Musketeers Don’t Die Easily picks up the threads left by last week’s foiled assassination of the Queen, albeit after a period of some months. The Cardinal needs to cover his tracks and by so doing sets Milady the titular task of killing the Musketeers. Putting aside the fact that in seventeenth century France you probably could quite easily kill four Musketeers, the story combines betrayal, conspiracy and subterfuge to defeat Milady, expose the Cardinal and be home in time for tea and medals.

The façade of D’Artagnan turning against the Musketeers worked well, and despite the obvious nature of the ploy, it was a little disappointing to see it being dropped so early in the episode. However, the overall pace and sense of consequence gave the episode some of the weight that’s been sorely missing at other times in the series. This did feel like a season’s final episode and the stakes were appropriately upped.

This was Milady’s episode and Maimie McCoy is finally brought out of the shadows to takes a central and direct role in the proceedings. The series has carefully developed her relationship with the Cardinal and we much better appreciate the threat that he represents to her life. Filling in a little of her background worked well, we understand the lengths she has to go in order to protect what she has but it also gives her an injection of sympathy without which Athos’ final judgement would seem completely inappropriate.

Musketeers Don’t Die Easily therefore represents a good, but not wholly satisfying conclusion on her season’s involvement (I don’t quite buy that we’ve seen the last of her). McCoy has consistently done well to mix seduction, innocence and violence into what could be so easily a pantomime villain. In many ways she is the Cardinal’s most direct weapon, and if anyone could kill the Musketeers you would believe she could.

That’s where the story lets her down, because instead of doing it herself – and we certainly know that she’s both capable of the planning and the action – she goes to someone who is everything she is not, brutish and direct, i.e. the exact kind of person who would find it difficult to kill the Musketeers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always good to see Sean Pertwee pop up but he was playing the role that Vinnie Jones played a couple of episode back, that of the generic bad guy with the penchant for violence. Having taken this route, it never really felt like the Musketeers were in any danger and so the episode was a little light on tension, especially towards the end. I also feel that we sold short on her final scenes, I get that letting her go was an ideal and somewhat easy way to leave the door open for her possible return, but even with the little sympathy we might have felt, it robbed us of any satisfaction that she was going to be held to account for her actions,.