Catherine the Great episode 2 review: An Empress in love

As Catherine the Great continues, two years have passed and the messy flirtation between the Empress and Grigory Potemkin finally turns into something more.

Catherine the Great is a period piece that has to serve a couple of masters. In theory, it’s a drama recounting the story of one of the famous – and successful – female rulers of all time. But, it’s also not a paint by numbers series, meant to merely catalog the various steps, success and failures of her reign. Catherine was a woman as well as an empress, and the series doesn’t shy away from the fact that she wanted more for herself than merely a crown.

The second episode of the four-part miniseries is largely devoted to the love story between Catherine and military leader Grigory Potemkin. Historically, this relationship  really did happen, and despite the fact that the two eventually parted, Potemkin is generally accepted as the love of Catherine’s life. They never married, since she was loathe to give up any of her hard won power to a man again, no matter how much she might care for them, a tension the HBO series plays up repeatedly throughout its story.

It’s hard enough for a woman to come to power in the first place, but it’s harder still for her to keep it.

But Potemkin is appealing as a romantic partner precisely because he doesn’t want any of those things. In fact, his complaints tend to center around Catherine not noticing him enough, and it takes the pair a full episode full of angst and flirting to actually become the lovers everyone already thinks they are. (The events of this episode take place a full two years after the series’ premiere, as though we’re supposed to assume that the duo engaged in the dance that closed that episode and just…never talked again before Potemkin went off to fight the Turks?)

Yet, it sort of works. Helen Mirren manages to make Catherine’s romantic skittishness feel as though it comes from a serious rather than a petulant place, and her two-steps-forward, three-steps-back courtship with Potemkin manages to somehow feel inevitable, even as both of them take other lovers and spend years apart from one another.

Why this is, I’ve yet to entirely put my finger on. But at some point during the conversation in which Potemkin is trying to quit court and Catherine is trying to ask him to stay, and they’re trying to admit that they’re kind of into one another on a public staircase in front of half her courtiers, well. Their connection suddenly made sense. Somehow. Call it the magic of acting, perhaps.

Mirren is twenty-some years Clarke’s senior, but the two have a refreshing, charming chemistry together, and their characters feel like equals in unexpected and interesting ways. Theirs does not seem to be so much a union of lust, though given Catherine’s constant comments on equipment and sex lives, that’s clearly a factor. But the two feel like a meeting of the minds, in that they both simply understand one another on a level that others do not. (For both good and ill, as that turns out.)

It’s a rare thing, in stories about women in power, that said characters are allowed to be fully realized, human people. Female leaders are so rare, it seems, that they must all be portrayed as various incarnations of the Iron Lady – formidable, forever, unshakeable. In some ways, even in this episode, Catherine herself leans into this idea. After all, she dresses in a male soldier’s uniform to ride out at the head of her army and welcome Potemkin home from (yet another) war. She accepts the accolades of her people as her due and right. But she’s also a woman with needs, anxieties and desires of her own, and Catherine the Great doesn’t think it makes its leading lady look weak to show us those things.

Of course, part of that is likely due to Mirren herself, who gives Catherine’s most placid utterances a half dozen layers as easily as she breathes.

But it’s also because this was a woman who contained multitudes. And the series’ second episode shows off the contradictions at her center as she shelved her more liberal dreams to free the serfs in the name of battling the Turks on her border and keeping the loyalty of her army. She executes another pretender as mercifully as she can, but threatens her own son when it sounds as though he’s thinking of following in his mother’s coup-stirring footsteps. What pieces of herself will she have to barter away next?

New episodes of Catherine the Great air Mondays at 10pm on HBO.