Mild spoilers

Vimes has to deal with a talking sword…

We’re over the hump. More than half way through the series and finally we’re getting some great character work. Every member of the Watch got time in the spotlight this episode and in each case it paid off.

This episode brings the entire cast to a place where they’re challenged by the things which make them broken. It’s a brilliant conceit and allows the different characters to face the very things stopping them from being the people they want to be.

The one I’ve been waiting for and have been most nervous about is Carrot and Angua. It’s not a part of Guards! Guards! but it is a core theme of the Guards series of books. Within the show, Angua’s story has been a long time getting to – for understandable reasons – yet here in a short, snappy, precisely delivered scene we get everything one could want and stepping right into it is Carrot showing us what a good person looks like. He doesn’t try to fix her, he doesn’t try to ignore it or play it down. Carrot stands up as her ally and makes it about her and about who she is. I was genuinely moved by both Marama Corlett and Adam Hugill.

Alongside them we see more of what’s eating at Vimes and a startling revelation about what’s going on inside both Cheery and Sybil. It was well constructed, well executed and the brevity of these scenes didn’t feel rushed or choppy in any way.

We see precious little of Carcer and Wonse this week. They’re on screen to provide motivation for the Watch. However, I didn’t feel like they were missing, well maybe a bit more of the goblins couldn’t have hurt.

Instead I was transfixed by the Watch finally becoming a team. They turn up to see Vetinari (who is described with the very best line by two characters in a moving picture theatre) and they are a single team, ready to do what they think is right and it was wonderful to watch.

I’m finding it hard not to write several hundred words of gushing praise here.

Let’s think about where the show is going. There’s no doubt it’s well written and loves the source material (sorry, will stop gushing now). The question is where do we end up? The Dragon, like it was in the novel, has so far been background even if those of us who know the material can see the dots which join up in a Carrot shaped diagram.

However this is much more of a team endeavour than the novel (which largely saw disparate characters making their own way through the story) and in particular the antagonists, although familiar to readers, are not the same as in the book. We don’t have a secret society trying to install a king, we don’t have a Dragon which decides it’s going to do things its own way. So far we have what is a comical police farce with an ensemble of buddy comedies deftly tied in.

Regardless of what’s gone before we have three episodes left and I finished this one genuinely unsure what happens next. There are some loose ends from episode 5 and in particular I want more of Wonse and why she’s thrown her lot in with Carcer, but I can’t tell you where this is going and that’s pretty exciting. Given her role in the book Wonse feels the least well fleshed out in the series and with Carcer being a big ball of trapped resentment, more of her motivation would be brilliant. The show has dropped the class battles for something more fundamental – the anger of those treated unjustly by the powerful. The lack of a class element means there’s not a whole lot of ground for Wonse to stand on as a character – at least at the moment.

Verdict: It’s worth noting that the show continues to wrap in people and systems doing bad things to one another as part of its DNA. The scars evil and cruelty leave behind drive the characters on both sides without preaching about it and again, this is entirely true to Pratchett. When thinking about the politics on show here – both in the casting and on the screen – it’s worth noting that when Guards! Guards! came out it was criticised for being too political, too serious. Some things never change it would seem.

Rating: 9 round world objects out of 10.

Stewart Hotston