Plebs: The New Slave

If you thought Plebs couldn't get darker in tone than 'The Patron', you'd be wrong. It's hard to say whether this episode is just as dark, or even darker, since it combines a plot about having a creepy psychotic living in your house with, once again, the realities of ancient slavery, in which your only way to escape a master you don't want to work for is to get yourself kidnapped.

I love the idea of basing an episode around the impulse purchase of a very creepy slave, because the idea seems reasonably plausible in an ancient setting, but isn't something the ancients themselves wrote about (because ancient literature always emphasizes the slave's subservience to his or her master and Romans would not feel comfortable depicting any free born Roman being frightened of his slave. If you started putting that in plays or literature, the slaves might get ideas. Literature always emphasizes the absolute authority of the master, even in plays about clever slaves or novels in which the master is in love with the slave - the cleverest slave will still be afraid of his elderly master having him beaten. And, of course, since masters could have their slaves beaten whenever they wanted, slaves themselves would be unlikely to behave in any way that would make their masters uncomfortable). Tim Key's performance is great, carefully playing comedy-unhinged in a character that's just creepy enough for the joke to work without being completely horrific - very much in the vein of Eddie from Friends.

I also loved the way the episode addressed the fact that Grumio is, in fact, a pretty terrible slave, while at the same time showing that Marcus apparently does value Grumio enough (having presumably grown up together) to pay a lot of money to get him back after Grumio manages to get himself stolen and refuses to identify Marcus as his master. This, along with catching runaway slaves, is presumably why slaves in the real Roman world were often branded - and probably why slave-napping isn't something that comes up in ancient literature. The Romans were way ahead of their time when it comes to tagging your property - unfortunately in their case, the property in question was other human beings.

It's not hard to understand why Grumio was worried about having a very creepy fellow slave in the house, though putting yourself up for sale at the market is a pretty risky solution - goodness knows what sort of master you might end up with. But if Mushki attacked Grumio, the only result would be that Stylax would owe Marcus some money for damage to (or even the death of) his slave caused by Stylax's slave. On the other hand, if Mushki really went mad and killed Stylax, Grumio might be executed as well as Mushki, depending on whether they count as slaves within the same household (technically they have different masters, so he might be OK). Grumio may have felt he was better off taking his chances. Or, given that he's not very bright, he just hadn't thought through just how bad another master might end up being.

I had a couple of pedantic nit-picks with this one, the main one being that Mushki's hat looked like a freedman's cap (as modeled in the picture here) - which, for obvious reasons, a slave would not wear. It's the sort of thing that can take you out of the episode a bit. And I'm pretty sure it was the Romans who brought rabbits to Britain, so, given that we're still pre-invasion, Cynthia probably shouldn't have had a pet rabbit. And isn't Metella Cynthia's slave? Why is she being invited to dinner with her mistress?

But pedantic nit-picking aside, my main reservations are once again about the treatment of the female characters. I was a bit uncomfortable with the joke about leaving Metella's gag on, and even more so with the boys giving the psycho slave to Flavia, who may be a bit of a hard task-mistress who once tried to replace them with a furnace, but who hardly deserves to have a man who ties up and gags women knowingly placed in her home. That final scene felt really very dark to me, and not in a funny way.

I enjoyed the episode overall, though, and it certainly made me laugh. I loved Water-Man correcting his name to Water-Boy on auto-pilot before realising he'd actually been addressed as Water-Man for once, and I especially loved the use of Latin plurals for the flowers (geranii, croci etc.). I liked the joke about Metella putting tomato sauce on everything as well, something I did for years (and Mushki being set off by people putting condiments on things reminded me of one of Kryten from Red Dwarf's craziest moments, thanks to which I can no longer hear the phrase 'brown sauce' without hearing Kryten yelling in my head "You want brown ketchup with lobster?!").

It's also another episode firmly based in the realities of ancient life. I confess to feeling actually slightly uncomfortable when we opened on the slave market (partly because I associate such a scene with the heroes being auctioned off in The Chronicles of Narnia's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, possibly) and Stylax's comparison of buying a slave to buying an aubergine is, again, pretty dark - but these are the realities of life in a slave-owning society, and the sort of thing we rarely get to see in serious dramas set in the ancient world, in which it's necessary for the hero/protagonist to come across as rather more likeable and have a rather modern and forward-thinking attitude towards slaves and slavery (though Pullo in Rome is clearly the exception to that rule). Sometimes, you need the broad scope and surreal tone of a sitcom to deal with material like this.

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