Messed-Up Moments In Period TV Shows

If you study Roman history for more than a few minutes, you’ll learn about Emperor Caligula’s depravity. There’s an infamous 1979 film about the man starring Malcolm McDowell, titled Caligula, and history has not been kind to him.

Of course, as with all politicians, stories about Caligula have been exaggerated or fabricated over time. The 1976 BBC television series I, Claudius features several of Caligula’s most salacious tales.

The one-season series covers much of early Roman Imperial history and features a young John Hurt as Caligula (with Derek Jacobi as his uncle Claudius, who will succeed him as emperor). A certain scene in the series is 100% fabricated for the show, though it aligns with Caligula’s bad historical reputation. In the scene, he kills his sister and eats her baby. It’s gruesome and shocking – but to be clear – it never truly happened. Caligula was accused of an incestuous relationship with his three sisters, but there’s no evidence of it. Regardless, this scene is easily one of the most messed-up moments in a period TV show.

Gunpowder was a three-part 2017 miniseries starring Kit Harington based on the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, a failed assassination attempt in London against King James I with the hope of restoring a Catholic-friendly monarchy to England after decades of persecution. Most people know of one of the participants, Guy Fawkes. He was captured and “interrogated” about the plot, and let’s just say the king’s best interrogators didn’t ask him questions nicely. Eventually, Fawkes was executed by hanging, and afterward was drawn and quartered.

Interestingly, Harington is a direct descendent of the character he plays – Gunpowder Plot leader Robert Catesby. In the series’ first episode, a woman is stripped in front of a crowd of onlookers and forced to lie upon a stone as she’s tied down. A heavy metal board is placed atop her, which is then loaded with weights as her executioner demands a plea to “save yourself.” She refuses, and more weight is added. This method of torture/execution is called peine forte et dure, which translates to “strong and harsh punishment.” More commonly known as crushing or pressing, it was a favorite of the English monarchy for many years.

As depicted in the episode, weight is added until the victim dies, but not from being crushed to death – the end before that, from asphyxiation due to the lungs being compressed. Her execution is followed by another as a young man is brought before the crowd. He’s briefly hanged, then dropped as an executioner disembowels him and lays his intestines out for him to see. Of course, this doesn’t immediately kill him, and he’s still alive as his arms are chopped off.

While disturbing and difficult to watch – the crowd doesn’t seem too pleased with what they’re watching – this too was a common form of execution during the period. It ends with the man’s head being removed and dipped in pitch, which is then held up for the crowd to see. The scene in Gunpowder was a bit too much for some viewers to handle, as it reportedly made them sick. While that’s understandable, it also indicates the showrunner had an eye for historical accuracy, as the scene’s brutality is only a taste of what truly happened when someone ran afoul of the monarchy.

The Bunker is a 1981 made-for-TV film starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as Adolf Hitler. It’s based on the 1975 James P. O’Donnell novel of the same name and depicts the final weeks of the Führer’s life inside an underground bunker in Berlin. The film, set before and during the Battle of Berlin, features an all-star cast, including Piper Laurie as Magda Goebbels, wife of the infamous Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

As the Allies came closer to finding them, she and her husband murdered their six children before committing suicide. In the series, Magda kills her children and then walks down the stairs, clearly distressed over what she’s done. The killing isn’t depicted in the film; you only see some pills in her hand before she leaves the children’s bedroom. After arriving downstairs, she smokes a cigarette and sits down to play solitaire.

It’s a chilling scene that’s all the more disturbing by what precedes it. Still, she had to do something to occupy her time while waiting for her husband to arrive, so solitaire was little more than a distraction. The six Goebbels children, who could have survived the war and lived long after their parents’ demise, lay deceased in the room above. The Goebbels walk upstairs as gunfire and explosions surround them and commit suicide together, completing the destruction of their family.

Little House on the Prairie was a popular series that aired from 1974 to 1983 about the Ingalls family, who live on a Minnesota farm from the 1870s through the ‘90s. It didn’t shy away from dealing with the reality of living the frontier life, and several notable scenes from the 204 episodes and four specials deal with serious themes and issues. One of the most disturbing came in the 18th episode of the sixth season, titled “May We Make Them Proud,” which was the first of a two-parter.

The episode is a turning point for the characters and the series as a whole. Albert (Quinn) Ingalls and his friend Clay Mays accidentally cause a fire to break out at the School for the Blind, killing Alice Garvey and Mary and Adam’s infant son. It’s one of the most heartbreaking moments in the history of TV programs, which rarely deal with the burning death of an infant, and for good reason – it’s horrible to watch the aftermath, and it’s something some people can sadly relate to.

Rome was a two-season HBO series that dramatized the Roman Republic’s fall and the Empire’s rise. Roman history is violent, and the show doesn’t have a problem featuring it as much as possible. One of the most harrowing moments isn’t necessarily the violence displayed, but the utter indifference to the loss of a human life. When retired soldier Titus Pullo first meets Eirene, she’s enslaved. He frees her, because he has fallen in love with her, and hopes she will agree to marry him.

