'Beecham House': Episode 2 Recap
Beecham House is so frustrating precisely because it should be good. On paper, it’s a story that hasn’t really be done before, set in a period we rarely get to see in shows like this. In actuality, however, it’s a trope-filled retread with tremendously dull storytelling, generally unlikeable characters and a chaotic plot that is so messy I can’t even summarize it easily.
It’s difficult to choose just one element to rank as the most terrible and ham-fisted thing about this episode. Is it poor Lesley Nichols, stuck playing a racist and wildly offensive older British woman who renames the Indian servants because their names are too difficult for her to say? Is it the flashback to Beecham heroically getting kicked out of the military for refusing to join in the gleeful brutalization of several dozen people? Is it the deadly dull side plot where Hot French Soldier Played By Gregory Fitoussi seems convinced that John is really some secret agent working undercover for the benefit of the East India Company? Perhaps it’s actually the simultaneously plodding and nonsensical romantic quadrangle between John and a bunch of women we barely know but who all, at first glance, seem to deserve better?
Perhaps the Henrietta subplot would be more entertaining if it leaned into the character’s soapy and meddling nature, rather than making her as vile as possible. We get it, she’s the worst sort of Englishwoman, a colonialist who looks down on the people of India as beneath her even as she overindulges in opium and is rude to both her of her son’s maybe-possibly love interests. She has, at least thus far, exactly zero redeeming characteristics, and no arc to speak of that I can see. Perhaps she’ll eventually get the typical feel-good white lady story where she learns not to be a terrible racist hag thanks to some servant or random person who is kind to her despite her terrible attitude, but even that feels like it may prove tough going at this point.
