In PRESTIGE PREHISTORY, Pop Heist critic Sean T. Collins takes a look at classic TV shows that paved the way for the New Golden Age of Television — challenging, self-contained series from writers and filmmakers determined to push the medium forward by telling stories their own way.
I, Claudius Episode 5
"Poison Is Queen"
Original Airdate: Oct. 1, 1976
Writer: Jack Pulman (based on the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves)
Director: Herbert Wise
Cast: Derek Jacobi, Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, John Castle, David Robb, Patricia Quinn, Patrick Stewart, Carol Gillies
The first time I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius, the title character was talking to his brother. Handsome, heroic, now battle-hardened Germanicus is back from the frontier, having defeated the rebellious Germanic tribes and secured peace in the provinces. (At the expense of quite a few Germans.)
But he doesn't big bro his little brother at all, doesn't play the strapping jock to Claudius' bumbling nerd. No, these two brothers are old friends, and dear ones. They joke about everything, from Claudius' discomfort with fatherhood ("How's your little boy?" "I don't like him very much.") to the height of his wife ("Her face is not unpleasant." "Well, I rarely see her face. I never get up that far!").
Their rapport is so easy and endearing that you know, despite the imperial hubbub for him in the Senate that opens the episode, Germanicus is the kind of guy Claudius really can trust with what comes next. In a conversation held sotto voce, filmed in silhouette, and unmarred by Claudius' usual stammer, the young royal tells his warrior brother the truth about everything: the murder or banishment of half a dozen of Augustus' intimates, their friend Postumus' bogus rape charge and exile, his last-ditch escape in order to tell Claudius what he knew.
To Germanicus' great credit, he's skeptical of the story, precisely because false rape accusations are so rare. "It's an age-old excuse: 'She led me on, she wanted me to do it,'" he says with exasperation. You get the impression that as a commander, he's heard these excuses from his own men. Only when Claudius runs down Livia's whole ghastly body count, of which Postumus' framing is but a minor entry, does Germanicus take heed and accept Claudius' request to be the one to bring the charges to Augustus. No one would believe a fool like Claudius, except his buddies.
The second time I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius, the emperor was talking to his adopted son. Only Postumus wants nothing to do with this reunion, sprung upon him by his estranged father figure after four years in solitary confinement on a barren rock in the sea. He spits Augustus' admission that he made a terrible mistake back in his face: "You have a wonderful knack for not finding out what you don't want to know." He mocks his propensity for self-piteous tears: "I never knew a man cry as easily as you."
He nails down the feeling of so many adult children whose parents come to them hat in hand, begging forgiveness for the wrong they've done: "You're wonderful. Wonderful! What's my role now? To feel sorry for you? To cry for you?" But in the end it is pity that wins Postumus back over to Augustus' side, because he pities the way the old man has been taken advantage of for decades by, though he lacks the term for it, a psychopath. He still loves the old man too much to abandon him to evil.
Throughout this scene, John Castle commands a screen with Brian Blessed on it, which is about the highest compliment I can pay this heartbreaking performance. Their reconnection, however brief, feels earned and true. Augustus insists that now he knows Livia's dark secret, the Empire will go to Postumus next, not her precious son Tiberius. But before he can reverse Postumus' banishment, Caesar has to sail back to Rome and square things with the Senate. What could go wrong?
The third time I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius, the empress was talking to the chief of the Vestal virgins. Livia and Camilla (Carol Gillies), it seems, are old friends. But compared to the smooth operator who serves as Augustus' right arm in Caesar's own words, even a woman of prominence and political power like the Chief of the VVs is a minnow staring down a shark. Livia gets access to Augustus' recently rewritten will, placed in the Vestals' trust, by feeding Camilla a bunch of lies that are just plausible enough that a massive bribe could convince the woman to overlook the ways in which they aren't.
The whole scene is like if a They Live alien deliberately gave the sunglasses to someone and said "Okay, can we dispense with the pleasantries and get on with this, please? I got a plane to catch." Siân Phillips is, accordingly, a scream. This episode is her at her villainous height — we'll get to more, but by this point she'd already nearly choked out Patricia Quinn's Livilla out of the mistaken belief that she, not Claudius and Germanicus, were the rats in the family. And in the very next scene, to which we crash cut, Augustus is already sick! Editing can be the funniest component of filmmaking.
The fourth time I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius, Livia was talking to her despised, neglected grandson Claudius and her despised, doted-upon son Tiberius. Her demeanor with the two men is shockingly similar, given that she regards Claudius as a sort of sick joke of a person due to his disabilities but wants to set Tiberius up at the head of an empire. In dueling performances that show the different ways adults deal with emotionally abusive parents, Derek Jacobi's Claudius does everything he can to play along with her uncharacteristically delusional belief he's a moron.
