The Musketeers, BBC One, 9pm
It's the penultimate episode of the second series of the BBC's Dumas makeover and things are building nicely to what should be an explosive finale.
Tonight, the Musketeers are forced into action when the conniving Rochefort (Marc Warren) tries to turn the ineffectual Louis (Ryan Gage) against Queen Anne (Alexandra Dowling). His reason? She spurned his advances, injuring his eye in the process. "I trusted him. Thought he was my friend," says a shaken-looking Anne at the start of tonight's episode as she faces her "loyal" Musketeers.
Just to make himself look doubly devilish, Rochefort dons an eye patch for the rest of the episode, passing it off as a hunting accident to the king. Worse, he tries to have Anne accused of treason by producing a letter she wrote to her brother, the King of Spain, asking for military help when she thought Louis had been captured by slavers. And as we've all seen Wolf Hall, we know how these sorts of allegations tend to play out when there's a king with a grudge.
So the Queen's position looks perilous even before the thrilling credits have rolled, and it's not helped when Aramis confesses to his friends that he slept with Anne when she was holed up in that convent.
"If Rochefort's advances to the queen were treason, what were yours?" hisses Athos angrily
"Love," says Aramis, in the episode's cheesiest line.
Rochefort knows all this, of course. But just when things look worse than ever for the Musketeers, help comes in the unlikely form of Milady (Maimie McCoy). After being half-strangled by Rochefort, she lays down her animosity towards the Musketeers - and in particular to former beau Athos (Tom Burke) - to help their cause and keep the Queen's head attached to her body.
Not that she isn't above milking the situation and turning it to her own advantage before lending her support. "What else would you expect from a woman like me?" she tells the sceptical musketeers when they meet. But help them she does, handing over the information which will bring down Rochefort: a killer fact about where his true loyalties lie. And lie really is the operative word here.
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