The Borgias brilliant finale
The Borgias comes to a stately, sumptuous and surprising close in a second-season finale titled, appropriately and somewhat ironically, The Confession.
True to time-honoured TV tradition, the closing moments are not to be missed. There are cliffhangers, and then there are endings calculated to be nearly unforgettable, and tonight’s finale weighs in on the high end of the TV scale. The Borgias’ faithful followers needn’t worry that the story ends here, either: a third season is confirmed. The Machiavellian intrigues of Renaissance Italy will once again warm the hearth of many a Canadian home.
There’s plenty of intrigue to go before then, as it happens. The die is cast, so to speak, early in tonight’s hour. The sanctimonious Savonarola, who spurned Pope Alexander’s (Jeremy Irons) most generous and gracious offer of a cardinalship, saying he would not be bought off at any price, confesses to heresy, and pays an appropriate price that makes the pope’s original offer look like a bargain in comparison.
Meanwhile, in the papal palace, youthful assassin-in-waiting Antonello plots his next move as the pope’s new taster, and a no-longer-so-innocent Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger), feeling the power that comes with being a woman after a lifetime of being dismissed as a girl, chooses her latest suitor. Marriages in papal Rome in the 16th century tended to be arranged through the need for political alliance, but Lucrezia has more of a say now than she ever had before, and she’s determined to make her voice heard. Her father the pope and her brother Cesare (Francois Arnaud) are no longer knocked off-balance by her assertiveness as easily as they once were, but she’s still capable of surprising them.
One of the many pleasures in watching The Borgias this season, aside from the obvious — witnessing the growing charisma and confidence of Arnaud and Grainger in their roles as scheming, murderous young lovers — has been the emergence of peripheral historical figures in the tale, notably Niccolo Machiavelli (Julian Bleach), who’s become increasingly key to The Borgias’ tale of court intrigue and skulduggery in recent episodes. This season has been deeper, richer, more profound and more meaningful than The Borgias’ first year, when Neil Jordan’s period drama was often — perhaps unfairly — compared with The Tudors, its spiritual and stylistic antecedent. Now, there is no comparison. The Borgias has elevated the concept of TV costume epic to a whole new level of drama and intrigue.
Anyone who has watched even a minute of The Borgias this past season knows what to expect from the finale: cold reason, hot, passionate lovemaking, murder most foul and scheming on a (literally) Machiavellian scale. Here’s what you might not expect, though: moments of grace, elegance, dignity and a haunting, almost elegiac quality at times. It’s one of the most gripping, hypnotic and compulsively watchable dramas on television today.
(Bravo – 8 p.m.)