‘The Bastard Executioner’ Series Premiere Recap: Trading Places

The two-hour Bastard Executioner pilot ends with Wilkin Brattle accepting his new identity as a “punisher” and cleanly hacking off the head of a man. It’s the medieval, Kurt Sutter version of Empire’s Season 1 finale ending: “Game time, bitches.” Wilkin will live as the executioner so he can get close to those he believes killed his wife and unborn child along with most of his village. If you made it to that point, odds are you want to know what happens next. If you didn’t, you likely got lost reading the words “Western Ventrishire” and “Inner Pryceshire,” pondering the mysticism in Wilkin’s dreams, or hearing the sound of Katey Sagal’s accent. Let’s break it down.

Related: Ken Tucker Reviews ‘The Bastard Executioner’

The Past: Wilkin Brattle (Aussie theater actor Lee Jones) was a knight in the charge of King Edward I. If his memories/dreams are to be believed, he was sent to slaughter by his countrymen Ventris (Brían F. O'Byrne) and Milus Corbett (Stephen Moyer) — the latter of whom suggested they fix a massive battle with the Scots to get Wilkin out of the way because he was young, ambitious, and had the king’s favor.

Wilkin overheard the duo discuss the success of their plan as he played dead while they rode through the carnage and decided not to take his body with them for fear he’d be idolized in death. So Wilkin was free to follow the words of the “bright child” who’d appeared to him as he was near death and told him he had a destiny to claim: His savior needed him to lay down his sword and live his life as a different man. That man was a barley farmer in Wales who still has vivid dreams of that day’s tremendous blood splatter set to pseudo heavy metal.

The Present: There really is no quicker way to establish which man we should be rooting for than to show us how he treats his very pregnant wife. Wilkin adored Petra and would’ve gladly given us our first sex scene had she felt up for it. Instead, Ventris, now the power-hungry English baron of the Welsh shire that Wilkin had settled in, treated having sex with the wife who had yet to bear him a child like a chore. God would give them a child in his time, Lady Love (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) told her husband. “Then let God waste his house chasing a barren hole with swollen meat,” Ventris snapped. (And, we’re already okay with him dying.)

The shorthand for telling viewers that a woman is someone you should embrace? Have her treat her handmaiden with respect and kindness — which Lady Love does since they’re old friends — and have her do something unexpected and common to remind herself of the girl she once was. In this case, that’s taking a dip in the sea to remember she’s of the land that her husband rules and why preserving it is worth the sacrifice she made marrying him.

We know Milus — still Ventris’s closest advisor as his Chamberlain — is the character we’re supposed to love to hate for many reasons: 1.) Stephen Moyer is allowed to look as clean and sexy as you possibly can in the 14^th Century. 2.) It doesn’t even rustle Milus when he gets caught having sex in the castle hallways with the young man who wipes Ventris’s bum. He takes his pleasure (and power) wherever he finds it. 3.) He gets the best lines, like “You should find a bath. You reek of s–t… and fear.” And 4.) He has moves so deliciously twisted and controlled — such as wiping a bloody blade on his less bloodthirsty brother’s sleeve (which wasn’t scripted) — that you want him around for a long time despite the death toll.

The character that the verdict is still out on is Sagal’s Annora of the Alders, the mystical healer who it seems will go to any length to keep Wilkin on his “journey” — including having his wife and unborn child murdered by her companion, Kurt Sutter’s Dark Mute, to send him on his war path.

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The Story: It boils down to this: Ventris wanted to keep control of his shire, and that meant building his fortune. He kept increasing the tariffs, and the Welsh rebelled. Some, like the large group led by “The Wolf” (Matthew Rhys), fight for a cause. Wilkin was content with his little band of violent Robin Hoods just doing it to keep food on their neighbors’ tables. Ventris’s tax collector escaped their latest raid and spotted a young trapper (with a sheep fetish) whose beaver pelts were used to identify the area of the shire the hooded men call home. CSI: Ventrishire!

When Ventris and Milus led their men to West River Riding in the dark of night and saw that all the able-bodied men were missing, they knew they’d found the right village. Ventris threatened to slit the throat of the son of Wilkin’s best friend, Toran Prichard (Sam Spruell), so Toran’s wife confirmed the men were the hooded rebels. After Petra pointed out that Ventris’s ranks were only fit to attack women and children, Ventris slit the boy’s throat anyway and told Milus to have everyone killed and the village burned. How much fake blood did they go through shooting this pilot?

Petra ran (cue Milus laughing), and the man who caught her, Leon Tell (Alec Newman), took mercy on her when she pled for the life of her child. He grabbed her cross necklace and told her never to return to the shire or she’d die. Later, someone Petra knew approached her and stabbed her in the stomach. When Wilkin and the men returned, they found the bodies of their families and friends piled high — with Petra and the baby, which had been cut out of her, lying on top. Suddenly the body count on Sons of Anarchy, even in the final season, seemed tame.

