‘The Serpent Queen’ Season 2 Saved the Best For Last

By Chris Revelle | TV | September 3, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | September 3, 2024 |

Well then! It took all season, but The Serpent Queen finally relocated its fangs and venom in time for its finale. The second season of the Starz series seemed to save its best stuff for the feature-length finale. The Serpent Queen brought a lot of new games to the table this time around, and taken together, the series presented a mixed bag of peaks and valleys. The series was never especially beholden to the history it spun yarns about, but this season, the show gave us a profusion of people that didn’t exist and things that didn’t happen. The Serpent Queen also meandered its characters around on a game board with seemingly no unified design until it suddenly brought its threads together in a majorly satisfying 90ish minutes of television. After spending a great deal of the season acting more subdued and melancholy than usual, Catherine put back on her finest scheming gown and visited justice and mortification upon all who stood in her way. If only she had done so sooner and, more importantly, if only Minnie Driver’s sublime Queen Elizabeth had been around to see it. The Serpent Queen giveth and she taketh away.

Beware, beyond this point, spoilers abound.

I was getting a bit worried about The Serpent Queen. The first season was a scream, an arch and dry-witted palace intrigue show that wasn’t afraid to show us the young heir to the French throne having Bible study-themed sex with his mistress who went insane from ingesting gold. The second season went in a more downbeat direction with the aforementioned Sad Catherine not being nearly schemey enough, second prince Anjou strangling a pastor, the Duke of Guise strangling his secret boyfriend, both of Catherine’s daughters Margo and Elizabeth being married off into joyless political marriages, and “Protestant Saint” Sister Edith running the most unfun cult to ever grace television. There was also a strange new ambivalent emphasis on incest this season. It’s a seemingly open secret amongst the family that King Charles is in love with his sister Margo, who manipulates his feelings for her when she needs something. Catherine meets Alessandro, a half-brother she didn’t know she had while visiting Italy and she’s very attracted to him (though nothing sexual happens). The show doesn’t really have a stance on this that I could detect and I suppose it’s just there for shock value, but it felt like such a weird thing to invoke and then do so little with it in the story.

There was also a bit of subplot-creep this season with way too many side characters competing for time and with time stretched so thin, most of the subplots barely moved an inch. I was happy to see Aabis again, but she was shunted into a truncated subplot where she joins Edith’s cult and then just dies without much resolution. Anjou’s subplot had some promise with him wrestling with how his queer identity fits into royal expectations, but once Anjou choked a pastor to death, all he did was brood. It wasn’t all grim; Samantha Morton was steadily great as Catherine and Minnie Driver delivered a perfectly unhinged Elizabeth. I wish we could have had more Elizabeth in the mix. She was a viperous delight who brought out the best in Catherine. Elizabeth’s monologue in which she urges Catherine to get the Valois court’s shit together was a high point of not just the season, but the series.

Speaking of high points, in its finale we see The Serpent Queen riff on the ole wedding banquet mass-assassination trick. Broadly speaking, we get the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre but with Edith’s cultists instead of Huguenots. Catherine comes back to her senses and seemingly takes Elizabeth’s advice when she sets in motion a wickedly satisfying gambit to stymie each and every one of her opponents. Catherine’s made a deal with Sister Edith to make her horde stand down and avert a war between Catholics and Protestants: Margot will marry her cousin Henri (a follower of Edith’s) and Catherine will sign her regency over to Edith. Jeanne d’Albret (Queen of Navarre and Edith-devotee) had expressed some reservations about her son Henri marrying Margo when she heard Margo had been sullied by the Duke of Guise. Catherine placates her with an invitation to some incognito shopping, but when Jeanne shows up, our favorite poisoner Angelica baits Jeanne into putting on a pair of deadly gloves that kill her on the spot.

Once everyone is seated at the wedding banquet table, Edith demands her regency title. In response, Catherine slits Edith’s throat and strolls out of the banquet hall as Anjou leads a group of masked killers to massacre Edith’s cultists with the assistance of Catherine’s sexy lady spy squad. The killers repeat the words “the House of Guise says hello” to implicate the Guises and set them against the Bourbons. This same purge claims Montmorency (who had dedicated himself to Edith) and very nearly claims Henri, but Margo intervenes. She doesn’t care about Henri, but she really wants to defy Catherine. Later Catherine visits Rahima who was locked in her room during the slaughter and is to be punished for boning Catherine’s half-brother (sigh) before Rahima reveals she’s pregnant. She’s carrying Medici blood. There’s also this great moment where Henri reveals himself to be an emotionless creep with only a desire for power and its games to drive him. The scene where the two Bourbon oafs are shown to have somehow survived, I guffawed. What a wild deployment of the reset button. It’s a fantastic episode.

The episode was so good it made me wonder where any of this was in the rest of the season. The political apex predator Elizabeth was a delicious frenemy foil to Catherine, but there weren’t many other characters who were so joyously bonkers. Henri showing himself to be a cold political player was fun and maybe if they got to that sooner, he could’ve sowed some worthy chaos. The second season of The Serpent Queen was fine overall and was worth it alone to see Samantha Morton and Minnie Driver face each down, but, unfortunately, it saved all its mayhem for the finale. The operatic, soapy, wicked good time I had watching Catherine wheel, deal, and murder her way through her enemies was missing from too much of the rest of the season. It’s yet to be announced if The Serpent Queen will return for a third season, but if it does, I hope series can trim its subplots, let Catherine be the scheme queen we deserve, and find some pretense to bring back Minnie Driver’s Elizabeth. Especially if she wears this headdress!