Matthew and Diana’s quest takes them to Bohemia, where they must deal with the prickly Emperor Rudolf II, who may hold the key to everything for which they are searching.

After the sweeping majesty of the previous episode, with its wonderful narrative and the weaving of a love story across centuries, it was always going to be difficult to match that energy going forward. That said, this is a really fascinating episode, albeit another very focused one.

The show tends to have the most fun when it’s playing around with the idea of major historical figures and the place they hold in its fictional version of the world. Here, we get Rudolf II, the noted historical ruler whose penchant for Astrology and Alchemy among other esoterica is often said to have seeded the scientific revolution. Here, he’s a prickly, difficult man, given to changing his mind but extremely taken with Diana, which of course offers its own advantages while also causing its own issues.

The basic ebb and flow of the entire episode centres around Matthew and Diana’s attempts to discover whether and where Rudolf has both the Book of Life and Edward Kelley secreted. For obvious reasons, Diana is far more interested in the book, and is more than willing to allow Rudolf’s ‘clumsy flirting’ in exchange for the opportunity of obtaining it. Matthew has issues with this, but this goes beyond mere jealousy and to the root of the real reason behind his reluctance to mate with Diana in the first place and his keeping from her of the truth of his nature.

What’s striking here (and in the show as a whole) is how the relationship between Matthew and Diana plays out. For all that she’s naïve in many ways to the nuances and details of the lives and traditions of creatures, even though she is one of them, Diana is no shrinking violet. Strong, educated and absolutely confident in her own intellectual abilities, the addition of her growing magical abilities only adds to that. This isn’t the traditional sort of vampire narrative we tend to have seen elsewhere in fiction the last couple of decades, but a true partnership of equals. Matthew and Diana bicker – even fight – but those conflicts are resolved by strength rather than weakness on the part of either side. And that strength is rooted in the personalities and actions of both parties, rather than some mystical quality possessed by either. For all that Matthew is a centuries old Vampire and Diana a super powerful witch, their domestic bliss is ruled by their mutual respect for one another as people first, which is a powerful and welcome message for a piece of genre fiction like this to give.

It also has to be said that Michael Jibson has a lot of fun as Rudolf, in a performance that manages to avoid being cliched or two-dimensional in a character that could easily have been both. He plays the flighty, whimsical nature of the man well, and walks a tightrope between that oddity and outright parody very well, carrying himself with the exact air of self-belief that you might expect from a ruler of the era and playing it entirely straight, letting the absurdity of his actions speak for themselves. It’s also always welcome to see more Gallowglass, and I genuinely hope that we end up catching up with that character more before the show comes to an end, if only for the delight of his cheekily dubbing Diana ‘Aunty’ when the mood takes him.

Verdict: Doing what it does best and doing it very well indeed. 9/10

Greg D. Smith