Fans of historical French adventurings rejoice, for The Musketeers is soon to be gracing our screens once again.
The ten-part final season begins at 9.30pm on Saturday 28 May on BBC One and changes the gang’s allegiance to the crown, turns their personal lives upside down and compromises their loyalty to those they love, as well as their loyalty to each other.
> Buy the complete Season 1-2 box set on Amazon.
Watch the epic trailer…
While we will be sad to see it go, here are a few things to be excited about in Season 3:
1. Aramis (Santiago Cabrera), who, at the close of Season 2, was last seen giving up Musketeering in order to devote himself to a religious life, spends much of the opening episode wearing a handsome shade of monastery blue. It’s a good look.
2. Unlike the first two seasons, in which there was a single main antagonist, the new run plays with layers of villainy, and a number of antagonists who not only all have nefarious agendas of their own against the good guys, but also don’t necessarily get on with each other, either. Among them is the mysterious and sinister Grimaud, played by Matthew McNulty.
“He’s like a really sort of powerful storm, it’s just waiting to drop,” McNulty says of his character. “And that’s kind of prevalent through the series. It just builds and builds, and then he strikes, and that’s what I kind of loved about it.”
3. The aforementioned Grimaud spends a lot of time with another of the new villains, Feron, played with tremendous wit by Rupert Everett.
“That’s one of the pleasures of working on this, was the amount of time I got to spend with Rupert, because he just brings colour and fun to my kind of deep, dark heaviness,” says McNulty.
4. In spite of the darker moments we’ve been promised in the new episodes, expect some of the joyous, silly fun we’ve come to know and love as well.
The little Dauphin is now a little toddler, looking every bit as adorably regal as you might expect, and his storyline in the first ep is so cute that at the new season’s recent launch in London, the assembled press in attendance let out a collective “aww!”
5. Expect some nudity in the first episode. We won’t say who, or when, or how, but it’s there.
6. Also expect plenty of the joyous fights and adventures that make The Musketeers such fun. As for whether any of these sequences resulted in real-life injuries: “Oh, loads,” says Luke Pasqualino, who plays D’Artagnan.
“It’s hard to distinguish sometimes between doing it for the camera and doing it for real. The stunt guys we work with are so – you give them a little knock, you’re like ‘you ok with that?’ they’re like, ‘no, go!’ They absolutely encourage it. So when you’ve done a couple of takes and you’re into it and your blood’s pumping and everything, and you start throwing your arms around – obviously, it’s all choreographed, but the number of times I’ve caught a stunt bloke in the face with my elbow, it’s crazy. But you get it as well, you know, a sword to the knuckles, a sword to the back of the head, or whatever.”
Sounds like fun, fellas!
7. This season will indeed be the last, and it will be missed, but at least we will be granted a sense of closure by the final episode.
“I think things do have a natural lifespan, and I think, you know, 30 hours in this particular climate is a huge amount of episodic TV to deliver,” says executive producer Jessica Pope.
“And we did want to go out on a high, we wanted to just prove to ourselves we’d done all the biggest stories we could do without then sort of filtering out into something that just repeated itself, really. And the big thing for these guys is that we did know it was the last season, we could play to that, they could write to it. So instead of doing that rather unsatisfying, ambiguous end of every season, of what would happen next, we knew we could do something extraordinary, which we have done in Episode 10, and just give the audience and the fans everything we hope they would want to see in the final episode, and really celebrate all those 30 hours.”
> Buy the complete Season 1-2 box set on Amazon.
Are you looking forward to Season 3? Let us know below…