#don't get me wrong tobg sucked but at least it lasted only two hours and not EIGHT

[redrosewhiterose]

The Spanish Princess Season 1: A ridiculously long review

I finally watched The Spanish Princess, everyone's favorite hate watch of 2019-2020. The last instance (thank God) of the infamous Gregoryverse, this series is a sequel (kinda?) of the mini series The White Princess, who in turn is a sequel of The White Queen. It is also... something else entirely.

Everything bad about this show has already been said: it's trash, it's full of misoginy, it's inaccurate in a way that's offensive to the people it portrays, the characters are unlikeable, the pacing is terrible, the costumes are dreadful, it's just a really bad written TV show. I am saying nothing new. And yet, I felt compelled to write a review, because I think that the reason why this show was terrible in a way that neither TWQ nor TWP were can be traced back to a single thing: ageing up Prince Henry. This had such a domino effect that created a problem that wasn't present in the previouse series, therefore making it bad even for the standards of the Gregoryverse. The problem being that Catherine's story doesn't work at all with Henry being of marriageable age.

Hear me out: had Henry been older when Arthur died, he would have married Catherine the moment their parents made the new agreement, and that would've been it. The precarious situation in which she ended during her years as a widow simply wouln't have happened. You can't have that story with growed up Henry. Or at least, you can't have that story while still making sense. And this was the main problem: they still wanted that story, so they made it and it made no sense. And I'm not even talking about not making sense because it's not historically accurate, just not making sense within the shows' universe.

Let me give you an example: in The White Princess it was stablished that the Infanta's hand was a prize worth killing for. Actually, even if we ignore TWP, in the first episode of this show they established that Catherine and Arthur's marriage was crucial because Spain was an extremely rich and powerful country and England a broke and backward one (pretty sure this is untrue). Not only that, even Catherine's Lancaster ancestry (namely being a great-great-great granddaughter of John of Gaunt) and the exacutions of the Earl of Warwick and Perkin Warbeck were brought up. She is important and key to the Tudors, they need her. And yet the second Arthur dies suddenly she is useless, everyone hates her and wants to inmmediately get rid of her. Why? Why are they going against everything that was established one episode ago?? It makes no damn sense.

The show tries to give very lame excuses to this: from Elizabeth of York having a prophecy (???) about Catherine and Prince Henry's marriage being doom to produce no sons to Margaret Beaufort just hating her for no reason at all. But the real answer is painfully crystal clear: Henry is old enough to marry Catherine. They have to invent these stupid reasons and contradict their own logic because if they didn't, there wouldn't be any conflict in the show. So now it's not that Catherine can't remarry Henry because he is a literal child so she has to wait, and during those years of waiting the political landscape of Europe changes so much that she is no longer an attractive bride for England anymore, but that the King's Mother is evil and gets in the way of Catherine and Henry's true love because she doesn't like her!

Which leads me to the second biggest problem of the show: Margaret Beaufort being the main villain makes no fucking sense. I know that Philippa Gregory has a personal vendetta against her, and that these trashy adaptations do nothing but further the slander towards Margaret but MY GOODNESS the way this series goes above and beyond to paint her as evil is just vile. And a problem, because it doesn't work. Take The White Queen: since we followed characters from different factions, while there were "evil" characters, there weren't really villains, just people who ended up in the opposite sides of the battlefield. And that worked because they all strived for the same prize, the English throne, and put their lives in line for it. In The White Princess our main villains are the Duchess of Burgundy and Perkin Warbeck (although here he is actually Richard, Duke of York), and once again, it works because they want to depose our main characters and take revenge against them (no matter how much Emma Frost and co tried to make us believe that Warbeck was good and loved his sister, there is no way that he was just going to let go his nephews as if nothing lol). Meanwhile, in The Spanish Princess the main villain is Margaret Beaufort, because she wants to... send Catherine back to Spain because she has an irracional hatred towards her. That's it. That is literally the biggest danger Catherine faces: that she may be sent back home.

