Galavant Rewatch 1.3, "Two Balls"

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More emerges about the loyal squires of the noble knights as Galavant traipses along.

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1.3, "Two Balls"

Written by Dan Fogelman
Directed by Chris Koch

Synopsis

After a themed recap of the previous episodes form the jester narrator, the three travelers--Galavant, Sid, and Isabella--purpose to overnight in Sid's hometown. He offers context for the place as he attends to Galavant, trying initially to gloss over an issue Galavant calls to attention in short order.

Just can't quite see it...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Sidney's hometown evidently idolizes him, in large part because the stories he has told them have exaggerated his deeds in the strangely interrelated village--and ascribed Galavant to the status of squire. Isabella relates some of her prior life, as well, before the introduction to Sid's adopted parents.

The parents in question.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

In Valencia, Richard continues to try to win over Madalena and the people of Valencia. After some idle violence, he purports to throw a ball to amuse the lot. And the time with Sid's family progresses, with their own squire introduced.

Someone enjoys the role.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Isabella plays into the role assigned to Sid, and a celebration ensues--with a musical number and aspersive comments from Sid's family's squire and similar looks from his compatriot. Sid apologizes for the excesses of his family, and Isabella rebukes him.

Preparations for the balls in Valencia and Sid's village. They do not go quite as well as might be hoped, though they are done in earnest. And the squires enact some of them, lampooning their knights (ironically in song); Galavant reluctantly engages in the lambasting and seemingly realizes some of his own failings in the process.

Is this the face of character development in progress?
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

In the event, the festival in Valencia goes less than well; Richard appears to mean well but to be utterly incompetent, and he ends up soaking insults from the populace until he realizes he's being cuckolded. That in Sid's hometown goes as expected, and it begins to reveal romantic longings on Galavant's part, as well as sympathy for Sid.

Discussion

The main thrust of the episode--that following Galavant, Sid, and Isabella--works more with the medievalist than the medieval, engaging with a pattern of mocking the chivalric that extends back to Don Quixote and farther. In the medieval chivalric, squires were servants, yes, but servants generally of knightly birth and explicitly in training to succeed to knighthood. Chaucer's Squire is a prominent example (and one that seems to prefigure Sid physically), but not the only one; several such appear in Malory, as well. They are not permanently in their positions, certainly, and they can still expect to be accorded the respect due to the positions of their birth.

That is not the case with the squires in the present episode, who act more the picaresque of Cervantes's work than the romance of Malory or his sources. They are rude and unflattering, full of sass and laziness than even Sid, who shows no hesitation in addressing Galavant sarcastically. And they seem to have a better head for practical matters than the knights they serve. It makes them more engaging characters than "good" servants, who are generally unobtrusive, but it also removes the show a bit more from the medieval in which it appears to try to ground itself. Such is not a bad thing; again, the trope is an old one, engaged in in some of the earliest medievalist literature. But it does tend to propagate an idea of the European Middle Ages that was not necessarily prevalent among the people of that time and place, with problems that the Society has addressed on more than one occasion.

An area in which the episode does seem to cleave to the medieval, though, and unfortunately is in the depiction of Sid's family and village as stereotypically Jewish. The community is insular to the point of being incestuous; upon arrival, one of the villagers expresses a wish that Sid were her cousin, that she might marry him. Such insularity has been ascribed to numerous minority communities, including the medieval Jewish. The speech patterns put into the mouths of Sid's parents, particularly, ring of typical US depictions of Jewish home life; the stereotypes differ, but that they are sterotypes and that the characters seem to be nothing but them does not. Here, again, the series seems regressive in ways that it does not have to be, which makes the episode less than it could have been.