Jump to content

Type keyword(s) to search

S01.E06: Episode 6


  • Reply
  • Start Topic

Recommended Posts

Episode description from PBS. As long as nothing bad happens to the baby, I'm good!

Quote

John learns who betrayed him, while Daniel, Margaret and Chandrika desperately work to get him released. Tragedy strikes at Beecham House.

 

Link to comment
(edited)

I'm sorry but my mom and i laughed thru that whole last bit. It was terrible. So they were attacked or something, a few people injured, others with blood on their shirts, baby kidnapped...but no one knows anything about what went down???? Like, were they almost all conveniently out of the house when it happened? How did no one see anything or see who did it? Was everyone just hiding and taking cover??? No one thought to send out a search/chase party after it happened? They just waited for john to return??? Like what??? 

I was gonna be mad if general french guy died bc he and chandrika are about the only ones i halfway liked on this show. And chandrika basically peaced out too.

I was also gonna be mad if mrs. Patmore got over opium that easily so seeing her have withdrawals was good to see (but not like that kinda good, if you know what i mean).

Margaret interrupting that ceremony without a care in the world was cringey. The whole margaret/john romance was cringey. Way too fast. His wife has only been dead for less than a year (probably closer to half a year) and he's known margaret for even less. Bleh. No thank you.

People are probably gonna disagree with me, but i think violet and daniel would have worked as a couple. Like, i can see the sibling angle, but it also comes off as flirty imo.

My mom and i just rolled our eyes when everyone freaked out about august not sleeping well and how chanchal (was that her name?) was the only one who could help him bc apparently she's some sort of magical baby whisperer? Like what?

I didn't know it was that easy to leave the army/militia/whatever back then. First john just walks off and now daniel just decides to stay at the beecham house all willy nilly like it's no big deal. Militia who?

I might be coming off as overly harsh but i'm not gonna be very sad to see this show go. Like, i've seen worse, but it didn't have a lot going for it outside of some prettiness.

I shall headcanon that that one beecham house guard dude survives his wounds bc i kinda liked him too. 

As for the other head servant dude who likes chanchal...i wish him a better fate than evelyn napier.

Edited by HoodlumSheep
  • Love 8
Link to comment

Looked at my watch about 9:35 and thought I should stop now. But no, what if something pretty happens?!

Cue the Taj Mahal. 😂 

After Samuel stepped out from hiding and played with his hat instead of his mustache, we knew the Cliffhanger of No Resolution was coming.

Bye, Show. Thanks for giving Leo Suter more work. 

 

  • LOL 1
  • Love 6
Link to comment

Shakes head. What were they thinking?  This show should have ended with the marriage proposal which would have tied most everything up in a pretty romance novel bow.  You could tell even Daniel was coming around to responsibility and matrimony.  If PBS had any sense they would have cut the final 5 minutes and the entire stupid cliffhanger.

There was a good drama hidden in there where the focus should have been on Daniel. Oh well.

I will say PBS and their UK partners have really lost their way with their Masterpiece drama  content lately. Very poor decisions in several cases.  The Sanditon fiasco - who do they believe wants to watch Jane Austen without a HEA?  Putting Victoria on what is starting to look a permanent hiatus.   And screwing over the audience of an exotic historical  romance with an idiotic cliffhanger and then canceling without resolution.

Thanks a lot PBS.

  • Love 10
Link to comment
8 hours ago, magdalene said:

I will say PBS and their UK partners have really lost their way with their Masterpiece drama  content lately. Very poor decisions in several cases.  The Sanditon fiasco - who do they believe wants to watch Jane Austen without a HEA?  Putting Victoria on what is starting to look a permanent hiatus.   And screwing over the audience of an exotic historical  romance with an idiotic cliffhanger and then canceling without resolution.

Thanks a lot PBS.

I feel the same. It doesn't help that they still seem to be looking for their next big hit after DA. I almost wish they'd take a step back from trying to find the next big thing for a year and just go back and focus on smaller book adaptations for a season again like they used to (outside of the shows that are still running ofc). I'd totally be down for another round of austen adaptations. I could watch a new one each day tbh. There's plenty of classic books out there that'd make for good content still. And you wouldn't have to worry about not getting a second season. 

 

  • Love 6
Link to comment

Daniel, I left you with one job to do, and I come back to this! 

Well, we may never know how this turns out, but I'd like to see Baadal and Chanchal together. They can go back to his village and raise the baby together. There doesn't seem to be much future in their present jobs. 

