Vengeance Is Coming in 'Monte Cristo’s Penultimate Episode
In the series' penultimate episode we finally get some revenge!
With the clock ticking down to the end of the series, The Count of Monte Cristo finally kicks its revenge plot — ostensibly the reason for its existence — into high gear. This is a good thing, if only because it’s about time something finally starts to happen on this show, but it’s hard not to be irritated by how rushed these events subsequently feel.
Fernand Mondego is unquestionably a dirtbag, and it’s immensely satisfying to watch him get publicly humiliated for not only getting rich off of orchestrating the murder of a military ally but selling a young girl into slavery on top of it. The Count gets his revenge, ultimately driving Fernand to suicide after revealing his involvement in Edmond’s arrest and imprisonment to his family. It’s grim stuff, but also... kind of not?
The series never made any effort to deepen our understanding of Fernand’s character, and he seems like a pretty bad husband and father in addition to all his other crimes. No one mourns the wicked, they say, but that probably goes double here. It’s difficult to feel anything like sympathy for him, even as he cries and takes his own life, because the only consistent character trait he has displayed throughout this series has been being a selfish [expletive].
There’s some entertaining irony in the fact that Edmond manipulates Danglars into digging up the dirt on Fernand’s history with Ali Pasha and making it public. (Greed is an amazing motivator!) Montego is summoned to appear before the Chamber of Peers in Parliament, where he is basically taken to the woodshed, politically speaking, and Kayla-Simone Spence makes the most out of the single scene she gets.
But given we’re so close to the end of the show, it would be nice if we could finally get some insight into the Count’s larger revenge tour. Is there a reason he’s targeting Fernand first? Is it because he stole his girl? It’s hard to argue that his behavior was any worse than Danglars’ own, simply in terms of getting Edmond arrested. This show holds its titular character at arm’s length so firmly that it’s difficult to know what he’s thinking about anything, and it’s deeply frustrating at key moments like this.
Then, there’s the Mercedes of it all. The show spent most of its first episode repeatedly telling us how in love she and Edmond were, but never made their relationship feel particularly urgent or deep. As a result, their reunion — which, let’s not forget, is primarily motivated by Mercedes’ desire to save her son, not by her feelings for Edmond — doesn’t have proper emotional impact.
It feels a bit like those adapting the tale missed a step somewhere along the way. Mercedes’ sudden outing of the Count’s real identity, as well as her claim that she’s known he was actually Edmond all along, isn’t really supported by what we’ve seen from the narrative thus far.
It’s certainly possible that she might have had some valid suspicions after the Count flashed that pocket watch in her face last week, but, once again, the folks behind The Count of Monte Cristo seem to have instructed poor Ana Giradot to play every scene with the same dead-eyed absence that Sam Claflin has been stuck with that robs her character of anything like nuance. (She’s been waiting for him this whole time? Girl, what?)
The version of this story where we saw Mercedes’ suspicions play out onscreen, witnessed her belief turn to certainty over several interactions, probably would have made her declaration — an unprompted use of Edmond’s first name — land quite a bit harder. Alas, what we get is this, where the audience is most definitely not in on the trick, a move that would not only have made Mercedes seem smarter, but also given more weight to her willingness to put herself at risk for her son’s life.
Albert’s also been going through it, convinced that he needs to defend his (criminal!) father’s honor by threatening to kill the man responsible for outing his (many!) crimes. To his credit, he throws in the towel as soon as Mercedes tells him the truth about the Count’s true identity, but the whole duel subplot is ridiculous.
Was Edmond really planning on shooting Mercedes’ son if she hadn’t admitted she knew he was? Considering that he doesn’t seem all that fussed about basically causing Villefort’s illegitimate son to commit murder, it’s got to be at least even odds. What does that say about the man who’s at least tangentially supposed to be the hero of this story?
By essentially setting Caderousse free, that still leaves Danglars and Villefort left on Edmond’s naughty list, and with just an episode to go, that’s an awful lot of ground to cover. The pieces are in place: Villefort doesn’t know about his still-alive, now-in-jail son, and Danglars hasn’t realized that the man he’s promised his daughter to doesn’t actually exist. But is there enough time left for either of those payoffs to mean anything?
The Count of Monte Cristo continues with new episodes airing and streaming on local PBS stations and the PBS app on Sundays at 10 p.m. ET through mid-May 2026. All episodes are available to binge on PBS Passport for members and on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.
