Mary finds Bash sword fighting with his new bodyguard Alec, who was hired by Diane, and tells him that his presence is being requested in the throne room. Now acting regent in Henry’s absence, Bash must go out and prove to the royal audience, many of whom haven’t met him before, that he can do the job of king. Though he’s still nervous about the target on his back from the marriage agreement with Mary, Bash assumes the throne for the first time and hears a dispute over chickens and goats that nearly bores him to tears. He obviously seems over the whole thing and Mary reminds him that this is his chance to rub elbows with people who will one day be his subjects and that he should take this a little more seriously.
The next case he hears, once he renders his verdict on the chickens, is a pregnant suspected robber named Isobel who he seems to know. He agrees to a suggestion of having her house searched and sentences the girl to time in the dungeon, leading him to his third appointment of the day, an older woman who claims to be honored to be in the presence of the man who could be the next King of France. She heads toward the throne and gets tackled by Alec; he comes up with a poisoned blade that she had hidden in her sleeve that she intended to use on Bash. Mary then storms into the chambers where Catherine is being held and it’s a far cry from the prison cell that Henry made it seem like he was sentencing her to, as there are tapestries, more than several servants, food, and anything she could have wanted. Catherine gets accused of having something to do with the attempt on Bash’s life, but she counters with the fact that anyone of noble blood would want the boy dead and tells Mary that she would do the same thing if it were her own children’s futures at stake. Catherine then accuses Mary of colluding with Henry to rule half of Europe and push her off the throne in the process, leading Mary to order the room to be emptied of all the lavish amenities Catherine had it outfitted with.
Mary returns to Bash and finds that Alec has a cut on his hand, which he’s put poultice on for the time being. Bash explains that the pregnant robber he had sent to the dungeon is in fact the daughter of his mother’s half-brother and not the mother of his illegitimate child as Mary thought. He has her released by bribing the jailer with the intention of getting her to their cousins in Benet before setting Isobel up in Paris with Diane. Bash knows that Lord Hugo was behind the arrest, seeing as how he wanted to rattle the acting regent on his first day, and confesses that the house search will turn up the ties that he has with Isobel, who he visited in the village and whose father was executed for treason many years ago. As such, Mary’s ladies disguise Isobel, who is nearing the time of labor, in fancy clothes meant to help her get past the guards, through the passageways, and out into the stables. Mary forces herself into the planned trip, with Bash set to go one direction and Mary leaving with Isabel in another before the two will meet up at another location; Mary’s ladies will then stay behind and gather evidence that Catherine was the one behind the assassination attempt on Bash.
A hungry, increasingly furious Catherine gets a visit from Lord Hugo and warns him that if Henry is allowed to change the rules and line of succession, he would be done for good. However, if they’re able to 
kill Bash, the line would stay in tact, Catherine would regain her power, and the castle would be strengthened. She mentions that the bodies of Isobel and Bash will have to be found together in order to tie them together in the public’s eye and Henry assures her that the next time he comes to her, he’ll be bringing her crown. Mary, Bash, and Isobel safely leave the stables and make it out onto the road without being noticed, though Isobel is uncomfortable in the new clothes. Bash mentions how he feels trapped by the politics of France, which Mary thinks means that he’s trapped by the situation he put her in, and he explains to Mary that after Isobel’s father Jonathan, another bastard, and her baby’s father died, he’s acted as something of a big brother to her and protected her from all the harm that could befall a woman as alone as she is. With the guards on their tail, the carriage approaches a fork in the road and rather than going for the expected option, Bash decides to duck into the blood woods, seeing as how it could buy them some time to figure out what to do.
Kenna, Lola, and Greer arrive in Catherine’s chambers and the queen proceeds to tear into all three of them, mentioning the king’s rejection of Kenna (and her presumed grating and tedious personality) and Greer’s family’s financial failure before taunting Lola with her deduction that Mary isn’t in the castle. If she were, she would never send the three of them to the chambers, but Lola fires back that Catherine’s reaction proves she had a hand in every plot against Bash. Back in the woods, Isobel’s water breaks and since she can’t give birth in a moving carriage, they decide to stay in the woods until she delivers the child, using the tent packed for situations like this. However, they’re not to stay longer than necessary before getting back on the road. Mary gets Isabel in the tent and notices that she’s suffering from dehydration; while Bash goes off to get her something to drink, Mary tends to Isobel’s aches and listens as the girl wonders whether Bash is shrewd enough to be king, as she doesn’t know if he would be willing to make the type of decisions necessary to rule entire countries.
While Isobel’s contractions have started happening closer together, Kenna goes on guard duty at Catherine’s door and the queen advises her to leave Mary and politics. She argues that Kenna isn’t smart enough to hang at court without Mary, though she’s pretty enough to find a husband and have a nice, quiet life somewhere away from the city. Her boldness comes from the fact that she thinks that Bash is either captured or stuck in the blood woods, meaning that her crown is all but secured, and Kenna quickly leaves rather than continuing to listen to the verbal abuse. Mary goes outside the tent when she hears strange noises and finds a pagan symbol hanging up, which she knocks down, and a necklace with the same symbol that marked her for sacrifice earlier this season. She runs back into the tent to tell the rest of the group and suddenly, the lights go out, with the pagans circling their tent on horseback. Alec, Isobel, and Bash repeat a prayer that keeps the pagans inside and leads to one of their horses being sacrificed instead. When the pagans leave, Mary accuses all three of her group of being pagans and heretics, questioning Bash about the “horrible shame” he carried with him from being a pagan. He reminds her that he’s a practicing Catholic like she is and explains that the prayer he recited was something he learned from Isabel’s family when he was little and how Isabel further embraced her paganism when Jonathan was executed. He goes on to explain that the only thing that separates pagans from Christians is that they see something different when they picture God and that the sect of pagans that Mary has encountered are different than the sect he grew up with. Namely, the pagans that just left believe that there’s a beast in the woods they have to continually feed blood to in order to survive.