The costumes and sets have kept me in for the six episodes. I gave up on the story. 

 

  • Love 6
Link to comment

Yes - the costumes & scenery.   Mrs. Patmore has suddenly gone native - she participates in a hindu prayer meeting, and other household things.  How close is Beecham House to Agra?   That seems odd to go there on a whim.   How does Missey  get soooo much time off from her job?  She's always at Beecham House or gadding about the countryside trying to save John.   Isn't it usual to have 1/2 day a week off?   So unbelievable.   The Prince is such a bad actor - I couldn't believe it, ( when the two Maharaja's met).   

  • Love 3
Link to comment

Well, that was just............awful.  Totally awful.  I know that they were hoping for a second season but they should have left it at the Taj and called it a day.  Ugh!

  • Love 5
Link to comment

When I went to the Taj Mahal in Agra from New Delhi (I believe that the pink palace shown in this episode is in New Delhi), it was an exhausting bus journey.  Had I known, I would have rented a carriage and gotten there after a pleasant ride (sarcasm).  And, such a symbol of love-the sons threw their father into a cell in the fort across from the Taj Mahal for the rest of his life as he was squandering their inheritance (he had just started to build a black marble mausoleum for himself across the river from the Taj Mahal).  So romantic.  

So, I guess it was way easier for Captain Parker to develop this complicated plan to get Beecham to London rather than just asking him to leave India to testify at the hearing and then returning.  When the reason for his villainy was revealed, I just rolled my eyes.  Because, of course, let's make things as complicated as possible rather than just ask.

I am so confused by the timeline-Beecham's wife had the baby, was alive for a while (as we saw her holding the baby at their new home by the river), then was killed and Beecham was secretly sent to Beecham House to raise the baby in secret, but shortly thereafter his mother arrived to live with him.  How did time travel work with that scenario?  How did she know, enough in advance to plan her journey and sail to India, where he lived?  And, apparently in a scant 2 to 3 months after his wife's death, he is declaring that he thought he would never find love again and proposed to Margaret.  I barely get over a hangnail in two months...

Agree with an above poster, PBS should have just cut out the last five minutes.  Really?  Nobody knew what happened?  Only redshirts were killed (well, there wasn't a clear outcome for Beecham's main bodyguard)?

Mrs. Patmore's turn around was far too quick.  And the maharajah himself certainly spilled the secret of where his grandson was living, which he made arrangements for, secretly.

Interesting how so much of the drama was about how the British (and French) were trying to gain control over India when the Emperor and Maharajahs benefited from the Mughal Empire that came to power through their conquest of the Indus Valley.  And, there really wasn't a reference that the rulers of India in this story were Muslim while the vast populace was Hindu.  I know, I know, for this story one conquering people were seen as victim while another conquering people were seen as despicable.  

One of the problems (yes, only one as there were many) with the story was that the baby did not noticeably age, therefore there was always the impression that hardly any time passed throughout the series. 

  • Love 6
Link to comment

I agree with many of the criticisms of the show.  However, I still enjoyed watching it.

I'd read it ended up on a cliff-hanger, but until the last few minutes, I didn't see how they would wrap it up.  Then we see the moustache twirling Samuel Parker, and the threat becomes more real.  But I'm fine, imagining that future maharaja August is rescued in the nick of time, and Parker eventually gets what he deserves.  And all live happily ever after.

The sets and locations were gorgeous.  From what I've seen of India in such shows as The Amazing Race, I don't think I'd like it or appreciate it as it should be.  Noisy, dirty, crowded.  I'm afraid I would be too much like Henrietta Beecham, critical and put off because it's so different.  Yet even she came to appreciate some of the culture that was so foreign to her.

  • Love 1
Link to comment
(edited)
On 7/20/2020 at 10:48 AM, Doublemint said:

How close is Beecham House to Agra?  

It's a several hours bus ride or a few hours train I think, if you get the Shatabdi express. But it aint around the corner, and certainly was a hike in those days.

I'm with all of you, this lame story, or lack thereof, ruined a most gorgeous set and surroundings, which I find nigh impossible but there we have it! I think the 'ending' was  a really cheap attempt at "they'll HAVE to give us a second season with this AMAZEBALLS cliffhanger, amiright?!?" Except they forgot that there was no substance to their storyline so, yanno, second season highly unlikely, IMO.

