This review contains spoilers. At the opening of the episode, Paris and Helen get married, and quite a lot is made of this throughout. Menelaus refuses to accept this marriage, which is unsurprising, as in ancient Greece, women did not have the right to divorce their husbands. Men could send their wives back to their fathers and divorce them, but women had no such right. So technically Menelaus is correct, Helen is still his wife (as much as viewers are probably more likely to take Paris’ and Helen’s side on that one). The wedding tells us something about how Paris and Helen, and indeed the Trojans more generally, view their relationship, but is a slightly odd choice in the middle of the war, as the Greeks will never accept it. The real benefit of a setting like a siege is that you can spend plenty of time having characters sit down and talk to each other – because they have nothing else to do – and that allows the audience to get to know them better, something this series desperately needs. And indeed, in this episode, we do start to get to know some of these characters better. Although we are still told rather than shown that Andromache treats Helen like an enemy, her struggles to have a baby humanise her a bit, and their later conversation tells us a lot more about both characters than we’ve had a chance to hear before now. Priam credits Greek strategy entirely to Odysseus, which tells us something about how sharp both men are. Paris is working hard to redeem himself by joining in manual labour and using his knowledge of the local hills to open up a supply line. We also learn a lot more about Hector, partly from his talk with Paris about marriage, but even more from his actions after he is basically told to murder his brother and fids himself unable to do so. Achilles gets a bit more characterisation as well. His refusal to play fight and his genuine belief that if he takes Helen back to Menelaus, the war will end, say a lot about him, though his creepy behaviour towards Helen does not work in his favour. He does crack an actual joke though, and as it’s the only one in the episode, it’s very welcome. We also meet his companion Patroclus, but the exact nature of their relationship, which varies in different versions of the ancient myths, is left unclear. They are of the same ethnicity, which might be intended to imply that they are related, but not necessarily, as neither is related to Nestor (or Aeneas, or Zeus for that matter). Some characters, however, are still basically names with swords. Poor Alfred Enoch got better characterisation playing Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter films than he does here as Aeneas.