If Petra had escaped, Wilkin would have gone looking for her. He wouldn’t have immediately dug up the swords he’d buried with his past and set out for Castle Ventris. Annora needed him to seek revenge with the help of the Wolf and his rebels. They eventually surrounded Ventris and his men for another brutal fight sequence — complete with a severed arm, a crushed head, the trapper knifing someone in the ‘nads, Ventris killing Petra’s father after laughing at him, and, most notably, Toran finishing Ventris off by sending a sword through the top of his head and out of his teeth. It was so gloriously over-the-top you had to laugh after you shouted and/or uncovered your eyes. That’s one of the things Sutter and director/EP Paris Barclay know how to do together — give us layers, even in violence.

Anyone else think of Danny Crowe’s death on Justified (he got a knife up through the chin into his mouth)? Also, why did Sutter have to kill off the hottest guy in Wilkin’s group?

This is where things got good: Ventris had wounded Wilkin and Annora healed him, while also giving him the facial burn of a cross, just like Gawain Maddox (Felix Scott), the journeyman executioner Ventris had conveniently run into before his final battle. Since that executioner — who’d abused his wife and apprentice son, so you know, screw him — had been poetically stabbed through the throat by a boy his son’s age during the brawl, his was the identity Wilkin’s savior needed him to now assume. Annora suggested Wilkin return Ventris’s body to the castle, tell the story from the perspective of that executioner, and then he could leave without a price on his head. Or so he thought…

Slight problem: Milus’s brother (played by Martin McCann), who’d fled the battle after it began, recognized Wilkin and Toran as rebels. Good thing Maddox’s abused wife was so touched by Wilkin’s gentleness and apology that she embraced him as if he was her husband. (Remember Sommersby?) With that decided, Ventris realized his best move was using Wilkin to execute his inept, deserter brother and, in his mind, secure a far more skilled ally. As he’d tell Wilkin later in the chapel, he saw an opportunity to free himself of a problem — kin in a position that could hurt him or that could be used against him. Milus convinced Lady Love to keep the punisher and his friend at Castle Ventris, knowing that if he threatened the innocent wife and children of the real executioner, Wilkin would stay. Having a punisher on the payroll makes Ventrishire look strong and decisive in the wake of Ventris’s death.

In the end, Wilkin had to execute Milus’s brother, and it felt like a play on Braveheart. Instead of an image of the wife appearing to give the man who’d be dying the strength he’d need to succumb with dignity, Wilkin, who’d be delivering the death blow, asked for help and saw an image of Petra and their baby. He walked to them (”Always,” she said), and they were led away by the “bright child.” Wilkin was standing by some of Ventris’s men who were ready to hand him cloths because, in their words, they knew the brother had been full of s–t. Wilkin saw Petra’s necklace on Leon Tell and was so angry and focused, he was able to chop off the brother’s head like a pro. So that’s his new mission: Stay employed at Castle Ventris long enough to get his revenge.

As much we look forward to Wilkin’s wrath and his power play with Milus, what’s exciting is the role Lady Love will play now. It’s obvious Milus and Lady Love don’t see eye to eye on how to rule: he’d rather intimidate and force people into submission while she, rightly, believes you don’t break those who build you up and that there’s nothing more dangerous than a Welshman with nothing to lose. Milus will want her ear like he had Ventris’s, and it’s clear from her time in the chapel with Wilkin that she senses a connection with him. What did she see when she touched the blood of his wound? Was that her delivering a baby that she’s already carrying from Ventris? A baby that she could have with Wilkin? Was it her or Wilkin as a child? Was her father secretly his?

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We know from Sons of Anarchy that Sutter likes to write strong women and drive what seems to be a male-centric story through them. Is it Lady Love who’ll be calling the shots on this show, even more than Annora, the mystical manipulator/spirit guide?

More Questions:

- What is the ultimate destination Annora is guiding Wilkin toward?

- Milus made a joke that his brother was half his blood, a quarter of his brains. It’s a big deal that Wilkin doesn’t know who his father is since the title of the show is The Bastard Executioner. What if they have the same father?!

- How soon will we see Milus have sex again? (Spoiler alert: next week.)

- We saw the real punisher punishing himself at night by burning his chest.  Was that just to show us how much this job weighs on a man? Or will that be something used against Wilkin one day, that his torso doesn’t have those burns?

- How soon will we see The Wolf return? And will he see the advantage of having Wilkin and Toran inside the castle they’re trying to bring down?

- What was that writing all over Annora’s body when she walked up naked to the Dark Mute and helped undress him so they could “ready their faith.” And what does that mean? Sex? But he didn’t necessarily look thrilled about it. What happened to his body? (Burns? What if he’s the father of the real Maddox? Crazy?)

- How much interaction will we see between Wilkin and his wife? Wilkin and his boy? That little smile Wilkin and his “son” shared when the kid said, “Blades have been grinded, sir,” was adorable and almost made you forget how creepy that child’s exposure to torture has been.

- And finally, did those fades to black-and-white before commercial break remind anyone else of NCIS’s black-and-white freeze-frames? We asked Sutter if anyone had told him that show does something similar. His response: “No. You did, f–ker. Do they really?”

The Bastard Executioner airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.