Really? A science fair? Did elementary school not scar us all enough in this department? Someone is trying to assassinate Catherine, but she can’t be bothered because she is holding an international science competition.
You might think I am devoting too much recap space to this invention, but it does get selected as Russia’s entry until Peter steals Norway’s entry and Catherine goes along with it.
From his slow-moving plot to take back the throne to his sped-up plot to take back the throne, now he has decided he does not want the throne.
She was not welcome in Russia, none of her daughters but Catherine survived infancy, and when Catherine assumed the Russian throne, she had been dead for two years.
Do you remember Gillian Anderson’s muted performance on The X-Files and how once she was able to pull away from the show, she made excellent choice after excellent choice, all of them stretching her as an actor and making her somehow even better than before? And now she’s at the age and has the star power where she can seemingly do projects she wants to do and pick genuinely fun roles like here, where she makes a Kate Winslet–esque entrance in a grandiose hat.
This makes sense because if Lydia running off with Mr. Wickham was enough to make the Bennet girls un-marriageable, then Catherine instituting a coup and shoving her husband off the throne to take power herself seems like enough to maybe break off an engagement.
Real Life Joanna seems to have been a nightmare, and The Great’s Joanna is startlingly unimpressed by her daughter, but she does have a nice Lucille Bluth touch with lines like “How was my trip? What a sparkling conversational gambit” and stating that the women at court wear the finest French fashion and still look like potatoes.
Peter is primarily confused, but this foreshadows terrible things because he has in the recent past indulged in sex as casually as I indulge in Jell-O pudding cups, and he has been without for quite some time.
I can’t help but think of all those historical novelists who spend hours frantically trying to find out the cost of carriage wheels in 1785, and then you get The Great, which is like, “fuck it, let’s add a roller coaster.” Maybe everyone should do this.