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.