Blakes 7's... er, Trial.
This is when Lady Camoynes comes to the rescue, providing Sharpe withe the evidence he needs to turn the tables on Fenner. While it is good to see a female character with some agency (and Lady Camoynes makes a good contrast with damsel-in-distress Jane), it is a shame that Sharpe couldn't be shown to win this one through his own cunning - him putting one over on the poshos is one of the main draws of the series, after all.
The biggest issue with this episode is that it doesn't feel much like a 'proper' Sharpe episode for much of its duration. The villains are almost cartoonishly villainous at times, and the scenes with the Prince Regent and Rossendale virtually belong in a sitcom. It feels as though the series is in danger of Flanderising itself, or jumping the shark. Individual scenes and sections of the plot are very good on their own, but the whole ends up being less than the sum of the parts.
Sharpe's Siege
Like Sharpe's Battle, another generic title. And also like Sharpe's Battle, an average episode that is pretty representative of the series as a whole.
This is the first episode in which the action moves from Spain to France, though you can't really tell that from the landscapes and really only from the fact that some more of the civilians speak French than Spanish.
It begins with Sharpe getting married to Jane Gibbons, continuing the romance plot from the previous episode, however Jane almost immediately becomes ill to set up a subplot in which Sharpe want to get his paws on some quinine, which here seems like it will act like a magic item in a point-and-click computer game.
To cure Jane use quinine on Jane.
There's then a moral dilemma when Sharpe obtains some quinine and then has the option of using it to cure an elderly French woman or keeping it for Jane. Of course our hero acts selflessly, and is rewarded by the woman's daughter (a potential love-interest-of-the-week for Sharpe whom he resists because he is only just married) giving him and his mannys some information that will help them to beat the baddy-of-the-week. (Jane is later saved courtesy of a Wellington-ex-machina.)
There's a posho-who-hates-Sharpe-of-the-week, of course, and in this case it is once more the colonel put in charge of Sharpe. Colonel Bampfylde is one of the more forgettable examples of this recurring trope, but he does at least get a proper and satisfying comeuppance, which is more than some of them do.
Where this episode perhaps scores over Sharpe's Battle in terms of being a typical Sharpe adventure is that this one sees the return of Sharpe's arch-enemy (well, one of them) Major Ducos, last seen maybe-but-not-really being killed by his own side in Sharpe's Honour. Féodor Atkine is just as good in this as he was in his earlier stories, though he is perhaps let down by the lack of a proper Sharpe/Ducos confrontation in this one - the two mannys barely even set eyes upon one another over the course of the story, never mind actually meeting.
This episode also sees the return of Philip "Inspector Cato" Whitchurch as Captain Frederickson. Of his three appearances, this is perhaps the one in which he is least essential to the plot, and could mostly have been replaced with a generic captain to act as Sharpe's sidekick. As for Sharpe's usual sidekick, Harper spends most of this episode relegated to a komedy subplot about him having toothache but refusing to see a surgeon to have his tooth removed - this subplot does at least eventually tie in with the main plot, which is the only thing saving it from being an annoying detriment to the episode.
The last guest actor of note is Olivier Pierre as the French General Calvet. Pierre is one of those actors who was in loads of things, and was liable to turn up in almost anything made in the 1980s in a small part, often in comedies and often playing a Frenchmanny, although he is probably best known to me as the Soviet brain surgeon in Whoops Apocalypse. Calvet's characterisation is that he is a veteran of Napoloeon's disastrous Russian campaign, and he goes everywhere accompanied by his aide-de-camp and chef Gaston who was on that campaign with him. They make for a pretty good comedic double-act, although at times they can go a bit 'Allo 'Allo! We will see Calvet again in the next episode.
Sharpe's Mission
The fourth season ends with the most generic of all Sharpe's Titles. While Sharpe's Battle and Sharpe's Siege were both pretty generic, and even the likes of Sharpe's Sword not exactly telling you much about what the story will contain except that Sharpe will have a sword... you know, like he does in every other episode... The title Sharpe's Mission tells us that Sharpe will... wait for it... go on a mission, mew. Perhaps only Sharpe's Rifles comes as close, but that gets away with it by being the very first episode of the series. This one doesn't.
