Synopsis
Gunpowder (2017) is a three-part BBC historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Kit Harington — who also produced — plays Robert Catesby, a Warwickshire Catholic gentleman who, in the autumn of 1605, coordinated a plan to pack barrels of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament and kill King James I along with most of his government.
The series is not really about Guy Fawkes, the man guarding the cellar. It's about the man who convinced a circle of desperate nobles that mass destruction was their only option. Catesby lived under laws that made open Catholic worship a crime: priests were hunted, Mass was said in hidden rooms, and execution for recusancy was a realistic outcome. Harington plays him not as a fanatic but as someone who ran out of other ideas. Mark Gatiss is cold and precise as the king's spymaster Robert Cecil; Peter Mullan brings weight to the Jesuit priest Garnet, caught between conscience and complicity.
The BBC production spares nothing in depicting the period's cruelty — the executions here are not elided. Harington's personal stake (Catesby is his ancestor on his mother's side) gave the project an unusual origin. Stream all episodes of Gunpowder (2017) on iFILM.
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