(It’s Episode Three because the two-hour pilot is listed as two episodes, “Pilot Parts 1&2”).

I said last week’s episode was overstuffed, and that was an understatement, even for a two-hour presentation. At the end of this one I was left wondering what, if anything, had happened; it seemed weirdly sparse, like thirty minutes of programming packed not into an hour but, inexplicably, into an extended 1h 15m. Then I went back over my notes and saw that the answer to “what happened?” was “quite a lot, actually”. I attribute this apparent distortion of time itself to the fact that many of the scenes lacked memorable moments, beats that the viewer could latch on to. This show is still finding its pace, the writers their voice, and the actors their chemistry. May they do so soon.

When last we left our intrepid hero, Wilkin Brattle, he was impersonating a torturer to get close to the English knights and nobles who slaughtered his Welsh village. This charade begs the question: how long before he has to actually torture someone?

NOT LONG. A teenage Welsh rebel girl is brought to his dungeon for the crime of knocking the nose off a statue of the late Baron Ventris, and the shire reeve, like a Medieval Belichick, commands the torturer to do his job.

(I must say, this plot actually made me appreciate modern dictators who erect statues of themselves. What good are they when you’re dead? Might as well set up a huge stone effigy of yourself that you can pass by every morning and think, “god in christ, I’m a handsome megalomaniac.” Life and statues are for the living, weeping angels excepted.)

The reeve (who Brattle mistakenly believes murdered his pregnant wife) buggers off before Brattle commences, however, sparing us the inevitable scene in which the impostor torturer, under the watchful eye of his lords and masters, really has to give someone the business. We don’t see Brattle – or perhaps his sidekick Toran (Sam Spruell) – actually pull the girl’s fingernail off, and that’s as far as it gets before the Baroness Lowry Ventris (called, absurdly, “Love”) turns up and puts a stop to the proceedings.

Lady Love (goddammit) deduces that the girl is from a seaside town, and off we go. The Baroness, who proclaims, apparently sincerely, that she wants nothing but peace for the Welsh, whom she sees as her people, asks the girl’s mother to set up a meeting with the rebel leader, known as The Wolf. The mother refuses in contempt, but Brattle gets the girl’s idiot brother (the show is long on idiot brothers) to give up a rebel supply cache in exchange for the girl’s freedom.

The rebels, however, scotch the deal when they attack Baroness Ventris’s caravan on the road home, and Brattle earns still more credit with her by personally seeing to her safety. He’s not alone, having God on his side in the form of the Irish priest Father Ruskin, who slips a knife from his monk’s robes, takes up a rebel’s maul, and proceeds to go straight to fucking town. It’s awesome.

So, what to do with the girl? The sinister Chamberlain insists that any clemency would be a sign of weakness, a show of “feminine frivolity or Welsh leanings” (the two greatest threats to any legitimate authority, it must be said) that would draw condemnation from the King.  And so the Baroness, perhaps taking a lesson from the Hammurabi Code, orders a nose for a nose. Brattle doses the girl with an herbal sedative/painkiller from the Slavic healer/witch with whom he hangs out (more on her directly) and then the episode closes with a step it would always have to take: Brattle doing something awful to someone who doesn’t have it coming.

Brattle’s compatriots get some time, beginning with an argument in which they make Brattle swear not to kill the reeve until they can figure out who else was involved in the village masscare (this macho shouting match broken up by Katey Sagal suggests that Sutter hasn’t entirely moved on from SOA). They also discover that someone in the woods is horribly mutilating animals and at least one man. There’s a heavy hint – almost a declaration – that it’s the witch Annora, or her completely scarred companion, doing it, because Annora seems to know a lot about ritual disfigurement and performs some kind of rite on the mutilated man. This dark magic plot, which began with the murder of Brattle’s wife, will be with us for a while, clearly.

There’s also a moment at the end when the Chamberlain, threatened by Brattle’s budding relationship with the Baroness, tells him to mind his place, and in so doing explicitly reveals that he knows who Brattle really is. Whether the Chamberlain knows that Brattle knows that the Chamberlain was part of the plot to have him killed in Scotland years before is not clear.

*

As I said, the show is still finding its pace, voice, and chemistry. It’s still fun to look at, and the violence – though there’s still a lot of it – was toned down from the almost repellant pitch of the premier. This episode’s chief problem is that good scenes are often undone by uneven writing. Much of it is ludicrously expository, and some of it is just mystifying. We get both together as Brattle agonizes in the chapel, unable to reconcile himself to disfiguring a teenage girl. An angelic vision of his wife appears, to which Brattle says, “Do you show yourself to help me, or to haunt me?” a question that would have been better left asked by the viewers; moments later, as the torments of his conscience reach a fever pitch, she tells him, “when you stop looking for all that was wrong, you’ll that what is right was just in your grip”. Excellent advice for someone grappling with a terrible moral quandary.

Other stuff:

*The original torturer’s wife appears to actually believe Brattle is her husband. Maybe she’s gone mad, maybe she sees him as the man her husband always should have been. No good will come of this, either way.

*Speaking of Brattle’s new family, his “son”, who assisted his father, is forever bailing out Brattle by handing him the right tool and thus saving him from showing how little he knows of his trade. This is wonderfully horrible.

*The faith thing came up again. It turns out Berber the Moor is, in fact, a Muslim; Annora catches him at prayer and promises not to tell. They have a brief exchange about religion, in which he actually delivers this line: “Your way with nature leans toward a pagan faith”, which she answers by quoting chapter and verse of the Quran to him, the expository and the mystifying once again making bedfellows in this weird writing.

* Baroness Ventris’s identity crisis as a Welshwoman in the English nobility is coming along apace, even if it did give us this line, said to the teenage rebel girl’s mother, “I do not understand your hatred of me, and you do not understand my love for you.” She later snaps at the Chamberlain “I am always earnest!” Yes, ma’am, that’s the fucking problem.

*The Chamberlain is twice shown tearfully clutching a child’s doll, giving Stephen Moyer something to do other than glower, and setting up some backstory to be revealed. The fact that he does so the second time while mid-coitus with twin ladies (having been shown rogering a dude in the pilot) adds an element of bizarre on which I am presently withholding judgment.

*’The Bastard’ appellation is to do with the fact that he was left at a monastery as an infant by a woman who claimed he had no father. I will lay a tidy sum that his father is Edward I.

*Finally, we’re two episodes in and I haven’t gotten to do any good Welsh jokes. This is an outrage that will be rectified as soon as can be arranged.