To this point, Spartacus’ plot, in as far as it follows the life of the eponymous character, has been about reuniting with his wife Sura. Everything he’s done, everything he’s sacrificed or debased himself for, it has all been in service of living long enough to rescue his wife from slavery. If he can get himself out as well, all for the better. If not, so be it.
But without Sura to live for, who is Spartacus? And what does he have to live for? After Sura’s death, what happens next?
The only person who seems completely sure of the answer is Batiatus, and of course, he would be, having engineered this turn of events entirely to force Spartacus into the life of a champion gladiator. For Spartacus’ benefit, he allows a funeral that even he and Lucretia attend (albeit from the villa’s balcony), then curses himself for not making more effort to keep her safe, such as not allowing Barca his freedom to escort Sura. It’s a good use of dramatic irony, and Spartacus doesn’t even seem to think of blaming his dominus for what’s happened, focusing it clearly on Glaber and the bandits who attacked her.
Through these early episodes, Whitfield has played Spartacus with a fairly cocksure energy. He may be down and out, but he’s often figuring out his next move. But here he’s hit his limit. He has no idea what his next move is, because he has no goal.
Instead, he contemplates his suicide. For a show that has an earned reputation for showing everything, it’s worthy to note that this is done fairly subtly. We get Spartacus examining the knife he stole from the magistrate’s son (I forget both their names). We get him examining the cliff edge. When Pietros, believing himself to be abandoned by Barca and now prey to Gnaeus’s violent rapes, hangs himself, Varro notes he’s “freed himself.” It’s an echo of the line Batiatus delivered as he slit Barca’s throat: “there’s your freedom.” And it drives home the real truth of being a gladiator so talented and successful that you can purchase your freedom: you can’t. It’s a pipe dream to keep you satisfied with your lot.
Batiatus seems to have drunk his own Kool-aid as well, or at least will not tolerate dissent. When Spartacus takes revenge for Pietros by hurling Gnaeus over the cliff, Batiatus rages at him that his “generosity has been boundless.” Hannah plays this with no sense of guile whatsoever, as though Batiatus pulled it straight from the tip of his brain without thinking, and of course, to his eyes, it’s true. To him, Spartacus is a slave who he has tried to placate with nice things and keeps demanding things. Not just a wife returned, but a living wife returned.
It’s not just Spartacus who are struggling to accept the new realities. Varro’s wife Aurelia appears with his young son, only to explain that she has been raped by a man she thought was a friend helping her through as Varro’s winnings aren’t enough to pay his debts and provide for his family and is now pregnant. Varro immediately goes into a victim-blamey spiral, angry at her for not fighting back (prompting my fiancee, listening nearby, to exclaim, “wow, fuck that guy”). It’s a pretty stark shift for Varro, maybe the cruelest thing he’s done. He immediately compounds it, by raging to Spartacus that he should forget everything beyond the ludus and then falling into gambling.
Even Batiatus has trouble accepting his place. When Lucretia scolds him for not revealing his plan to kill Sura, he tells her he desired to keep her hands clean, and from this point on he plans to return to less violent activities. Why? Because he hopes to someday rise higher. Not a villa, but a palace. Not a lanista, but a Senator of Rome. It’s a pretty ambitious climb for a guy who not two episodes ago couldn’t even afford to buy more wine.
And last but not least, there’s Crixus. Finally awake after suffering through a fever in addition to his wounds, he finds that Barca’s free, Spartacus is a champion, and he’s too feeble to rise out of bed. Even the fact that he’s got Naevia with him (on Lucretia’s unsuspecting orders) can’t shake him out of his funk. He observes he’s “awoken to a world of shit.”
What Crixus does have is an unshakable surety in his place, though. When Spartacus arrives, bloody from Batiatus hitting him in the head with a heavy ringed hand, and explains he’s killed Gnaeus, Crixus chews him out for killing a “brother.” There’s no stronger bond for Crixus than the one between gladiators. Everything else is just pointless noise, and the noise of the arena, and those who understand its glories, are what matters. It’s a step back, frankly. Before Theokoles, Crixus seemed to have begun to understand there was something to live for beyond the sands, but with the arena taken away from him, he falls right back into that old habit, spurning Naevia’s attentions to mope about not being able to fight.
Spartacus eventually seems to reconcile himself to his fate, but it comes at the cost of his sense of self-preservation. Throughout the show, he’s scoffed at the idea of the gods, evincing an almost atheist viewpoint. Now, though, based on his memories of Sura and her beliefs, he resolves to accept them. But not only that, embrace them. He surrenders the knife to Batiatus in a show of goodwill, then demands that the combat (which recreates a Roman consul’s victory of a tribe of fellow Thracians) be him alone against six prisoners, rather than him and four other gladiators. Then, in the fight proper, he lets one of the prisoners throw a javelin at him, spreading his arms, welcoming his fate. Of course, it misses him (he’s wearing historical plot armor), and we’re off to the slaughter races, which this time features exceptionally poor CGI effects.
I think the final scene lands differently depending on how aware you are of it. As of this writing, the original Spartacus, Kirk Douglas, has just died, so the “I am Spartacus!” declaration is counterpointed by the relative freshness of that scene in the Kubrick film in my head, and it feels less like a homage than a very strange thing for him to scream to the crowd. When I first saw it, I believe I was relatively delighted with it, taking the altruistic declaration of the film and twisting it as Spartacus kills his old self and replaces it with his new one, but it just didn’t connect that way with me on rewatch.
Maybe a bit on the nose that he hallucinates the last prisoner as himself, while the crowd chants “kill, kill, kill,” though.
Sex!
We have one sex scene here, done in flashback at the start of the episode, of Sura and Spartacus’ first sexual encounter, which reveals her deep faith in the gods and also reinforces the idea that they were meant to be. “You’ll never love another woman,” Sura tells him the gods told her. Cheeky, on your first date. Especially because he didn’t even know her name. It’s lengthy, but its earliness in the episode really makes it feel like they just needed to get it out of the way, to fill their quota for explicit sex scenes. Seems like the previous episode featuring an orgy ought to buy you room for story, but then again they filled that orgy with narrative.
- Man butt: 2
- Lady butt: 0
- Frontal nudity (men): 1
- Frontal nudity (women): 2
Stray observations
- The hunt for the Legatus Glaber’s favor isn’t over—Lucretia tells Illythia the House of Batiatus is looking for a patron to share in its good fortune.
- Apparently Capua finds only the most muscle-bound of prisoners to fight in the arena.
- The crowd started throwing things onto the sands in anger at Spartacus’ apparent initial refusal to fight and all I could think was “and here come the pretzels!”
- There’s been a running thing about Spartacus’ name not actually being Spartacus, but the show refusing to do something as brave as actually tell you it, so characters just cut him off if he tries to speak it, as when he goes to introduce himself to Sura in the opening flashback and she interrupts to say, “everyone knows who you are.” I will not miss this convention.
- Doctore figures out, from questioning, that Naevia and Ashur’s stories about Barca’s passage to freedom don’t add up. Naevia gets out of it by observing that any answers she gives could get her killed, but then Doctore drops her name to Ashur. Sherlock Holmes, he’s not.
- Doctore also tells Spartacus that he figured out he was trying to escape in the last episode, and that if he ever tries it again, he’ll have to kill Doctore, rather than leaving him alive.
- Illythia Putdown of the Week: She wasn’t on the finest form this week. We had a couple of snide remarks to Mercato, the sponsor of the battle, about Spartacus getting all the glory. The best I got is, to Lucretia, “Pity Crixus won’t take the sands in Mercato’s games. I’d like to see him ram his sword home.” Innuendo!