Meanwhile, George Baker's Tiberius is so hurt when she tells him Augustus plans to supplant him with Postumus that he breaks down and cries. That's pain, real pain this unpleasant man is feeling, and that's painful and unpleasant to see. Director Jack Pulman at times frames Tiberus in a seated position several feet back from Livia in the extreme foreground, making him look tiny and helpless in the face of his mother's power.
Bridging the two conversations is Phillips's Livia, who, though she plays it so subtly you might not even notice it at first, is shitfaced throughout the entire scene. Listening to Augustus' screams of agony, brought on by her own poisons when she realized he was moving to make Postumus his sole heir, turns out to have been too much for even this cold customer to bear. She begins drinking even as he's crying out in pain, and stays drunk for much of the rest of the episode.
Phillips is far from the teetering, stumbling, word-slurring caricature you expect out of someone playing drunk. Some extra sibilance at the end of a word here, a harder edge or blunter tone to her mockery there, a few sips from a chalice, and voilà, a portrait of the empress as an old lush. (Phillips was at the time married to Peter O'Toole, an alcoholic who long remained at the top of his field; it's hard not to wonder how much this truth inspired her fiction.)
The fifth time I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius, the title character was talking to the emperor. Returned from his surreptitious visit to Postumus in exile, recovered from his poisoning by Livia — he started eating only hand-picked fruit and drinking only hand-squeezed milk, eliminating her chance to do her dirty work — Augustus finds Claudius one evening and admits he's been wrong about the lad all these years. He knows of Claudius' role in getting the truth about Postumus and Livia to him, and he's found he's come to share Germanicus' high opinion of his kid brother. He doesn't even mind that the two young men are republican sympathizers: "I'm a republican myself, at heart," he says, the "By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could" of the ancient world.
It's a lovely scene for a couple of reasons. We want to see Claudius' kindness, intelligence, and loyalty rewarded at last, and we want to see Augustus take off the blinders and put a stop to the rot spreading under his nose. There's something tragic in the idea that neither man has really gotten their due — not materially. Obviously they (Augustus in particular) live like gods. I mean they've been treated badly, Claudius to his face and Augustus to his back. Perhaps this new friendship, as a smiling Augustus calls it (he has the good graces to keep smiling even after Claudius drops something mid-embrace), will bring them both the ally and companion they need.
The sixth time I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius, the emperor is staring at the empress. She's poisoned him again, and he knows it.
The seventh time I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius, Livia talks to Augustus one last time, after tainting the figs from the garden outside his sickroom, the only food he'd eat. She keeps talking to him after he's dead, in fact. Not that we see almost any of her dialogue delivered on camera. Rather, our point of view is fixed on Augustus — first as he realizes that he's doomed, that his end is near, and that she knows it full well because she's responsible; then as he lies there dead, eyes open and unblinking. The shot goes on for minute after minute as Livia voices her resentment of the way he marginalized her because she's a woman, the way he failed to listen to her, the way he never understood that everything she did — by now her voice is quavering — she did for him and for Rome, never for herself. She's of royal blood too, isn't she?
Her hand reaches into the frame to close the dead emperor's eyes. When the camera finds Livia's face, we see that during the end of her monologue to her victim's corpse, she'd been crying. This one hurts even her.
It doesn't hurt her so badly she can't leave with a killer one-liner, though. When Tiberius arrives at Augustus' deathbed, she instructs him to wait there with his stepfather until she returns from speaking to the visiting senators.
"By the way," she says, pausing. "Don't touch the figs." I hooted and hollered, personally.
The eighth and ninth times I thought "Wow, what a scene" during this episode of I, Claudius are kind of related: Livia dispatches a colonel named Sejanus (Patrick Stewart with curly hair!) to whack Postumus on his lonely island (another witness is similarly dispatched), then laughs evilly at Claudius after he tells her the news that Tiberius has become Emperor. When the aged Claudius Caesar yells "Poison is queen! Poison is queen!" at the empty chair in which his grandmother once sat cackling at him, brandishing the undoctored will of Augustus he retrieved from he cellars, you can see why he'd feel say that. These people are supervillains. She really might as well have mutant poisoning abilities.
But by the time ambitious colonels with something to prove start arriving on the scene and making headway up the ranks because they've curried favor with the monarch's wife, supervillainy isn't really a requirement to do a lot of damage. All that the likes of Livia and Sejanus are doing is exploiting weaknesses inherent in the imperial system, which is like a global government-by-cult. The power amassed by the founding father everyone worships can easily be usurped by the third underling from the left — or the shrewd family member in the rear — so long as they're willing to abuse every ounce of power they have to acquire more.
The events fictionalized in I, Claudius stood as a cautionary tale about that kind of system and these kinds of people for two thousand years.
