Category: Television

No cold open.  Title card is a man in 1960s or ‘70s clothing writing, “The Ballad of Roger Mac,” which is our episode title. Is this Roger? If so, when? 1771 (finally, we know what year it is!) Hillsborough Roger is singing “Oh, My Darling, Clementine” to Jem, which seemed like an appropriately old-timey song…

No cold open. Title card is a slave powdering a man’s wig. The man wears a creepy cone to protect his face that looks like a cross between one of those old-fashioned plague doctor masks and a dunce cap. Later it becomes clear that this person is Phillip Wylie and that mix is spot-on, frankly.…

Cold open: 1960s Claire in a mostly-empty Catholic church. Book-readers and those attuned to the episode title might surmise that she’s there for the perpetual adoration of the blessed sacrament, though the show doesn’t say that here. My husband thinks Claire’s wig is from “Jackie O: the mature collection.” Claire stands alone in front of…

No cold open this time. Title card is a man’s hand with a fancy ruffled cuff, playing with a coin. Stephen Bonnet. Roger & Co. ride into Brownsville. Roger and Fergus approach the Trading Post on foot. Fergus notices the barrel of a gun sticking out the window. They stop. Roger introduces himself. Man inside…

Cold open: Claire watering her moldy bread. She adopts the Socratic method to avoid Marsali’s questions about how she got this idea in the first place. All this food is under glass, but I seem to remember that in the book she wanted the food open to the air to catch mold spores on the…

Cold open: mob burning someone in effigy, then dragging officials out to the street and tar and feathering them. Murtagh is overseeing the tar & feathering. Right off the bat, this is a brutal episode. “Go to it, lads,” he says, but they’ve already poured burning tar on them, what else? Opening credits: I like…

Here’s how we’re going to do this: I will assume that if you’re reading this, you’ve watched the show. The post is based on notes I took while watching, so events should be mostly in the order they aired. Some scenes are going to get more attention than others. I am not trying to be…