Gunpowder: Season 1

On the one hand, I had absolutely no surface-level interest in "Jon Snow makes a BBC/HBO miniseries about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605," especially not this late in the year with so much other good television to catch up on in such a short amount of time. But on the other hand, this was only three episodes long, and HBO generally doesn't sign off on shitty, half-assed movies or miniseries, so I gave it a whirl. (Even with HBO dreck like Entourage and Ballers, the problem isn't that the shows are executed in a low quality manner; it's that there isn't any meat or substance to them to begin with. I have no doubts that Westworld, which I generally hated, was not the exact version of itself that it wanted, and chose, to be.)

So yeah, we've got Kit Harrington as the main character here, which surprisingly isn't Guy Fawkes. It's Robert Catesby, the chief architect of the failed plan to blow up the anti-Catholic King of England and his House of Lords. He's... pretty much Kit Harrington, really. Not quite as sullen as Jon Snow, but still all weary looking, still ready to sacrifice himself for a greater good. Liv Tyler is also here along with a standard smattering of half-recognizable British faces and names.

The thing I'll always remember about Gunpowder isn't the story of the actual plot and its failure, but the brutal torture scenes it included. Make no mistake - people are horrible to their captives and prisoners, and they used to be even more horrible. The earliest and worst of these torture scenes comes when an old woman is executed in the public square for the crime of harboring Catholic priests. She is stripped naked and tied down to the floor before several enormous weights are dropped onto her one by one until her spine cracks. Holy shit! Then one of the priests is also slowly and painfully killed; he is hung from the neck, but before he can die he is dropped to the ground and then disemboweled with a hot knife. Then his arms and legs are all hacked off by an axe before finally, mercifully, so is his head. It's all some real harrowing fucking shit, I tell you!

I go back and forth on this kind of torture porn in historical docudramas. Part of me agrees than in order to best understand what would motivate a guy like Robert Catesby to conspire to commit regicide, it's important to see the heinous and horrible acts endorsed by King James I. But another part of me agrees that, holy shit, this is some really, really off-putting stuff, enough to turn a lot of people away form an otherwise mildly interesting and important history lesson.

Still, ultimately, the torture scenes were what'll always stick with me from Gunpowder, an otherwise fairly forgettable footnote to television this year where there's no happy ending, and the good guys just sort of lose and lose horribly and go down in history as the bad guys. 2017, everyone!