'Les Miserables' Episode 6 Recap: One Day More

Previously on Les Miserables: Javert’s obsession with Val Jean drives him toward increasingly bizarre behavior, including disguising himself as a revolutionary because he’s convinced his nemesis is, like, trying to bring down the monarchy, or something. Why? IDK, the show never bothers to explain. It also never really bothers to explain much about the pack of students building barricades in the name of the French Republic, nor does it tell us most of their names. (Though you’ll know who Enjolras is if you’ve seen the musical.) None of this super matters since they pretty much all die, and at least the final battle set piece is impressive to watch. Elsewhere, Marius and Cosette are in love, Valjean disapproves, and Thenardier is still alive and not in jail. Whew. Need more detail? Our Episode 5 recap is right this way.

Les Miserables barrels toward its dramatic conclusion with several of the story’s most highly anticipated moments – The fall of the barricades, Marius’ rescue, Valjean and Javert coming face to face again. But as the story hits several of its biggest emotional highlights, there’s kind of a problem. And that is, we’ve run out of time to explain why people are doing the things they’re doing. Maybe the series needed to be an episode or two longer, or it simply spent too much time on Fantine and Valjean’s early days, I don’t know. But, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s hard to care too much about some of these characters when you feel like you don’t know them at all.

And that’s the case as the barricades fall. Dozens die, including a bunch of “major” characters, young men whose names and lives the series’ has barely bothered to mention, using them more as a stand in for the idea of lost youth and wasted idealism. If I can’t tell you anything about these boys as people, can I really mourn them as a viewer? Sure, some of the set-piece moments are impressive – Gavroche’s meaningless death hunting bullets and the firing squad execution of Enjolras and his drunk friend whose name I still don’t know come to mind. But on the whole this is a pile of bodies largely without meaning, and other than generally being against the concept of senseless death, it’s not clear why we should have hoped for them to win.