After a chaotic ride that oscillated between ebullient comedy and devastating drama, the third and, as it has lately been announced, final series of Tony McNamara’s The Great has come to an end.
★★★★★
Spoilers ahead, ye be warned.
Season two left us on a wild cliffhanger as Empress Catherine (Elle Fanning) attempted to murder her husband, Peter (Nicholas Hoult), for sleeping with her mother, then sobbed with relief when she realised she had instead stabbed his lookalike, and then had most of her closest friends arrested. Ouch. It made some of the families in House of the Dragon look positively well-adjusted.
The habitual sex, murder, and politics continue into season three, where we find Catherine and Peter trying to repair their marriage and raise their son, all whilst Catherine rules an increasingly fractious Russia.
Without delving into spoilers, the first episode kills off a major character, and the sixth kills off another. Both deaths inspire open-mouthed shock at their suddenness and audacity and they completely shift the dynamic of the series in mere seconds. It’s thrilling stuff, but The Great has always thrived when operating at its most unpredictable.
Season threein particular seems to emphasise the thousand little unpredictabilities of life; how both choice and chance can set your course or set you adrift, or how one path can come to a sudden stop whilst others open up.
It has a less defined trajectory and looser objectives for the characters than the previous series. At first, this makes it feel as though it is lacking direction, yet when the narrative hits freefall in episode six, it becomes clear that the assumed lack of direction is key to the expression of the central themes; those of destiny, choice, and the illusion of control.
Catherine and the numerous other characters that make up this electric ensemble cast are at the whim of chance. After a devastating loss, she grapples with her sense of identity, and the assurance that it is her “great destiny” to rule Russia. She slips and slides from event to event, and Elle Fanning does a phenomenal job of portraying a young woman wading through grief, desperate to regain a sense of control over a life filled with chaos.
Catherine’s transformation from a boundlessly optimistic child, to an idealistic coup leader, to a competent and calculating Empress is a fascinating journey to explore. It is executed so well by Fanning and Tony McNamara that the resigned, fatalistic Catherine we see at the midpoint of season three feels as foreign to the audience as she seems to feel to herself.
However, the highlight of the series is episode eight, ‘Peter and the Wolf’, in which we see the court in mourning. It is a genuinely kind and contemplative portrayal of grief in all its forms, from the mad to the mystifying.
The segment focusing on Elizabeth (Belinda Bromilow), Peter’s aunt, is particularly affecting, aided by a slower pace and more intimate cinematography. Belinda Bromilow explores the nuances of Elizabeth with fluency, her past and position, and her love for Peter and for her country. She tempers Elizabeth’s habitual whimsy with the acceptance that comes with maturity and makes use of moments of stillness, resulting in scenes that are at once beautiful to watch and deeply emotionally resonant.
Elizabeth is world-wise, but not world-weary—a sentiment shared by the show as a whole. The Great acknowledges all the mess that comes with life and manages to both poke fun at and indulge in it with affection rather than cynicism. It is a show with an evident love for the absurdities, eccentricities, and contradictions of people.
The Great exists in a specific niche of television that it carved out for itself. Whimsical, brutal, charming, filthy, and altogether good fun. It treats the past like a paint palette from which to pick and choose exciting colours to remix, and the team behind it clearly relish in this creativity. It has side plots about silly people doing silly things in silly costumes that somehow seem just as important as the weighty, clear-headed observations it makes about class, gender, politics, patriotism, love, and grief.
The Great had a firm sense of identity, perhaps never more prevalent than in season three. It knew how to tell a good story, it knew how to make best use of its exuberant cast of characters, and it knew how to coax a response from the audience and make it seem effortless.
And, like the sound of a shot glass being hurled against a wall, it never failed to shock the viewer as it waded its way through the backstabbings and betrayals of 18th-century Russian court.
Regarding its cancellation, it is necessary first to congratulate the team behind it for managing what few succeed at—creating a television show that is original, insightful and just plain hilarious. Then, to lament its loss, a fan-favourite and Emmy-nominated critical success, The Great has been one of the shining highlights of television since it first aired in 2020.
It is inconceivable that it should be cut down so early without reason, why would Hulu cull what many consider to be one of their most-recognisable properties? Despite, or perhaps because of, the outcries from the show’s dedicated fanbase, Hulu have yet to pass comment on the cancellation.
It is a television show as strange, delicious, and inspired by genius as the lemon-thyme salt that Peter spends much of the final series trying to perfect. I’m certain that it’ll linger on the palette for many years to come—a blazing one-of-a-kind triumph that’ll be much missed.
All three series of The Great are available now with a Lionsgate+ subscription via Amazon Prime Video.
Words by Briony Havergill
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