Episode Title: "Pharsalus"
Original Air Date: October 9, 2005
Episode Grade: C
"Pharsalus" is a perfect example of what we might call a "strategic anti-climax." There are moments in a story that an audience can recognize as momentous and epochal, especially when the story is based in well-known history. These moments present certain challenge and expectations.
Instead of taking these challenges head-on, the strategic anti-climax deliberately sidesteps them, disposing of the crucial event in a cursory fashion. The focus is placed on the lead up to, or aftermath of, the incident and how it shapes the characters involved.
There can be thematic reasons for this, such as an attempt to emphasize the importance of all the little things that contribute to the large event. In comedies, the strategic anti-climax can be played for laughs. In skillful hands, it's a storytelling trope that puts the audience off-balance by subverting its expectations.
"Pharsalus," on the other hand, is strategic anti-climax as cop out. It dispenses with its titular battle in a way that betrays a contempt for the audience and doesn't do nearly enough in the aftermath to make up for it. There's enough in the closing moments of this episode to keep it from qualifying as a true disaster, but it remains the worst episode of the series so far.
There are two choices here that creak and squeal like a rusty gate. In the first, the episode starts by showing Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus stranded on an island somewhere in the Aegean, most of the 13th Legion having been drowned by the massive storm we saw last week.
In the second, "Pharsalus" elects to elide The Battle of Pharsalus, in which Caesar destroyed Pompey's forces. The "battle," such as it is, is represented with a soundless, generic, 15-second vignette in which a few soldiers swing swords at each other and scream menacingly. This being finished, we cut back to an ever-so-slightly bruised Caesar riding triumphantly into camp.
And so Rome handles the first truly momentous, epic moment of its run: by waving at it from a passing car. I eagerly await the moment where the show grapples with Caesar's assassination by having Pullo say, "Hey, remember when those dudes stabbed Caesar last week? That was weird, wasn't it? Anyway, I like having sex."
Let's be honest about what this is: a bullshit-powered plot machine. Rome was famous as one of the most expensive shows of its day, but it has shown no stomach for shelling out the money required to truly do justice to a battle like Pharsalus. This episode is an attempt to make a virtue out of a necessity, and the necessity is an inability or unwillingness to grapple with the true scope of the moment.
Pullo and Vorenus, for their part, are stranded on their island so that they can't take part in the "battle," such as it is. If our two main characters were present the show wouldn't be able to get away with ignoring Pharsalus; the audience would expect to see the two in action. We wouldn't accept breezing past a moment that presented so much danger to Pullo and Vorenus. Throw a shipwreck at them, however, and the details of the battle become irrelevant.
Of course, the shipwreck plays a more important role in the story: bringing Titus and Pullo into contact with a defeated Pompey. The two escape their island by building a raft out of the corpses of their comrades, which is terribly innovative and interesting to anyone who hasn't read Watchmen.
Titus and Vorenus wash up on the beach right in front of Pompey and his family, who are fleeing to a Greek port where they can take ship to Egypt and try to raise more forces. This is, again, an utterly ridiculous contrivance, a deus ex machina so ridiculous that it's partly redeemed later in the episode when Caesar lampshades its ridiculousness by suggesting these two men must have gods on their side.
For all that there is in this development to set one's eyes a-rollin', it does at least bring us the few moments that prevent the episode from a complete collapse.
Kenneth Cranham hasn't had much to do so far as Pompey, but he shines in his final episode. "Pharsalus" does well when it is exploring a defeated and humbled Pompey, and it is at its best when Pompey is interacting with Vorenus.
There are some cursory attempts to raise questions about power and influence in these post-Pharsalus scenes. Pompey's servants and soldiers all flee, one of them stealing the jewelry from his wife's neck as she sleeps. The guide and protector who's left, a creepy fellow named Lysandros (with a bitchin' metal nose), is impudent almost to the point of mutiny, harshly inquiring about his fee and refusing to move on to the Greek port when Pompey demands it.
Cranham handles all of this with a heartbreaking mix of wounded dignity and resigned acceptance, and he takes advantage of his first real chance to imbue the character with something more than simplistic arrogance. And Rome doesn't allow Pompey too unrealistic a transformation; he shows a flash of the old arrogance when explaining Pharsalus to Vorenus, defending his strategy as "right" while blaming its failure on the "cowards" in his army.
Vorenus, who had initially taken custody of Pompey after killing Lysandros, decides to release Pompey. He later tells Caesar that he didn't think a "broken" Pompey was a threat, what with his watery eyes and shaking hands, but his explanation to an aghast Pullo is a little different. The traditionalist, honor-bound Vorenus just doesn't think a man such as Pompey Magnus deserves to be trussed up and delivered like a slave to Caesar. It's a reasonable explanation that's consistent with what we know of Vorenus.
In the end, of course, all Vorenus does is give Pompey the freedom to die on the Egyptian shore. It's a moment that's handled with the kind of unsparing directness that I can only wish the episode had displayed with the Battle of Pharsalus.
For all of the good work turned in by Cranham and Kevin McKidd, "Pharsalus" remains an utterly disappointing and uninspiring episode of television. Yes, the scope and size of this moment is massive and difficult to cover. But it's a task Rome gave itself, and the magnitude of the moment should give the show an extraordinary amount of pitch and drama.
Instead, Rome opted out of the moment, and in doing so betrayed a crippling lack of ambition and creativity.
Notes
- The other significant plotline here is Atia dispatching a reluctant Octavia to ask Servilia for some men to guard the house. This leads, as it so often does, to a lesbian affair. I assume this will eventually prove to be part of Servilia's revenge plot, but right now it's just manipulative.
- There's a really good scene before the "battle" in Pompey's camp. Pompey wants to hound Caesar into a hunger-driven surrender without offering battle, but Cato, Cicero and Scipio play on Pompey's ego and talk him into an "honorable" battle.
- Caesar's reason for giving battle with his hungry, desperate troops: "We must win or die. Pompey's men have other options."
- Cicero and Brutus surrender to Caesar, who has a shockingly joyous reaction to seeing the two Senators.
- Ciaran Hinds is good in relatively limited work here. He's charming with Brutus and Cicero and furious with Lucius Vorenus.
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