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 7
"Queen of Heaven"
Original Airdate: Oct. 15, 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, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, John Hurt, Patricia Quinn, Kevin McNally, Fiona Walker, James Faulkner, Margaret Tyzack, Isabel Dean
It goes ill for the Empire. Its ruler is a bitter old man who spends his time nursing ancient grudges and indulging in rape and pedophilia as pastimes. The whisperings of the ambitious head of his secret police drive him to ever greater acts of paranoia and violence. His inner circle includes even bigger, more sadistic perverts and murderers. The Senate goes along with it as innocent people are arrested without charge. The only ones who can put a stop to it all are either too old and enfeebled to act, or too complacent, or too cowardly.
Anyway, did you guys watch this episode of I, Claudius? Because things are pretty bad there, too.
The tone is set with the opening scene. Claudius attends a party and enthusiastically applauds the scantily clad dancer hired for the festivities, but Lollia (Isabel Dean), the hostess, has a darker spectacle in mind. After recounting a horrifying story about how she allowed herself to be gang-raped by Emperor Tiberius and his slaves in order to spare her young daughter the same fate — all of it declaimed in the kind of Shakespearean register they can hear in the cheap seats — she kills herself in front of her assembled friends. The message is clear: Rome has become intolerable for decent people.
It's only getting worse. Sejanus, the ambitious colonel who's long done Livia and Tiberius' dirty work, is now the head of a full-fledge spy network he's using to take down politically powerful people at will. A little trumped-up evidence, a few words in Tiberius' ear, and suddenly war heroes are committing suicide rather than stand trial in the Senate for a made-up crime. Is it illegal to say mean things about the Emperor? According to Sejanus, it is now.
But Sejanus has designs of his own. For one thing, he's fucking Livilla, who makes her welcome return after last having been seen framing her lover Postumus on Livia's behalf.
The old woman's namesake is a keen student, it turns out: At Sejanus' suggestion, she poisons her husband, Castor, the reformed rake who's since become a leading critic of Tiberius' and Sejanus' excesses. The last thing he sees is Sejanus groping Livilla's breast as they stand there watching him die, knowing they're now untouchable.
But wait! There's more! Unsatisfied with his affair with a relative of Caesar — and who knows, there may be wedding bells in his and Livilla's future yet — he uncovers evidence of adultery by Claudius' long-estranged wife. (The evidence is that she's pregnant; Claudius is most definitely not the culprit.) Sejanus thus more-or-less forces Claudius to get divorced, then agree to marry the spymaster's own sister.
Claudius' mother and sister, Antonia and Agrippina, are aghast when they hear of the arrangement. Antonia in particular, who's never been kind to her disabled son, calls him a blockhead. But Claudius' quick-witted friend Herod, soon to return to his native Judea, comes to his defense. It's they who are the blockheads, he says, because all of them would have told Sejanus to pound sand — and thus wound up on his hitlist. Claudius knows enough to go with the flow and thus stay alive.
The most surprising reassessment of Claudius, however, comes from Livia herself. She's a very old woman now, soon to die, so she summons her stammering grandson even though they hadn't spoken since that little psycho Caligula set the house on fire seven years earlier.
Ah, Caligula. He makes his triumphant debut as a young adult this episode, played by a mellifluous and sinister John Hurt in a blond fright wig. Claudius' ne'er-do-well nephew has become a close confidant of Tiberius' due to their shared interest in depravity. Honestly, of all the fucked-up shit Caligula winds up doing, sharing his pornography collection with his uncle is way up there. Like, imagine giving your mom's older brother your OnlyFans login info.
Such are Caligula's appetites that he kisses and gropes Livia in full view of Claudius. (There's a lot of that going around this episode!)
Livia explains that the young lunatic is attracted to her precisely because he finds her elderly form repulsive. She additionally explains that Thrasyllus, the put-upon court astrologer, has predicted that first Caligula, then Claudius himself will be Emperor. Tiberius will select Caligula in order to burnish his own reputation by comparison, then Claudius will avenge Caligula's death, in whatever manner that arrives.
Livia, of course, is the smartest person in Rome. In her advanced age, even her one real blind spot — the idea that Claudius' twitch, stammer, and clumsiness indicate he's stupid — is gone. But she really does believe in prophecy, astrology, and the gods. And now that she's on death's door, she's finally starting to worry that her poisoned chickens may come home to roost. She's headed for an eternity of torment and damnation, unless something changes — and it's not exactly like she can un-poison or un-drown or un-banish the countless people she's offed in her quest to sit her son Tiberius on the throne.