When Eirene learns she’s been freed, she tells another enslaved person named Oedipus, who thanks Pullo for what he’s done, revealing that he and Eirene have already made plans to marry. Pullo doesn’t take it well and bashes the man’s face into pudding against a column, killing him. While the scene is brutal, the more horrific aspect comes shortly after, when Pullo’s friend Lucius Vorenus confronts him, angrily chastising him for destroying his property. Vorenus is hardly upset over the murder; it’s the inconvenience of losing one of his house servants that really seems to upset him.

Vorenus does pay lip service to the severity of the act, saying, “You do this violence before my children.” But he seems mostly upset that the incident happened in his house, rather than that it was done at all, and complains about how Pullo is disrespectful to him. The two comrades sit together, airing their feelings, Oedipus already half-forgotten, as Eirene weeps madly over the corpse of her beloved. It’s a troubling depiction of the way a life’s value can depend upon class and social status.

Deadwood is a violent period series about the eponymous Old West town. It focuses on sheriff and businessman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), but features several prominent characters, including shady saloon owner Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen and his No. 1, Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown). The series is based on real people and events, though it’s heavily fictionalized and sensationalized. Regardless, one thing that may be a bit too realistic is the violence, and one of the goriest scenes involves a fight in the street.

In the fifth episode of the third season, “A Two-Headed Beast,” Dority fights Captain Joe Turner, the enforcer for gold prospector George Hearst. As they fight, it goes from bloody to brutal pretty quickly. At one point, Turner has Dority in a choke hold, and in a desperate attempt by Dority to stop his demise, he reaches up and pulls Turner’s eye out. The camera doesn’t cut away and leave anything to the imagination – the audience is forced to see the bloody orb hanging unnaturally from the socket, and it’s as disgusting as you might imagine. (If you’re not squeamish, you don’t have to imagine it: you can see the scene here.)

The fight finally ends when Dority gets up and grabs a nearby log, which he uses to beat Turner to death after looking to his boss for approval. The final blow is blessedly replaced by a cut to Swearengen, so at least you don’t see a man’s brains splattered into the dirt.

The Knick is a medical period drama set in New York City in 1900, centered around early 20th-century medical practices under the tutelage and leadership of Dr. John W. “Thack” Thackery (Clive Owen), chief surgeon at the Knickerbocker Hospital. He’s based, in part, on Dr. William Stewart Halsted, an early pioneer and champion of the use of anesthetics. Thackery is a talented surgeon but also a cocaine and opium addict, so there’s a balance between his brilliant work and his substance abuse.

At the end of the second season, Thack collapses and requires bowel surgery, but instead of leaving the operation to his staff, he does it himself, using the spinal block technique instead of anesthesia so he can handle the procedure using a mirror. He accidentally nicks his abdominal aorta, which causes him to lose blood and consciousness as his staff desperately attempt to save his life. It’s a harsh scene to watch because it’s filmed spectacularly and looks very real.

As it happens, self-surgery wasn’t an entirely unheard-of practice at the turn of the last century. When Owen researched the role, he went to the home of the series’ medical adviser, Dr. Stanley Burns, and looked at pictures from the period of doctors instructing people while holding parts of their bodies open with clamps for them to see. When asked by Entertainment Weekly about how the character decided to do the surgery on himself, Owen explained:

Thackery is a very complex character, and he’s hugely arrogant, so there’s no question that it’s driven by the loss of Abby [Abigail Alford, his former lover], and it’s driven by his arrogance. He believes it’s… something he can pull off, but he also has a self-destruct mechanism in him. He’s always pushing himself to a place that he defends as right. And I think it’s a mixture of all of it, really. He’s driven, but also, I don’t think he’s this clear-thinking… because of what happens to Abby, he’s not in the most stable place at the time he’s making this decision.

The Last Kingdom, a BBC series that Netflix later picked up, is based on Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories novels. It covers 866 to 878 CE, during the arrival of the Great Heathen Army in England led by Ubba Ragnarsson and Guthrum Borgsson. When you throw Vikings into England in the ninth century, you know violence will be prevalent, and the series doesn’t disappoint.

Among the most messed-up moments from the series is when Ragnarsson has the Saxon King Edmund slain with arrows after a brief debate over the legitimacy of Edmund’s Christian faith.

Hoping to persuade the Viking invaders to convert to Christianity, Edmund uses St. Sebastian – who, according to Catholic tradition, miraculously survived being shot full of arrows – as an example of God’s will. Ragnarsson challenges him by suggesting they shoot arrows at him, and “If you survive, we will all be washed [baptized].” Edmund, taken aback, offers to retract the baptism requirement, though he wants to remain king. Ragnarsson has his archers shoot Edmund with their bows from very short range, perforating him with four arrows that almost immediately kill him.

History is unclear as to whether Edmund truly expired in this manner, or on the battlefield fighting the Great Heathen Army, but what is clear is that he passed on November 20, 869, which falls within the time period of the show. He was later canonized and became known as St. Edmund the Martyr, and a cult sprang up surrounding him in the years that followed.