Poldark, series 4 episode 3, review: Does anyone else think there's just too much going on?
As much as I enjoy Poldark (BBC One), three episodes into this fourth series and I’m finding myself a little bored. It’s not for lack of incident. Already we’ve had so much: all the usual love wrangles between Ross (Aidan Turner) and Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson), the death of a major character, a courtroom drama and a thumping political victory against George “Boo! Hiss!” Warleggan (Jack Farthing). Yet it still feels sketchy and underdeveloped – as if we’re stuck in the early stages of a jigsaw puzzle with lots of pieces scattered about, but no coherent picture yet emerging.
“Everything will change,” said Ross last week, following his election win. And with an opening scene on Sunday night that saw him racing, not across those familiar Cornish clifftops but over the cobbled streets of Georgian London to the House of Commons, it looked like that might actually happen.
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But no sooner did he get there – a few snatched scenes of him making suitably heroic anti-slavery speeches, and manfully resisting rapacious London ladies of the night – than he was back again in Nampara, a looming crisis in his tin mine drawing him home. Despite all the pretty plant-based footage of winter melting into spring and on into summer, it hardly felt like he’d been away.
It was left to other characters to pull us onward. Naughty George was plotting to buy his way back into parliament, via a character so rotten even his name was snake-like: Monk Adderley (Max Bennett). And, speaking of reptiles, that pioneering foot-fetishist Rev Whitworth (Christian Brassington), when not getting sweaty at the sight of his sister-in-law’s socks, was betraying a deathbed confession that will likely come to haunt our hero. But not yet.
Even the ray of light that was the birth of the Enys’s daughter looked in danger of being extinguished as soon as it was lit, Dr Dwight’s (Luke Norris) dark looks and repeatedly furrowed brow indicating something amiss. Like much else in this episode it didn’t so much tantalise as inspire a frustrated wish that one – any one – of the multitudinous storylines being hurled at us would take firm hold and deliver some of that proper Poldark gut-wrenching drama.