'Les Miserables' Episode 5 Recap: Do You Hear the People Sing?
Previously on Les Miserables: Cosette – now considerably older – convinces her adopted dad that she’s tired of life penned up in a convent and wants to see the world. She and Valjean move to a splashy new flat that none of us can tell how they afford, and she catches the eye of the world’s most boring youth, Marius Pontmercy, on their daily constitutionals around a local park. Valjean is unhappy, Cosette feels oppressed, and Marius whines about his lack of love life to his pseudo-revolutionary friends at the pub. Elsewhere, it turns out that the now-broke Thenardiers are Marius’ next-door neighbors and he watches them both discover and try to rob and murder Valjean when he stops by to distribute some charity. Paris is wild, y’all! If you need a longer explanation of what went down, our recap of Episode 4 is this way.
After four episodes, it feels like Les Miserables is finally ready to acknowledge the most bizarre thing that’s going on in this particular adaptation, and that is the fact that Javert has straight up lost his mind.
Those of us who know the basic facts of Les Mis are already aware that Javert’s obsession with Jean Valjean is a major driver of the story. But at least the novel and its musical adaptation take some care to tell us why Javert feels like this. Part of it is because of his extremely aggressive love of duty and justice – he truly believes that the world is made a better place when people who break the law are held accountable. (No matter how dumb and/or unreasonable their original crimes might have been.)
