Reign 2.05 “Blood for Blood” Recap

Out in the countryside, a group of Protestants huddle in a barn that’s acting as a make-shift church, seeing as how they’d be prosecuted if they openly practiced. During the service, a group of Catholic men burst into the barn, nab one of the boys in the front row, and set the barn on fire. Meanwhile, in the castle, Francis claims to be visiting his son more frequently when Mary catches him in a lie about playing dice with Dash. Rather than being angry, though, she simply tells him that they can get pregnant again and that he doesn’t have to be so secretive with her. But Mary isn’t as understanding when confronted with the fact that Greer is about to become a stepmother four times over; while out in the ball room where the wedding is to be held, she and her ladies run into Castleroy’s daughter Gemma and her insecurity about not being with child flares up. This time, she doesn’t lash out, instead telling Greer that she’s looking forward to the wedding, as it’s a welcome distraction.

After being sent to check out the burned barn by Francis, Leith and Bash learn that the building was burned all the way to the ground and that the horses escaped due to being scared. The object is to now bring the riders to justice while finding and protecting the Protestants who were inside the church, yet Leith is faced with a whole other dilemma when he happens upon Lord Castleroy, who was present at the church. Instead of turning him in, though, Leith shoos him off and leads the riders he came with in another direction. Back at the castle, Kenna walks into one of the tents assembled for Greer’s wedding and finds two female servants in a less than flattering position, all over a smutty sex journal that was found by a castle chambermaid. Interested in its contents, Kenna confiscates the book, just as Francis finds a shard from the lance he used to kill his father on his bed. Once he goes out into the hallway after being summoned to the throne room, he spots Caroline and confronts her about why she’s in the castle. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know about why she’s there, nor does she know about the evidence in Francis’s room, so he sends her to the infirmary to have her blackouts checked out.

In the throne room, Mary is forced to deal with the fallout from the church attack, which claimed the life of Lord Conde’s young nephew Emile. The Protestants want those responsible for the death to be executed, with Conde pleading to his cousin to do the right thing. He claims that the murder was a message specifically for him, taunting him that all Protestants were fair game, and wants to know whether Francis would be willing to rule like his father on this issue or not; for his part, Francis doesn’t like violence of any kind and vows to make the guilty pay for their sins. However, Lord Narcisse brings the Catholic nobles to Francis, along with a paralyzed, mute stable boy named Mark, who he claims was injured by a rock thrown by Emile. He then tries to persuade Francis to release the imprisoned Catholics by getting the nobles to bow before their king, yet it doesn’t end up working. Elsewhere, Lola finds out about the sex journal when she happens upon Kenna reading it. The book goes back two years and features ratings of both male and female lovers in the castle, with Kenna having recognized all but one person: a hunter with a butterfly birthmark on their forearm. With Lola intrigued, Kenna gets her friend to tag along on the search for this mystery lothario, claiming that Lola needs to have some fun and if this fun were to turn into love, all the better.

While Kenna and Lola get caught by Catherine, who points them toward Lord Aris, one of the lovers she took following Henry’s death, Conde shows Mary the three dark rider brand on his chest. He doesn’t think that the men are these soulless devil riders from another realm that others seem to; he knows that they’re paid brutes and possibly Catholic extremists hell-bent on giving people a reason to disprove Protestants. If people know that Conde was branded, they wouldn’t believe anything he said and Conde thinks this is so they can eventually detonate France and watch the carnage from their ivory towers. He is correct, though, in that France is a powder keg due to the rising tensions between the Catholics and Protestants. With the Protestants believing that Francis is looking into the victim rather than trying to catch the culprit, they damage a shop in a nearby village, causing Francis to call for justice for the shopkeeper. However, Catherine warns him that if he does this, he could upset both sides of this war and end up being the common enemy for both the Catholics and the Protestants, so Mary ends up taking Conde to interrogate the Catholics themselves. She leans on the weakest link in Jerome and manages to get him to confess that the entire fraudulent affair was Luke’s idea, as Mark was a boy from another village who had been kicked in the head by a horse.