Unlike every previous episode of the TV series, this is not based on a pre-existing Bernard Cornwell novel at all, not even as tangentially as the likes of Sharpe's Gold. While I don't know exactly why they decided to do this, I suspect it was because at the time they were making this there were only two more Sharpe novels remaining unadapted, so they decided to pad out the series a bit rather than end it sooner.
This episode features a just-after-he-became-famous appearance by Mark Strong as the baddy-of-the-week Colonel Brand, seeing as this was broadcast a couple of months after the BBC finished showing Our Friends in the North, in which Strong starred as the odious Thatcherite Tosker Cox, one of the four main characters. Brand is just as unlikeable as Tosker, a British officer who is secretly W-wording for the French until Sharpe discovers his treachery.
This could have ended up seeming quite similar to Captain Jack Spears in Sharpe's Sword, except there are enough differences to make it feel fresh - we the viewers are given the knowledge that Brand is a traitor before our heroes are and, unlike with Spears, Sharpe has a history with Brand and respects him. Most importantly of all Sharpe actually begins to suspect Brand quite quickly, and then just needs to prove his guilt to his superiors, including Major General Ross. In a way this is Sharpe doing a Columbo - the question is not who the traitor is, it is how will Sharpe catch him.
Brand is eventually caught out, given a hasty court-martial and sentenced to death. But by this point our heroes are about to be attacked by Brand's French allies, so he smugly tells Sharpe about how they can't kill him without Wellington's permission, and how he's going to have his revenge on Sharpe once the French rescue him. What happens next is a classic Sharpe moment, and is easily the best scene of the fourth season, giving Colonel Brand one of the best comeuppances of any Sharpe baddy, perhaps since Sir Henry Simmerson all the way back in Sharpe's Eagle.
Of the supporting cast, Major General Ross gets his biggest part yet - despite not having to take Major Hogan's role from the corresponding novel (since there isn't one), as most of the intelligence officers in the TV series have done, he is written quite a lot like Hogan here, even using Hogan's catchphrase
"That's what you pay me for."
to General Wellington at one point.
Riflemanny Harris gets a larger than usual role when Sharpe tasks him to keep a posho away from his wife Jane. Unusually for the series this episode does not contain a posho-who-hates-Sharpe, instead it contains a posho-who-Sharpe-hates, that being the war journalist and painter Shellington, who tries to seduce Jane with his poetry until Harris points out that all of his poems were not composed by Shellington himself but were pre-existing poems. This is a different literary use to the one Harris was put to in Sharpe's Sword, where he broke the French code, but he was the only regular character for who this could have been remotely plausible for.
That Sharpe needed Harris to guard his wife from Shellington's seductions in the first place is setting up the (sadly rather tedious) recurring subplot from the next season in which Jane grows bored of Sharpe and starts having affairs. Jane is such an annoying, shallow character that it is a shame that Sharpe (the series) is lumbered with her for six episodes when the magnificent Teresa was only in four. The fact that Sharpe (the character) is still in love with Jane at this point means that there is no love-interest-of-the-week for him at all in this story.
The series seems to have run out of ideas for Harper, since this is the second episode in a row where he doesn't get much to do, and his subplot where he has a rivalry with Colonel Brand's sergeant is little more than a retread of subplots we have seen Harper in before, even as recently as Sharpe's Regiment. He does get one really good line, though, in the episode's best scene I already mentioned above.
The French General Calvet and his sidekick Gaston return from Sharpe's Siege, and here we see them playing Russian Roulette with possibly poisonous mushrooms. Except it's not quite the same since Calvet knows which ones are poisoned. When he kills off the French Colonel Cresson for failing in his mission, it does come across a bit like SECTRE Number One having a henchmanny killed for failure.
This is mostly an average episode, with a couple of standout moments. I think season four is showing the limitations of Sharpe's Format - stick too closely to the formula (Siege and Mission) and you risk ending up with an average episode that is too generic and unmemorable to stand out, but stray too far from the formula (Regiment) and you risk losing the qualities that make Sharpe Sharpe. While none of season four is as bad as Sharpe's Gold was, we're still a long way away and getting further from the series peaks of seasons one and two.