As Isabel delivers a healthy baby girl, Lola approaches Catherine in the chambers and tells the queen that taunting Kenna gave the girl an idea. In her barrage of insults, Catherine mentioned how words are like smoke and can dissipate in the air, which caused Kenna to come up with a plan of forging notes from Catherine that give them concrete evidence to approach Henry with. Greer wrote one letter with instructions to attack Bash with a knife and a second that authorized the use of Catherine’s funds for an extravagant public banquet; Lola then threatens to show the letters to Henry and Francis if any harm comes to Mary and Bash, reminding Catherine that if her guards were tortured, one of them would eventually give her up anyway to save himself. Lola’s whole goal in this is to take away the power that Catherine has abused for years, leaving the queen even more bitter and alone than she already is. Back in the woods, Mary apologizes to Bash for what she said about paganism and warns him that if he agrees to the proposal, things are going to move very quickly and soon enough, he’ll become both the King of Scotland and the King of England. He’ll have hundreds of enemies and a much larger target on his back, so she decides to give him an out – if he doesn’t want to do this anymore, she won’t force him to take the crown.
Just then, Alec alerts them that Isobel is in trouble and Bash arrives in the tent just in time for his cousin to tell him to take care of the baby and bleed out, dying in his arms. The body is taken to the castle and the baby to the court nursery, with the latter especially nerve-wracking due to the symbol Isabel put on the baby’s foot, a way to distinguish babies in the eyes of God. Bash tells Lord Hugo that he found Isabel in the woods and used force in order to kill her when she tried to attack him. The guards had found the evidence in her home that linked her back to Jonathan Durant, a member of the revolution that sprung up following a series of pagan burnings 15 years ago, and Bash mentions that wolves might have gotten the child that she was carrying. Later, he buries Isabel and cuts his hand to spread blood on the grave, a pagan tradition. Mary does the same and when Bash reminds her that he’s not Francis and he’ll always put her above his country, she kisses him.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Learn to expect the blade you can’t see.”
-“I’m still locked in a tower, am I right?”
-“The next time I come, I’ll bring you a crown.”
-“Kenna, well, let’s be kind and call her a seductress.”
-I appreciated the show separating Mary from her ladies and giving Kenna, Greer, and Lola things to do that didn’t have anything to do with their romantic lives. Thus far, the only time they’ve been together is when Mary needs counsel and the rest of their screen time comes from their romantic angst, so an episode like this makes them feel like deeper characters who are not just extensions/attachments of Mary. Although it would have been nice to watch them formulate their plans against Queen Catherine and try to survive the castle without Mary being their safety net, watching Lola stand up for the three of them against Catherine and threaten the queen was especially delicious, especially after how much Catherine has thrown her weight around when it came to the ladies.
-Speaking of, Megan Follows was in fine form this entire episode, giving a rather fun, soapy performance that infused the show with humor and the type of viciousness that has only been bubbling under the surface thus far. Catherine hasn’t exactly been a shrinking violet when it comes to using what she had to do in order to get what she wants, but the pain she’s wrought has all been action-related; as she mentions in the episode, Catherine is a woman who does stuff, so it was an interesting change of pace to have her verbally decimate Kenna, Lola, and Greer. Especially interesting when Lola proved herself to be unafraid, adeptly calling that Catherine is bitter after sticking her neck out for Francis and not finding his support in return.
-Sexy Nostradamus Alert: :(
-Favorite dress: Greer’s green dress when the ladies were getting their orders from Mary was pretty. I also like the color of the dress that Isabel wore out of the castle.
-Props to the show for being confident enough to sit Francis out without sending him off on a trip or having there be extenuating circumstances that keep him from being in the middle of the action. Of course, Nostradamus, Clarissa, and Henry were all missing this week, as well, but each of them has missed at least one episode before and none of them are as central to the narrative as Francis. But it was a smart decision that allowed the focus of the episode to be on Mary’s relationship with Bash, something that will be continuing for the foreseeable future and something that needed the type of development that came with this type of storyline.
-While I figured Catherine was the one behind the attempted assassination, a part of me was rooting for it to not have been her, just to increase Mary’s paranoia and make Bash realize the depth of the opposition to him taking the crown in the future. Considering that the other storyline was fairly close-ended, I understand why they made it Catherine, though.
-I like how you can fool French guards by putting on a new wig. Let that be a lesson, kids.
-I also liked how this episode tackled religion and added further shading to the pagans in the blood woods. Though they’ve definitely had a presence through the first half of Reign‘s season, this is the first time where you felt some sort of understanding about who these people are and their reappearance led to what might be the most striking conversation the show has written yet in Bash’s explanation that the pagans he grew up with are different from the pagans in the woods. Although the religious tolerance undercurrent in what he said felt very modernized, I buy that his years of being an underling in the castle and feeling like an outsider have left him feeling sympathetic to the plight of the pagans, particularly when his mother is still strongly connected to her fate.
-The sequence of the pagans circling the tent and Alec, Bash, and Isobel joining in the chanting was gorgeously disorienting. If nothing else, the blood woods bring about a certain mood that the show does well in integrating into the rest of its whole.
-I wonder if we’ll be following the journey of Isobel’s little girl, whose name we didn’t learn. It’d make for a nifty parallel to Mary’s story, as Mary dealt with whether she wanted to embrace/fulfill her destiny earlier this season and the baby will have a certain life path expected of it due to being from a pagan mother.
-Next week on Reign: Catherine attempts to expose a dark secret from Bash’s past in order to save herself from punishment from Henry, while Nostradamus exposes the truth about Clarissa.