Outside, Kenna, Greer, and Lola dance around in a water fountain as Greer’s wedding date approaches, her final days of freedom and singlehood ticking away before her. On her way to change clothes, she runs into Leith, who pointedly nudges her to ask Castleroy about the events of that morning. Over in Tent City, Caroline leers at Kenna before sitting on Henry’s old throne. This causes Francis to send his guards to drag her away and confront the nanny in a private room in the castle. Caroline-as-Henry gets Francis to confess to the murder, only for Narcisse to overhear the entire thing. With Caroline sent to the dungeon for the time being, Francis falls under Narcisse’s thumb; Narcisse threatens to tell people about Francis’s role in killing Henry, which would send him and Mary to their deaths, if Francis doesn’t prioritize the French Catholics. Francis ultimately agrees to the arrangement, yet Narcisse later twists the knife when he sets Caroline free, as she was hired by him to play act the role of Henry and provoke a confession. Narcisse also has Lord Montgomery, who was accused of murdering Henry, at his beck and call, thereby stacking the deck against Francis; he claims that all he wanted to do was weaken Francis so that he would have a ruler who would listen to him like Henry did. Should Francis not release the Catholics who killed Emile and convince Mary of the merits of the decision, though, Narcisse threatens death for both royals, something that would come once the rumor reaches a fever pitch.

Francis ends up bulldozing Mary and signing a document that frees the Catholics responsible for Emile’s death, which drives the wedge between them even further. Elsewhere, Castleroy confesses that he began going to Protestant church services following the death of his daughter and that he would not be able to marry Greer if she couldn’t accept his faith. He would take care of her sisters, though, and he tries to convince Greer to stay with him by telling her that they’ll be partners in their marriage and that she’ll have a hand in every aspect of his life. Greer does end up walking down the aisle with Lord Castleroy, sending Leith out of the wedding in a fit, and during the reception, she tells him that she loves how he challenges her and how he stands by his convictions.

Also during the reception, though, Lola’s chat with dolphin lover Lord Aris, who invites her to go sailing, gets interrupted by Narcisse. When Aris ditches Lola, Narcisse tries to tell the girl that Aris was not the type of man for her, as all men at court are terrified of the king – all men except him, that is. Since both are feared at court, something that can be quite lonely, Narcisse wants Lola to be his and invites her out to tea so they can get to know one another more. Though she rejects the idea, she sees the butterfly birth mark on his forearm, signifying that he is the great lover in the sex journal. After the reception, Mary presses Francis about what he’s hiding from her and why he made the decision to free the Catholics. Rather than tell her the truth and risk her life, Francis agrees with his wife when she brings up her insecurity about not being able to bear a child. He claims that the visits to his son and the issue that she can’t fix, that he can’t change, are all about his worry about not having a legitimate heir to the throne. The hope he claimed he had for her, for them, is gone.

