YMMV / The Serpent Queen

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Does Ruggieri actually have any magical powers? Almost everything that Catherine attributes to him could just as easily be the result of fortunate (or unfortunate) coincidences.
  • Was Catherine Driven to Villainy like she insists, forced to become cold to survive in a cutthroat court where trusting people like Diane led to betrayal? Or is she, like Mathilde believes, secretly motivated by a lust for power? A little bit of both? When Rahima asks if she did all these bad things for power, Catherine professes that she did it for freedom. But whether you can trust her version of events is another story...
• Base-Breaking Character: Fans' opinions on Diane fall anywhere on a scale of her being an entertainingly dramatic and campy villainess that they Love to Hate, to a Complete Monster whose actions towards Henri would constitute grooming and statutory rape by modern standards (Samantha Morton herself belongs in the latter camp, as she has stated outright that she views Diane as a pedophile).
• Broken Base: The handling of the timeskip was mildly controversial, mainly because of the inconsistent approach to the Time-Shifted Actor situation (specifically, Liv Hill as Catherine and Alex Heath as Henri are replaced respectively by Samantha Morton and Lee Ingleby, while everyone else stays the same). While a case can pretty easily be made for Diane being played by the same person in both timelines—contemporary sources attest that the real Diane actually did manage to maintain her looks well into her later years—it is somewhat jarring that Catherine and Henri suddenly seem to be pushing fifty while the likes of Aabis and Angelica have hardly aged at all.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Liv Hill's turn as the younger version of Catherine has been widely acclaimed. After the timeskip, some even said that they missed Hill's more irreverent and humorous take on the character.
  • Ludivine Sagnier as Diane gives easily the most memorable performance after the two Catherines, and many critics praised the Catherine/Diane rivalry as being the heart of the show.
  • Several others can also qualify, including Antonia Clarke for playing Mary, Queen of Scots as a hilariously unsettling combination of Stepford Smiler and Knight Templar, and Danny Kirrane and Nicholas Burns as the Bourbon brothers, whose alternating moments of snarkiness and incompetence provide many of the show's other moments of comic relief.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Samantha Morton played Mary, Queen of Scots in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. In this series, Mary (this time played by Antonia Clarke) is one of Catherine's enemies.
  • Perhaps not "hilarious", but certainly...something in hindsight. A few weeks after the show finished airing on Starz, Ludivine Sagnier starred in a one-woman stage adaptation of the French bestseller Consent—about a fourteen-year-old girl who is seduced by a middle-aged author. Does This Remind You of Anything?
• Hollywood Homely: Catherine's supposed ugliness is very much an Informed Deformity.
• Les Yay: Very strong between Diane and Angelica (the latter of whom, at least, is clearly characterized as a lesbian). Diane initially seduces Angelica into continuing to supply her with liquid gold by giving her a lengthy kiss; their later sessions together see Angelica brushing the gold onto Diane's naked body, or helping to towel Diane off after she submerges herself in an entire bath of the stuff. During one of these meetings, Diane purrs to Angelica that "like it or not, our fates are intrinsically entwined."
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Pope Clement getting an abscess removed from his rectum. Thankfully the actual gory detail isn't shown; we just hear him groaning in pain.
  • Catherine's magician Ruggieri gives her a potion that, he claims, will help her get pregnant. When Catherine asks him what's in it, his response is basically that You Do Not Want To Know. Everyone who gets a whiff of it thinks it's absolutely disgusting.
  • The manner in which Sebastio is executed. You've heard of being "quartered"? Now witness it.
  • Henri's injury in the tournament—the show doesn't shy away from depicting the chunk of the spear lodged in his bloody eye socket.
• Squick:
  • Basically everything about the relationship between Diane and Henri falls under this umbrella in one way or another.
  • At one point Antoinette de Guise virtually fondles one of her two sons as he's taking a bath. His reaction makes it clear that he's not comfortable with it at all.
• The Woobie:
  • As a child, Henri II is kidnapped by the Holy Roman Emperor's army, who keep him imprisoned for years. Whilst jailed, he's implied to have been raped by guards. As a teenager, he is groomed by the predatory Diane who has him so under her thrall that she stops him from being able to form a proper connection with his own wife. As an adult, he is mocked for how much power Diana has over him. Towards the end of his life, he seems to realize he has been abused, telling her "I was a boy when you first came to me", but it seems it's too late for him to break free. and then he dies in a joust trying to impress his wife, who may or may not have had a hand in killing him.
  • Sebastio. Despite his tendency to be the Snark Knight on occasion, he was a genuinely Nice Guy and Catherine's only true friend in France, and he definitely didn't deserve his extremely painful execution—particularly since he didn't even do anything wrong.

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