It just doesn't work. We went from pretenders to the throne that put our main characters' lives at risk to grandmother-in-law from hell doesn't like our protagonist. The stakes are so low it's ridiculous. And it's even more jarring when we all know were this is going. Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York may be more unknown to the general public, but most people have at least a vague idea of who Catherine of Aragon was. Every episode's cliffhanger after episode 2 it's "Oh no, something happened that will prevent Catherine from marrying Prince Harry!! Will she ever become Queen now??" and it's really stupid because the answer is yes, of course she is going to become Queen, she is Wife Number 1, divorced, you literally sold this show as the story of Henry VIII's first and true love. We know that. There is nothing engaging in watching a show that drags the unavoidable for six episodes and give us nothing else.

Because even though this show really wants you to feel sorry for Catherine and root for her, it also has a weird reluctance to actually showing us Catherine struggling with her undefined status after Arthur's death. Everyone is rude to her! She has to choose between old king Henry and his young son! Her mom wants her to go back home to live like a princess! She got send to a small apartment! She doesn't know if Harry truly loves her! And it goes on and on until she marries Henry. And yes some of these things are kinda bad, but they never feel... actually difficult? Like you never feel that Catherine is going through a hard time, because the show never pushes her too much out of her confort zone. This comes directly from the already mentioned biggest problem of ageing up Henry, because now Catherine isn't in a limbo in which she has no idea what's going to be of her for seven years, but only for a couple of months. For real, there isn't any indicator that even a season has passed, since the weather never changes. This season might as well take place in a single month for all we know.

The series also has a very anti-Tudor sentiment, which was also present in the two previouse instance of the franchise, but here comes off as weird: we are meant to see the Tudors, personified by Margaret Beaufort, as tyrants, impostors and simply unworthy of rulling England. King Henry is an uncapable ruler dominated by his ruthless mother (remember the whole character arc he went in TWP in which he separate himself from the influence of his mother? no? well, neither did the screenwritters) and the whole country hates them. Edmund de la Pole, the Yorkist pretender of the hour, lurks through out the entire season, but no one actually cares except for Margaret Beaufort and sometimes King Henry (and that's bad for some reason). It's just weird how he isn't threatening at all, given that it is crucial for our protagonist that the Tudors remain in power. But no, the screenwritters love the Yorks so much that even when de la Pole should be the greatest concern to Catherine, given that all the trouble she is going through to marry Prince Henry would be for nothing if his family gets deposed, he is merely Margaret Pole's friendly cousin that wants to help her by overthrowing the tyranic Tudors. Maybe it's just me, but I found strange how we are still asked to dislike the Tudors while simultanously root for our protagonist to marry into said family.

Also, another thing that I think was a failure is the fixation on Catherine lying about having consummated her marriage to Arthur. I don't think the real Catherine lied, but that's not the point: it is yet one more thing that doesn't work because of how known Catherine's story is. Episode after episode, there's always some variant of "Oh no, Catherine lied about being a virgin!! Will this ever come back at her??" and the answer once again is yes, we all know this. And it's also just annoying hindsight, because whether Catherine slept with Arthur or not wasn't important until Henry decided to base the annulment of his marriage to her in that fact. I think Catherine lying would've work better if we, the audiance, were made to believe that nothing happened until the season finale. You know that final conversation in which Catherine swore to Henry that she never slept with Arthur? Just imagine the impact that the scene could've had if it was revelead right then that Catherine did consummated her first marriage, and that she had been lying to everyone, the audiance included.

Overall, I actually think that Catherine's widowhood could have made for an interesting TV series, but the way they handle it just resulted in an uninteresting, predictable, utterly boring show. That was my biggest surprise watching this: how dull it is. For all their problems, TWQ and TWP were very entertaining series, and even when I was yelling at my scream for something awfully inaccurate that was happening, I was engaged in the story. Here I got bored in episode four, and I continued to be bored until the end. The story really has nothing to offer: just going on circles about whether Catherine will marry Henry or not, while the characters remain exactly as they were at the beginning. I could and I have more to say about this disastrous show, but the review is already ridiculously long, and anyway I'm not bringing anything new to the table. I am a completionist, so even though I didn't enjoy this series at all, I will watch the second season. Oh well, at least I'll get to see more Hot Thomas Boleyn, so it won't be all suffering.

My score: somehow they managed to make a TV show that makes The Other Boleyn Girl (2008) look like a not terrible movie in comparison