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.
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