Gunpowder episode 1 review: ‘Full of sound and fury’

Gunpowder’s first episode does some particularly interesting things with musical accompaniment and sound, but struggles in dialogue.

(In the spirit of the times in which this show takes place, the title of this review is quoted from Macbeth‘s Act 5, Scene 5.)

Gunpowder opens on a corpse (Elizabeth I) and a smug king (James I), and I wish that were an exaggeration. In fairly small text, over shots of hanging bodies, guns and more, it lays out the brief story of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in England in 1604. The credits themselves aren’t anything to write home about — a driving beat and lots of smoke.

That same beat of anticipation returns throughout the episode — as Kit Harington’s Robert Catesby and his family hide the evidence of their practices, as William Wade’s men search the house for the priests hiding inside, as Wade himself knocks on the wooden panels to find the hollow one.

However, Gunpowder plays with the ideas of silence and noise quite effectively. At times, all you can hear is one hissed line, or one knock on wood, but then the music of anticipation returns. “Madam, be quiet,” hisses Wade to Catesby’s aunt Dorothy, and the music and the knocking build until a clatter breaks the tension, as one of the priests drops a censer.

But every protagonist, antihero or hero, needs something to spur them on, and in Robert’s case, as the preview promised, it’s the death of his family — his aunt, to be precise. To be fair, she sacrifices herself for the safety of the other priests, her nephew and her niece (Liv Tyler as Anne Vaux).

This, about 25 minutes in, is where Gunpowder starts to really go for it. In public, Wade strips Dorothy naked, then has her tied down and crushed to death, as people in the crowd cheer for it. Again, the sound mixing and usage is great. You can hear every bit of Dorothy’s Ave Maria and the crack of her bones as the weights are placed upon her, and then the music takes over as her blood spreads on the platform. Now, to be fair, the show doesn’t shy away from doing men violence. The priest who gets caught is hung, drawn and cornered, though at least we don’t see his limbs actually get chopped off. (His head gets dipped in tar, though.) Anne walks away at one point, and frankly, the audience might do the same.

Although the show does well with sound, it doesn’t do quite as well with dialogue — telling us things we have already picked up, like Robert’s propensity for violence, or sounding just a bit too stilted. As the show reminds us, the year is 1603. Shakespeare wrote his first play in the late 1580s or early 1590s. (Unsurprisingly, Tyler and Harington do perhaps the best with the dialogue, as fantasy veterans.)

Meanwhile, King James mostly wants to watch his entertainments, which puts Mark Gatiss’ William Cecil in charge of actually handling things up until James decides he wants to call Parliament. Gatiss plays the role with a strange cant to his body, as if to suggest he’s sinister, even when he’s seated. And, to Robert, he is the villain, sending spies into the ranks of the Catholics. (Or calling out the king’s current boy toy.)

Much as we’re supposed to find Robert (or Guy Fawkes’ late arrival, complete with more murder) the most compelling, Anne’s quiet strength ends up shining through in this episode. She smooths things over to get him out of jail, for instance. But it’s Robert who gets to look upon ruined churches and hiss out that he is “desperate.”

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Gunpowder returns tonight. Will you be watching?