Too bad because I loved the setting, sets, costumes, but damn if that writing was The Worst.

ETA: I thought Sanditon was bad with it's cloying storylines and 'you can see um a coming from a mile away' plot twists. But this was worse, waaaay worse! Contrast it to, say, The Durrell's in Corfu, which is so right in story telling, with wonderful characters that we fall in love with, and a beautiful location. Yeah, the writer/director should be fired, or sent back to film school.

Edited by gingerella
  • Love 6
Link to comment
18 minutes ago, gingerella said:

Contrast it to, say, The Durrell's in Corfu, which is so right in story telling, with wonderful characters that we fall in love with, and a beautiful location.

Thank you for the suggestion.  I found it on Amazon Prime.

  • Love 2
Link to comment
On 7/19/2020 at 10:31 PM, HoodlumSheep said:

My mom and i just rolled our eyes when everyone freaked out about august not sleeping well and how chanchal (was that her name?) was the only one who could help him bc apparently she's some sort of magical baby whisperer? Like what?

That one I could actually believe. It's not so much that she's a magical baby whisperer as that she's his nanny and essentially the replacement for his mother. The poor kid's already lost his mother, and then this was the replacement mother figure and she suddenly vanishes. Of course the kid's fussy.

I definitely agree that for the US showing they should have cut the cliffhanger since they knew it wouldn't be renewed and let it all be tied up in a neat bow, as ludicrous as some of the resolutions were. The insta-love with John and Margaret, when his wife couldn't have been dead more than about six months, was a bit much to take. Weren't there social conventions about not remarrying within a year? And the mother had a complete personality transplant all of a sudden. I'm surprised she wasn't wearing a sari by the end, at the rate she was going.

I still think it would have been a more interesting series if it had been about Daniel having to get his act together rather than about perfect John being perfect and upright and everyone else being just jealous.

The actor playing the maharaja had the most amazing voice. It was so deep and rich that it was mesmerizing.

I'm curious, how much of the cast playing Indian characters were actually Brits of Indian descent doing accents and how many were native born? I live in a "little India" neighborhood. All my neighbors are Indian, most of the people working at businesses around me are Indian, and one of my pastors is from India. I hear Indian accents all the time and am pretty well attuned, but I had trouble understanding a lot of the characters with accents on this show. I was wondering if maybe the ones I had trouble with were Brits putting on accents since I'm used to the real deal. Or maybe the actors are from a region that my neighbors aren't from.

  • Love 4
Link to comment
(edited)

Ending the episodes with the shot of Captain Parker smirking as he watches the lovers come back from their trip and then quietly walks away would have been a much better cliffhanger, even if a second season had been ordered; it would have been full of menace and foreboding. Instead we got this mess where a child gets abducted, people get killed or wounded, there's blood all over, but then no one in the house knows what really happened.

It feels like cheating the viewer to include such a big dramatic last scene when the renewal of the show was far from certain. I dislike having many major plot threads to be left hanging even at the end of a season when a show has been renewed, but some writers and producers like to end with big grand gestures and flourishes.

The French general was really stupid to walk into the cell alone, knowing how treacherous and determined Parker is, especially since he was about to throw a big spanner in his plans. Also, he should fire all of his staff since they can't find a fugitive who still openly walks the streets and wears the same silly little hat he has from the first time we saw him and which is very easily recognisable.

John and Margaret managed to make the Taj Mahal boring.

Edited by Florinaldo
  • Love 5
Link to comment
6 minutes ago, Florinaldo said:

Also, he should fire all of his staff since they can't find a fugitive who he still openly walks the streets and wears the same silly little hat he has from the first time we saw him and which very easily recognisable.

Heh, that's exactly what my brother-in-law said.  An Englishman wearing that stupid hat is hardly blending in!

  • Love 2
Link to comment
7 hours ago, Florinaldo said:

John and Margaret managed to make the Taj Mahal boring.

This!

7 hours ago, Florinaldo said:

Ending the episodes with the shot of Captain Parker smirking as he watches the lovers come back from their trip and then quietly walks away would have been a much better cliffhanger, even if a second season had been ordered; it would have been full of menace and foreboding. Instead we got this mess where a child gets abducted, people get killed or wounded, there's blood all over, but then no one in the house knows what really happened.

And THIS too. Instead, they made a mess and guess what madam director? We STILL think this show sucks so...game over.

  • Love 2
Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...