Additional thoughts and observations:
-“If you release them, you’ll be smiling on murder.”
-“You may go, Marie. And please…your hair.”
-“Henry died. I live.”
-“Honestly, is Greer drawing out the suspense to make a grander entrance?”
-“I understand more than you think and it thrills me to see you.”
-Favorite dress: The wedding was a bounty of pretty dresses, you guys. Greer’s wedding dress was quite lovely once the bouquet was set aside and we got a good look at it. I also loved Mary’s sparkly gold dress that she wore to the wedding – beautiful texture, color, construction, etc.
-The new opening credits are okay. I don’t know if my mind is just used to seeing season one’s credits, but these were a bit cut-paste and the quality of the new footage didn’t seem to match the season one clips. I’m sure I’ll get used to them after another episode or two, though.
-Although I like the idea of sex journals and scandalous behavior within the castle walls, the Kenna/Lola storyline felt a little thin here. Bar Kenna and Lola’s interaction with Catherine, it wasn’t funny enough to be comic relief like some similar storylines on this show have been; setting this against a Protestant/Catholic conflict and Greer’s wedding made the episode too cluttered; and it didn’t have enough screen time to make any kind of impact. The reveal of Narcisse’s bedroom prowess was okay, since I think it’ll make Lola seriously consider getting in bed with the devil in order to protect herself and her son, but otherwise, this could have been transferred to another episode and fleshed out more.
-While I’m glad that Kenna at least got some screen time here, let’s talk about how Bash is being pushed to the sidelines. I understand that this show gets very crowded very easily, so some characters are going to be emphasized at different times and for different lengths, but with Henry gone, I thought that Bash would become a greater part of the ensemble, with the tragedy drawing him closer to the castle. Instead, he’s been given a title (a development that I do like) and sent out into the world for stretches at a time; a lot of his job takes place off screen and doesn’t give him any opportunity to interact with the core cast, so that’s not great. Torrance Coombs gives one of my favorite performances on the show and Bash is a complex, interesting enough character to really mix it up, but they’re doing absolutely nothing with him through five episodes. So that’s disappointing.
-Francis was obviously lying in the final scene where he played into Mary’s insecurity in order to shut her up. You could tell in his voice and body language that he went for the first thing he thought of that could get him out of a conversation he didn’t want to be having. Plus, the distance this will create should protect Mary from Narcisse, which is the whole point of the argument in the first place.
-I don’t know how I feel about Caroline having acted. On one hand, I’m glad that they’re steering away from this particular fantasy element and that they got to the point of the season/this half of the season (Narcisse making a power play on Francis to regain the control of the throne he had with Henry) in episode five. On the other, it feels stupid? Narcisse is power hungry, but would he really pull the “let’s make the skeptic believe that his dead father has possessed a nanny” card? And Caroline must be the best actress in medieval France because after the clunky first reveal, she had Henry down pretty cold. Plus, what was the deal with doing stuff in public (e.g. sitting on the throne at Tent City)? Was Narcisse that committed to getting into Francis’s head?
-Minorly disappointed that we didn’t have Greer’s family pop in during her wedding episode. Aside from the annoyance that the wedding was given little attention, Greer’s entire purpose on the show for the first 26 episodes was to find a husband so that her sisters would be well taken care of and able to marry who they want. Why not pay that off with a scene featuring her loved ones, kind of as a way to tie off this part of her series-long storyline and send her into the next phase of her life? It’d be a moment for her father to not be a jackass and it’d make such a pivotal moment in her life about her and not about Castleroy, Mary, or anyone else in her life.
-Another strike against Leith: he passive aggressively tried to take Greer away from a good man, someone who would treat her right. Telling her to ask Castleroy about the meeting negated his pardon of the man and Leith leaving the wedding when Greer showed up highlighted what his exact motivations were here. If you truly do love someone, you want the best for them, even if that doesn’t involve you, so Leith is not looking great to me right now. I think he does love Greer, but I think that he’s more possessive than was initially thought.
-I’m curious where these meetings between Conde and Mary are going. He’s taken Bash’s place as her confidante, but is he trying to be something more to her? Or is the show trying to steer far away from the former love triangle that they’re terrified of having Mary and Bash alone in a scene together?
-I would watch a show about Catherine hooking up with dudes in the castle. That should be the B-story every single week – Catherine getting it on with one listing in her little black book.
-You just know that every Catholic that was being interrogated was like “ugh, shut up, Jerome” when Jerome squealed about the attack on Emile. The entire episode was comical like that (e.g. Narcisse’s throat clear when Francis tells “Henry” that he was responsible for the murder), which I liked because the season has been a bit dour thus far.
-Next week on Reign: Mary and Catherine ride into the woods, masking their identities during a peasant revolt, while Lola entertains Narcisse’s offer as she ponders the path to financial independence.