They should really call this miniseries War & Peace & Fur Turbans. This week, it brings us a VERY ILL-ADVISED engagement to a total wet noodle, a death, Freemasons, a gambling addiction ruining a family and then a TERRIBLE PERSON refusing to make it right (see the aforementioned engagement), and James Norton doing the following whilst being very very very very handsome: Smiling, crying, dancing, holding a baby, tickling a toddler, eating bread, kissing, wearing a fur turban, wistfully eyeballing a tree, and dressing up like an honest-to-God Disney prince. I bring you that, and more, within. But first, our Obligatory Whizz Through the Plot:
PIERRE: Shoots but does not kill Dolokhov (the one who slept with Pierre’s wife on Pierre’s dining room table), then has a life-crisis that culminates in him becoming a Freemason. (“OH RIGHT this is the one with the FREEMASONS!” is a thing I said to my TV.) He continues to be stuck in an unfortunate marriage to a sex addict even though he’s obviously in love with Natasha.
HELENE: Is a sex addict. However, she is also a sex addict who appears to be banging the Tsar.
DOLOKHOV: Got shot (rather humiliatingly by someone who didn’t even know how a duel worked. Find a place to die where it’s high and dry!) but lived; proposed to a complete limp handshake of a person who turned him down because she’s in love with her dumb cousin; then satisfyingly RUINED the cousin financially in an epic game of cards. Also wears leather pants. I like him now.
NIKOLAI: Loses all his money gambling, refuses to even meet the heiress his mother wants him to marry so he can SAVE THEIR FAMILY, gets engaged to his idiot cousin Sonya after telling her that she should have accepted Dolokhov because he, Nikolai, is the sort who totally falls in and out of love and he’s probably not going to be that into her for very long. Is generally horrible.
SONYA: Don’t get me started.
NATASHA: Falls madly in love with James Norton (who can blame her?) and agrees to a secret, year-long engagement to him while he’s off at a spa. I have a bad feeling about this.
ANDREI: Isn’t dead! See the above re: dead wife, eating bread, eyeballing trees, falling madly in love with Natasha, and being sent to a spa for a year.
