Thursday, May 4, 2017

Reign Review: 4x04 "Playing With Fire"

Mary and Greer's vacation in this episode reminded me of how thankful I am that Greer has stuck around for this season. I really thought that she would go back to France at the beginning of the season, and back at the end of season three, I didn't think she'd be making an appearance in season four at all. If I'm thankful for one thing this season, it's that Greer is still around. It's reassuring that Mary still has one of her ladies in waiting.

Darnley shows up and proposes pretty early in the episode. No surprise there. This was the first episode where I stopped to wonder if we would be seeing their wedding this season. Now that I've seen the later episodes I know the answer to that question, but at the time I thought it might be the series finale.

Here's something I wrote right after seeing this episode, and I'm going to leave it as is since my perception is different now, having seen later episodes: They're dropping little doses of Knox into each episode despite nothing all that significant happening with him for a while. I wonder what the situation with Knox is going to lead to. Something big has to happen with him before the end of the season. My best guess is that it will involve his wife considering how that's being set up.

During this episode, I was still completely clueless as to who Mary's anonymous source was. I don't feel like we were given enough hints to even begin to guess.

After Charles took off with Bianca I was worried that she was dead, so it was nice to see that that wasn't the case. This was the first episode were I felt reassured that Charles wasn't off doing something violent, which made me feel a lot better.

Claude is forced to marry Narcisse's son. I've never been a big fan of Narcisse, so it's nice to see that his son is a lot different than he is. That difference seems to be genuine, not an act, too, which is refreshing on this show. I don't think we've gotten a new character on the show for a while who comes across as having as good of intentions as Luc seems too. It makes me worry that there's going to be a reveal later on that he's not who he seems to be.

I never expected Leith to be alive, but I am beyond thrilled to see that he is. Leith has always been one of my favorite characters, and while the timing of his return is terrible, I'm happy about it. Actually, his return is a bit conflicting. I've always shipped Greer and Leith, but while I never liked Greer with Castleroy, I had come to accept Leith with Claude. I can't say that I enjoyed them together quite as much as Leith and Greer, but I liked them well enough. I wanted them to both be happy at any rate, and it was clear that that was only going to happen with each other.

Now Leith has lost both Greer and Claude, and that's really upsetting. Leith is such a good person, and he deserves to be happy. I don't know how they're going to do that at this point, but I hope that they do.

Watching Elizabeth put up with the bluntly sexist Maxford was frustrating (because of him) as much as it was enjoyable (because of Elizabeth). I loved her smirk when she successfully shot the deer. I also feel like this is such a thing that Elizabeth (and Mary) would have had to deal with frequently and it hasn't always been quite as overt on the show as it likely was in real life.

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