The fast of a good series is over! Now the drama is having time to follow everything. My week will certainly be better with the return of the Serpent Queen, herself, the deliciously malicious and Machiavellian Catherine de Medici (Samantha Morton). Over time no less than 10 years, we have new faces, familiar faces, and the beginning of a new social and religious conflict brewing in just one episode. How I miss Catarina!

The series that is on MGM Plus, with just a few days delay compared to the United States, is one of the most intelligent, hilarious, and thought-provoking period series we could hope for, with the boldness of The Great, with breathtaking costumes and all recorded in situ in the castles where Catherine lived. with a female rock soundtrack and lots of curiosity.

Taking advantage of Catarina’s bad reputation in History – being called a “serpent” is the least of insults and witch or bitch were the most common – we have a Samantha Morton flying in irony and breaking the fourth wall so that Catarina contextualizes her initiatives with her “practical” vision of survival. As a narrator – cynical and skeptical – Catarina is fascinating.

In the first season, we saw Catherine’s arrival in France and her rise to power, with the evolution of a young woman who was always exposed to danger, fell in love with her husband (which was actually a mistake on her part) and overcame the sexist prejudice such as xenophobia to become Queen and later, Queen Regent. In the second, a decade later, her children are adults and after an unlikely period of religious peace with mutual tolerance between Protestants and Catholics, she is on the verge of social and economic collapse.

The political machinations taking place at court include the Queen’s children, including her nemesis-daughter, Margot. There are more characters and a more complex political scenario, as we are rusty, it takes us a little longer to remember who is who and what each one wants.

In the case of Catherine, ostensibly a widow who is still in black even 10 years after her husband’s death, she may have a genuine interest in keeping religious life in balance but does not want to give up her power as regent, creating an obvious conflict. and exploited by his rivals with his son, King Charles IX (Bill Millner). When religious tension escalates, with the Guise (Catholics) and the Bourbon (Protestants) leading the fights behind the scenes, the trigger comes with the attack on the Protestant preacher Edith (Isobel Jesper Jones), accelerating the violent clashes until the massacre on the night of Saint Bartholomew. As we know from History classes (and the movie Queen Margot, lol), Charles will be an unstable King whose legacy was blood and one of the worst religious attacks of all time.

The big attraction of the second season, but a unique anachronism, will be bringing Elizabeth I (Minnie Driver), from England, to visit Catherine, when in fact the two only exchanged correspondence.

In this first episode (a new one every Friday and there are only six), Catarina maintains the facade of a suffering widow, a “submissive” woman, but deceives few people with her firm hand in power. Charles, a weakling, is harassed by his brothers who, like the Guises, tease him for still letting his mother effectively rule in his place. It’s incredible because Catherine was not known for tolerance, but for a decade, and here she genuinely is thinking of her subjects of all faiths, without pleasing any particularly. Therefore, the Bourbons and Guise act to accelerate its decline.

On the Protestant side, Antoine and Louis push to open trade relations with England, something that Catherine avoids so as not to anger Rome. The two bring Antoine’s wife from Navarre, who comes with their son Henry and agrees to be the bridge of contact with Elizabeth I. If you haven’t already noticed, Henry will be King of France when the Valois fall, and he will be the first Margot’s husband. Another initiative of the duo is to approach Charles and convince him to be seen with the Huguenots, perhaps by watching a lecture by the religious leader that Edith, Montmorency’s “daughter” became? Hiding from his mother, he finds out.

On the Catholic side, Antoinette, Guise’s mother, is the one who returns to regain control of politics, since none of her children can. Charles and François disagree because the latter is against attacking Protestants. But his mother gets proof that he is gay and blackmails him into participating in the plan to start the religious civil war. With no alternative, he agrees, to set fire to the church where Edith is.

And if he has enemies outside his family, Catarina is not even okay with her children. Charles resents his control, Hercules laughs and follows Anjou, the older brother’s favorite but intemperate and envious one. Clearly, Anjou wanted the Crown, and Catherine had to tame the three of them. The daughters are help little: Elizabeth is taken in by others and Margot, with a strong personality, is Charles’ confidant and is tired of the apparent rectitude of her mother, who is not affectionate or close to her daughter. Their rivalry is legendary and has barely begun.

From the Catherine team, we see that Rahima (Emma McDonald) is the head of the Queen’s spy network (an artistic freedom, since she didn’t exist, but the ‘army’ of beautiful women to seduce men and learn secrets is a fact, Catherine even used agents trained by her) and that Cosimo Ruggeri is her most confident esoteric source. It is to him that the Queen confesses her dreams/visions, which he helps to decipher with a chilling warning: “People can only be governed by fear, not love”.

In other words, the peaceful effort has been for nothing. But does anyone doubt that if she goes into “fear”, Catarina will be even more dangerous?

So good to have Catarina back!

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