Knitted a few rows, then watched The Virgin in the Ice from the Brother Cadfael series. A major change in casting: Hugh Beringar is played by someone else now, just as the former actor--an interesting cross between young David Duchovny and young Peter O'Toole--was growing on me. The former performer was unreadable and therefore ambivalent, capable of both tenderness and ruthlessness. The present performer is the very trap that every casting director falls into, which is to assign the role to someone who will play it like Miles Hendon from The Prince and the Pauper.

Love that soft montage of the nun frozen inside a block of ice and surrounded with fires as the ice gently melts.

This episode is all about how Crusaders can turn out to be bandits, and how a nest of monks can be comprised of paranoid and malicious gossips. As the previous episode introduces us to Richildis, Cadfael's long-abandoned betrothed before he took on the cowl, this one introduces us to Olivier, born to Cadfael and a Syrian woman from when Cadfael was a soldier in battle. It is faithful to the book, but the long stand and the minutely-described fight against the renegades is missing, possibly because the construction of the bandits' fort would have been too expensive for one sequence. At any rate the truncation is proof that words can be more spectacular than visuals, and that, no matter how much you edit out from Ellis Peters, she will always remain a magnificent raconteur.