SHE'S TEEN 'ELIZABETH'
Starz drama: season finale a royal rush
OVER the course of the first season of “Becoming Elizabeth” on Starz, we’ve buried Henry VIII, watched Catharine Parr (Jessica Raine) die shortly after childbirth and saw Thomas Seymour (Tom Cullen) beheaded for his brash attempt to kidnap young King Edward VI (Oliver Zetterström).
So, surely, someone major had to pass away in the Season 1 finale — but it’s not the person everyone was expecting.
The series, created by Anya Reiss, follows the tumultuous teen years of Queen Elizabeth I (Alicia von Rittberg). Long before she ascended the throne of England and became one of the most beloved monarchs in Western European history, Princess Elizabeth found herself enmeshed in a dangerous love triangle with her stepmother, Catharine Parr, and her husband Thomas Seymour. Elizabeth believes she and Seymour are in love, only to slowly realize he’s been both abusing her and manipulating her for his own political gain.
In Sunday night’s season finale, Elizabeth finds her place at court shifting as it seems Edward VI might be dying. While the king is on his sickbed, the court makes moves to either put Elizabeth’s Catholic sister Mary (Romola Garai) on the throne or to keep her from it at all costs. As always, Elizabeth attempts to skirt both sides, but it does no good. By the end of the episode, Edward recovers and is horrified to learn how everyone plotted when they thought he’d die. Edward Seymour (John Heffernan) follows his brother to the executioner’s scaffold, while Mary and Elizabeth find themselves cast from the king’s good graces.
“It feels like a really important thing to explore and that thing of everyone showing their cards and everyone’s shown how ruthless they are,” Reiss said. “It’s genuinely history. He was sick ... and he got better. I think if it had been a sudden illness and then he suddenly died, everything wouldn’t have happened the way it did.”
Reiss compared the actions of Mary, Elizabeth and Edward Seymour to the drama in the film “Force Majeur,” where characters learn how they’d react in a catastrophic moment to their deep shame and regret. “Everyone tries to cram it back in the box pretending it didn’t happen,” she said. “Then that’s kind of how
you end up with that conversation on the stairs. It’s like everyone’s laid out their daggers and that’s to go like, ‘I wasn’t going to do anything. Kind of.”
Reiss is referring to the final scene between sisters Mary and Elizabeth, who can’t cram their feelings back in that proverbial box. They have a heated conversation on the stairs outside their brother’s chambers where they commiserate about their newfound lack of power and the fact that maybe they don’t love each other. “It would be the first honest conversation they have,” Reiss said. “It’s really meant to be that last scene where you just suddenly go like, ‘Oh, there’s the Elizabeth we know. There’s the Elizabeth and Mary we know.’”
Reiss said she felt like this was a pinnacle moment for the series and that it had larger implications for how we see women in history beyond Elizabeth I and Bloody Mary — a moment where the two women realize they might just become, like many other princesses in history, mere footnotes.
There’s no word, yet, if “Becoming Elizabeth” will be renewed for a second season. Reiss said she definitely plotted the season finale to “hopefully springboard” into Season 2.
In one major bit of foreshadowing, Lady Jane Grey is hustled up the stairs past Mary and Elizabeth, hinting that Edward’s sisters will be passed over in favor of the seemingly pliable (and Protestant) girl.
“Hopefully we’ve set up quite a savvy and smart Lady Jane Grey with her own set of ambitions and beliefs,” Reiss said. “There’s a school of thought that Lady Jane Grey was just then carried along ... Our Lady Jane Grey will have something to say.”