There's only one option left to her: She must become a goddess.
A modest proposal! With Augustus' now Empire-wide elevation to divinity, there's precedent. The reason Livia is allowing Caligula, whom she despises so openly she repeatedly calls him "Monster" to his face when he's around, to take such liberties with her is because she needs him to deify her when he becomes Emperor. (She's not getting along with Tiberius, as a hilarious scene in which their litters get stuck next to each other in a traffic jam in the square shows us.) Gods and goddesses, as Claudius agrees, suffer no consequences for their countless acts of rape and murder and incest and general violent insanity. If Livia can just make it to Olympus, she can stay out of Hell.
That's where Claudius comes in. Now that she understands he's no dummy, Livia is counting on Claudius to ensure his nephew makes good on his promise. He agrees, but only on the condition that she tell the whole truth about her long career as an assassin. (Now we know how he knows all this stuff to begin with, including the events that happened before his birth.) She agrees, recounting all the crimes she did and didn't commit — Claudius' beloved brother Germanicus was done for her on spec, not on her orders, for instance.
Livia even admits to killing Augustus, her husband of many decades. Doing so audibly takes the wind right out of her sails. "Yesss…" she sighs when Claudius, shocked, points out that she and her husband had lived together for so long. "That was hard. Very hard. That was the hardest thing I ever had to do." Every word comes drenched in as much regret as the figs that killed Augustus were with poison.
It's a good thing for Livia she made the deal. Paying her one last visit on her deathbed, Caligula mocks her, telling her he has no intention of going through with his promise. He only made it to keep her from snitching about his role in Germanicus' death, and now that she'll be dead too, the secret dies with her. He strokes her hair as she lies immobile and crying, taking great pleasure in explaining that she'll suffer forever, and he'll look down from Olympus and order her pain to continue.
By the time Caligula leaves and Claudius arrives, there's almost nothing less of this once-vital viper of a person. "I want to be a goddess, Claudius," she croaks with almost childlike petulance. "I deserve it."
Crying seemingly despite himself — Claudius knows better than anyone what his grandmother really is — he renews his vow. "You'll be Queen of Heaven," he sobs. "I promise you."
After advising him to go on playing the fool, Livia breathes her last words — words of fear that something may go wrong in the afterworld unless she plans in advance. "Put a coin in my mouth," she says, "to pay the ferryman for the journey." She dies, and Claudius does as he's told.
Much to my surprise, tears sprang to my eyes during this scene, not just Claudius'. Why? It's not like I liked Livia, not as a person anyway. As a villain, as a screen presence, as a tour-de-force by actor Siân Phillips, who I'll remind you was only forty-three years old when she so convincingly played the elderly matriarch of Rome? Sure. But as someone to really care about? I kept hoping she'd choke on one of her own figs.
But there's something enormously moving and enormously sad about watching someone die afraid. Yes, there are plenty of people I hope die afraid, in fiction and IRL. But watching it performed by actors with the talent, sensitivity, and nuance of Phillips and Derek Jacobi, you forget you've been rooting for Livia's demise since episode one. Instead you see an awkward, misunderstood man trying to reassure his dying grandma that she's not going to go to Hell, she's not going to suffer, he'll make sure of it.
They're people, in other words. Phillips in particular, who initially struggled in the role until she was told it's okay to just play Livia as a villain, finally gets to show another side to the woman. Asking to be made a goddess shows terrifyingly high self-regard, but the rest of her behavior is painfully easy to understand.
One last note about understandable but surprising human behavior. During Sejanus and Livilla's steamy rendezvous prior to their murder of Castor, they fall into bed while talking through an elaborate fantasy of Sejanus keeping her locked nude in a room, for him and his guards to use whenever they want, forcing themselves on her if she fights back.
Assuming this is only a fantasy — this is Rome, after all, and it is a time of monsters — it's not an uncommon one. People of all genders have fantasies of nonconsensual sexual encounters, and reenact them in a consensually nonconsensual way. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.
But in a historical epic? Filmed in 1979? Aired on the BB bloody C? Even speaking as a real freak: Holy shit. This is some truly combustible psychosexual dynamite being played with, by the powerfully sexy couple of Patrick Stewart and Patricia Quinn, no less. And there it is, in a show lots of people watch in high-school Latin class. The nooks and crannies of the human psyche television is capable of exploring are innumerable, and there for the probing. If Robert Graves, Jack Pulman, and Herbert Wise could do it in 1979, your favorite show in 2025 has no excuse.
