Knightfall: Road to Chartres

Knightfall: Road to Chartres | Season 2, Episode 5 | Air Date: April 22, 2019 | Rating: 8/11 |

*SPOILERS AHEAD* Episode recaps (with random bits of commentary) occur in this space, so if your mind’s not ready to know what happened in this week’s episode of Knightfall, avert your eyes. Now. Ready? Let’s roll.

We’re halfway through season 2 and enroute to King Philip’s eventual (and historical) destruction of the Knights Templar. Landry’s reunion with his daughter doesn’t go as planned, Gawain proves his worth and Prince Louis and Princess Margaret both face some hard truths.

BEST LAID PLANS

With Gawain’s (Pádraic Delaney) assault on the Temple of Saint Lazarus not going as planned, he now has to account for it with King Philip (Ed Stoppard) and the king is not pleased.

King Philip is so not pleased that he relieves Gawain of his command as Marshall of the Men at Arms and has lost patience with DeNogaret’s methodical legal approach to destroying the Templars. DeNogaret’s temper flares but King Philip’s roars right back as he forges ahead with plans to attack Chartres Temple…now with the aid of a little invention called gunpowder.

DeNogaret & King Philip

Even though dismissed by King Philip, Gawain’s Templar hatred is too strong for him to be left out of the fun so he convinces DeNogaret (Julian Ovenden) that he still has value: that value being his knowledge of Templar secrets such as worshipping a two-headed idol of Knights Templar legend/co-founder Hugues de Payens and the deity Baphomet: an act that is inherently heretical. Gawain impresses the hell out of DeNogaret, literally having the false idol fashioned before his eyes, as he comes to realize that Gawain actually is more than mere muscle.

THE HARD TRUTHS

While keeping Lydia (Salóme R. Gunnarsdóttir) in his chambers (an alarmingly unsecured place for keeping someone prisoner) Prince Louis (Tom Forbes) seems to have a developed a fondness for her. She’s dressed in one of Princess Margaret’s dresses and he won’t kill her but he won’t release her, either, for she serves some unnamed purpose. It’s weird and it’s creepy and now it’s not a secret because Princess Margaret (Genevieve Gaunt) wandered in and found her.

Needless to say, Princess Margaret did not take hearing of her husband’s murderous ways well.

But, once again, Prince Louis is off doing his father’s bidding (trying to locate and kill Landry and baby Eve) after receiving a tip about Templar Knights being seen at the Holy Sisters Convent where Sister Anne (Claire Cooper) is caring for Eve. Accompanied to the convent by Tancrede (Simon Merrells), Landry gets a few precious moments with his daughters before Prince Louis and his men (again, dressed as Templars) arrive. Landry being Landry senses something is off: Swords are drawn and the fight is on. Sister Anne and the wet nurse escape on horseback with Eve, Landry realizes that he’s dealing with King Philips’s son, Landry wounds Prince Louis with an arrow and then escapes with Tancrede.

On the road to Chartres Landry and Tancrede find the women at an abandoned Jewish temple but Prince Louis soon finds them all due to his extraordinary tracking skills. Prince Louis demands Eve’s life which – of course – is a hard no for Landry. During their one-on-one fight, Prince Louis spits venom laying out exactly why he wants Landry dead: he believes that Landry killed his mother, Queen Joan. But Landry corrects the record with the truth that King Philip actually murdered her and did so in front of his entire army.

Prince Louis seeks and gets confirmation of his father’s crime when he questions the mute (due to King Philip having his tongue cut out) Pascale (Pavel Bezdek) in his prison cell: Needless to say, Prince Louis does not take the “your father murdered your mother” news well.

Gawain

ODDS & ENDS

One moment Grand Master DeMolay (Matthew Marsh) and Berenger (Peter O’Meara) are welcoming former Archbishop Raymond DeGoth now newly appointed Pope Clement V (Stephen Fewell) to Chartres Temple where they are promptly commanded to resume crusader activities and return to the Holy Land despite the friction with King Philip. The next, they are welcoming Sister Anne, baby Eve and her wet nurse – aka women – into Chartres Temple (and their sheer horror at such a thing is comical) and learning the truth extent of King Philip’s anti-Templar vengence.

But King Philip’s business with the pope (aka his lackey) is more sinister. While meeting at the Paris temple, he, DeNogaret and Gawain present him with “proof” of the Templars’ heresy: the false idol. Now Pope Clement V is ready to haul the Templars in for questioning.

But first, King Philip and his army are outside the walls of Chartres: prepare for war.

NOTABLES:

• Ed Stoppard’s cold-blooded King Philip is frighteningly good.
• Now that King Philip has discovered the wonders of that humanity changing invention, gunpowder, the walls of the Chartres Temple are now in jeopardy.
• Yes, DeNogaret quoted Sun Tzu.
• Prince Louis and his men slaughtered every nun at the convent.
• How subservient is Pope Clement V to King Philip? King Philip still calls him by his birth name, Raymond.   

QUOTABLES:

• “What kind of a man willingly sacrifices his son’s soul by commanding him to act in such an unforgivable way?”(Landry)
• “I’ve always lived by Sun Tzu’s credo, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ but I look at you and it makes me wonder: which one are you?” (DeNogaret)

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The next logical question is – now that he knows the truth – what will Prince Louis do? Will he help or inhibit the assault on the Templars at Chartres? And now that the Templars know King Philip’s true face, how far are they prepared to go against the King and the Pope?

Next week’s episode: “Blood Drenched Stone”

All Photos: Larry Horricks & José Sarmento Matos courtesy of HISTORY