'The Count of Monte Cristo' Manages to Capture "The Castle"
Thank goodness, Jeremy Irons is here.
After a premiere episode full of both extensive exposition and elaborate idiocy by our ostensible romantic hero, The Count of Monte Cristo finds itself on firmer ground in its second installment. Sure, things don't exactly get much better for the wrongly imprisoned and deeply suffering Edmond Dantès for most of this hour, and series star Sam Claflin is forced to exist in a nightmare wig-and-beard combo that's giving homeless more than dashing.
But none of that matters, because Jeremy Irons is here! The acting legend, who either really loves Alexandre Dumas's original story or badly lost a bet, immediately interjects some much-needed gravitas to this entire situation. Dressed in what appears to be a burlap sack, he still manages to convey the sort of prestige performance vibes that make you want to take this entire endeavor a lot more seriously than it probably deserves.
Irons plays Abbé Faria, a kind and intelligent priest who is also being held as a political prisoner. His cell is down the hall from Edmond's, he's managed to tunnel through the wall separating their rooms, and they can visit each other as long as they tidy up after and keep beds in front of the obvious slabs of stone that have been disturbed. Faria has, if you haven't guessed, been in the Castle d'If for quite a long time.
(Fun fact: There was a real person named Abbé Faria, a Portuguese priest who was one of the pioneers of the scientific study of hypnotism. If only Dumas had bothered to leave that bit in the book!)
Ten years have passed between Edmond's initial imprisonment and the moment he finally meets Abbé in person. The two men hug and clutch each other, delirious at getting to experience human touch again after so long. They become fast friends, with Edmond eagerly agreeing to participate in the priest's long-running plan to tunnel his way out of the prison and Abbé giving the younger man lessons in comportment and manners.
There's something genuinely entertaining about watching Edmond attempt to grasp the concept of soup spoons by using the dingy bowls and utensils the prison provides. But it's really just an unconventional training montage. Edmond doesn't realize it yet, but this is Abbé helping to create the false identity he will one day put on like a coat.
Outside of that, not a lot really happens in this episode in terms of plot. Yet it's still leaps and bounds ahead of the series premiere. A big reason for that is that "The Castle" is, for the most part, a two-hander. Outside of a quick update on the outside world — Edmond's father has passed away, Danglers quits his job with Morrell, and Villefort decides to tell everyone Edmond has died in captivity — the episode is focused almost exclusively on the two prisoners and relies on the (admittedly solid) chemistry between Irons and Claflin to keep viewers invested.
It's also a relief that Abbé Faria is perhaps the first actually smart character this show has introduced. (Yes, the bar is in Hell.) He not only teaches Dantès to read and write, but also how to use the scraps from the few items they receive from guards to make lamps and chisels with which to dig. (He's even educating him on the finer uses of various poisons! Men of God really do contain multitudes.) More importantly, perhaps, Faria is a role model — he's been in the Castle d'If for the better part of two decades but refuses to lose hope in his freedom.
Faria also clocks instantly that our boy has been set up, most likely by Villefort, in a bid to protect a family member. It's hard to overstate how refreshing it is to watch someone use common sense on this show, which is generally populated by the dumbest and most gullible people alive.
But because Edmond is truly cursed with the worst luck in the world, the boys' plan to tunnel to freedom metaphorically collapses at the last possible moment. Abbé, a victim of sudden onset plot paralysis, has what may or may not be a stroke, and can't take part in their escape anymore because the whole point of this story is that Edmond's gotta go through whatever this rebirth turns out to be alone. Conveniently, the priest stays lucid long enough to give his adopted son a lengthy, extremely detailed lore drop about a secret treasure he still believes to be hidden on the island of Monte Cristo.
(Abbé's sneering denouncement of "that terrible Borgia Pope, Alexander VI" is extra hilarious when you remember Irons spent several seasons playing Rodrigo Borgia on Showtime's wildly underrated The Borgias.)
Abbé even manages to do Edmond the solid of not dying in front of him. Some undetermined amount of time later, a day or two it seems, he wakes to the guards in the hallway announcing that Prisoner 27 has died. (Abbé's death is such peak nineteenth-century literature, truly, struck down suddenly by a wasting sort of illness. What did he die of? A stroke? A brain tumor? Old age? Plot contrivance? We'll never know.)
But, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, Edmond Dantès is not going to throw away his shot. Displaying a degree of ingenuity that it's unlikely most of us expected him to possess, he scrambles back into Faria's cell to switch places with the dead body, hastily stitching himself into the priest's burial shroud before the guards come back.
(Further genius at work: None of these braintrusts notice the difference in weight between the body of a malnourished eighty-year-old and a younger man who is both physically denser and larger in size!)
The hour ends on what is, at least for this show, a fairly hopeful note. Edmond is free, at last, with a dead man's stolen treasure map in his pocket, and a heart burning to punish those who have wronged him. Let's go.
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.
