“…starts.”
And I don’t believe season two starts until Sept. 2007. We get to wait almost two years.
That’s the one thing I really dislike about HBO. How long has it been since we saw the Sopranos?
I’m okay with the long waits, since HBO usually manages to give us other good stuff while we’re waiting.
Besides, having Rome, Deadwood, and The Sopranos on at the same time or one right after the other would be a Good Things overload. I don’t think I could handle it.
2007? Really? Damn.
Supposedly the new Sopranos is in March 2006. Does anybody know when the next Deadwood season starts?
As much as it sucks to wait, a two year interval might actully help in the long run, not only because it gives them the time to work on good scripts and really block out some quality episodes rather than rushing through them, but also because it will give the actor who plays Octavian some time to age a little bit. I think Octavian was 19 or 20 when he became Consul of Rome (although he didn’t become “Augustus” until he was in his 30’s).
The HBO Deadwood page promises it’ll be in '06 but doesn’t have a month. Presumably we’ll have to wait until at least the Sopranos season finishes, so I figure July at the earliest.
I tuned in late, and totally failed to connect the dots. This was on one of the subsidiary HBO channels so I thought I was watching and old episode. As I watched Verinus (?) slicing up these gladiators, meanwhile telling my wife that they were only flesh wounds, and asking, “Do you think they’ll be all right?” I couldn’t figure out why he was being executed in the first place.
I’ll have to watch it again, but I don’t think the leg wound was one that took the leg all the way off. It looked to me like he sliced the back of the leg, causing the mace-guy to go down on his knees, where he then got the pointy-thing-in-the-neck move.
We did see an arm taken off for sure.
Maybe this whole controversy over the capabilities of weapons could be taken up by the Mythbusters – “We’ve built a leg for Buster from ballistics gel and bamboo, and I’ve got my gladus here…” After all, they did “Shark Week,” so why not “Rome Week?”
Curate
You know, you guys let me down. I had this episode on my Tivo waiting for me since Sunday, and just now watched it. With an episode this awesome, gory and intense I expected to see giant exclamation points and superlatives in the subject line. As it stands I figured it was just another anticlimactic episode building to the finale. I was SO wrong.
Curate, great call on Mythbusters. Would love that. As for the leg dismembering shot, he definately cleaved it most of the way through. It is possible that it wasn’t completely severed, but they showed a lot of daylight in there and some meaty flesh. If it was a slice, it was a very deep slice.
I think you can look at it this way: Today if a middle class woman walked into a high society party wearing a nice Banana Republic dress, the society women would probably snicker about her not wearing the lastest Versace dress out of Milan or Paris.
Even though there was nothing wrong with it, the elitist women could tell it wasn’t from one of the best shops in Rome and therefore beneath them.
There were dress shops in Rome? I guess I thought clothing was made in-house.
Niobe could have afforded to buy something rather than risk being out of fashion, couldn’t she?
Heck, she could have worn burlap and looked good. I totally agree with the poster above who said the other women were just jealous.
Yes, there were tailors and dresshops in ancient Rome. A wealthy woman like Attia could afford to own her personal slave seamstress, but the fabric would come from merchants. Some Roman noblewomen did weave their own cloth but that was more of a respectable hobby for women.
Oh for heaven’s sake, Octavian is just a kid. What possible influence could he have over Vorenus & Pullo’s lives?
I almost cried when Vorenus threw off his cloak, shouted “thirteenth” and jumped to Pullo’s defense. Thirteenth my ass, he couldn’t let his buddy go down like that, even if he is an anal tight-ass goody-goody.
Somehow I suspect Caesar won’t have time to be too pissed off with Vorenus. Just a guess. You know, based on the previews. Not a spoiler.
I read that scene differently from either of you. I got the impression that those women were whom Niobe leased the two new slaves from. That is the scene they first appeared in, after all.
I got the impression that the ladies were miffed at being hurried out the door after basically having their lease money thrown at them.
Aha! You were paying closer attention than I was. When Niobe’s in a scene, she’s the only one I’m looking at.
She really is strikingly beautiful. I confess that I didn’t connect the dots until after I’d read the first post I quoted and then watched the episode a second time.
When Niobe scrunches her face up in that about-to-cry expression just before blowing out the candle, it just breaks my heart.
Did anyone else notice that Lindsay Duncan, the woman who plays Servilia, also kicked butt in last week’s episode of MI5/Spooks?
Now both of these shows will be off air for a year. Damn, damn, damn. 
As far as a Season Two goes, don’t count on it. Chris Albrecht at HBO just did an interview that said it’s going to be very hard to do another season because they’re not sure what the time span of the season would be (all the way to Actium?), it’s incredibly expensive, and production is a beast. HBO renewed when it did because they were approaching the deadline after which the actors would not be contractually bound.