Historical Drama Review - Reign

I just started watching Reign on Netflix. Like Game of Thrones, I must be the only person on the planet that hasn’t watched this yet. If like me though, you too haven’t joined the rest of the human race in watching this yet, Reign focusses on Mary Queen of Scots' early life in the French court.

Now, I know we have something called creative license and Reign has well and truly embraced creative license. In fact, it rode off into the sunset with creative license, had a wild affair with it, married it, had twenty kids and bought a big house in the country with it. If Reign is loosely (extremely loosely…) based on real life events, someone needs to ring Antonia Fraser urgently and tell her that there is a massive, exciting chapter of her already epic biography on Mary missing.

The costumes do a lot of time travelling. The period they resemble varies from 16th Century, Victorian age to Coast at Debenhams. Maybe some of the cast were on their way to Downton Abbey and entered through the wrong door.

Those four girls that hang around with Mary – who are they? I’m assuming they’re supposed to be the four Marys, except one of them is called Lola. Was Lola a popular name in the 16th century? Was she named after, I don’t know, St.Lola? Maybe Lola, is just her nickname and is short for, erm, Mary?

Mary’s fiancée defies every natural law by reaching puberty before the age of reaching puberty. He’s even got a mistress – some strumpet sneaked into his room wearing a very floral, Edwardian-like gown.

And who is that woman with the bag over her head? Mary even pays homage to Liam Neeson in Taken by telling her “I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, but I will find you and I will take off that silly bag from off your head!” (or something like that).

Mary also gets sweet on someone called Sebastian. Sebastian is played by Torrance Coombes, who we know played Thomas Culpepper in The Tudors and like Culpepper, Sebastian is potentially another royal bit on the side. Sebastian gets all chivalrous with her by telling her not to follow her annoying dog into the woods. If only we knew who Sebastian really was and the important role he played in European history.

The first episode even had a beheading. The victim was some guy called Colin, who was getting sweet on Lola. Both have obviously been brought together by sharing that common ground of owning names which must have also been very popular in the 16th century. Well, damn that puts an end to that romance! I would have loved to have found out what they were going to name their baby!

I do like their interpretation of Catherine De Medici here. All she needs is a couple of horns on her head, a black cloak and wings and she could easily be Catherine De Maleficent. Out of all of the characters, I’m definitely intrigued to see how this character progresses for the rest of the season. Definitely. I got a slight feeling that she might be a bit Badass, but maybe I could be wrong.

I think Reign could potentially be ground breaking in terms of spoilers. Let’s face it, historical fiction doesn’t have spoilers as we know roughly what is going to happen in the middle and the end of the story. With Reign though, I’m not so sure, I think this is possibly the first historical drama that could actually have spoilers – things happening, which you just did not see coming, even after years of reading Fraser, Starkey, or Weir.

I’m not saying it’s rubbish – it’s, well, different - and I will watch all three seasons with a very, very, open mind. It is historical fiction’s answer to Sharknado. I just can’t wait to see what happens next! Please don’t tell me what happens!