The Empresses (3 paragraphs).

[August1991]

About to cancel my Netflix subscription (Tubi is good enough for me), I renewed because of this series. Like Marie Antoinette, Sissi is a wonderful female character - to me, she's always Romy Schneider. Assuming the series is renewed, I wonder what will happen in Mayerling. (BTW, she was tall - almost 5'10. And by all accounts, competitive, vain, sportive.)

This series shows a dysfunctional family. And yet, it is somehow the model of our current Canada. We have a bilingual federal state with no official cultural. I still wonder how Sissi's husband became the Franz of the Great War. Spoiler alert: She was assassinated. (Violence is often directed to perceived power.)

I am no historian but I am intrigued why Europe in the summer of 1914 threw away its civilisation. What is now western Ukraine, Romania, was once part of Austria. And then, these foolish Europeans involved us in another of their wars. This series somehow shows me how this happened.