Bridgerton Returns With Makeovers

It's our recap of Season 3, episode 1, "Out of the Shadows"

Greetings, fair reader, and welcome to another season in the ton¹, which has so far produced two matches involving people whose tongues somehow tripped and fell unbidden into each others’ mouths. Shall we go for three? The formula on Bridgerton typically is that X and Y do not want to be together, and yet their loins take over where their brains fall short, so they must get their legs over both a variety of emotional obstacles AND each other (not always in that order). In this season, the formula tweaks slightly. X very much wants to be with Y, but assumes it’s off the table, and Y is going to be oblivious to his feelings until Laney Boggs puts on a red dress and comes down the stairs without her glasses on. You get the gist. But it ought to be a sexy ride, complicated by the fact that one of our leads has a poison pen that she’s wielded rather liberally and with no shortage of spite.

Spoiler: It’s this one!

I did a quick primer in Thursday’s newsletter, but the Previously On in episode one takes care of the most important bits: Eloise Bridgerton found out her BFF Penelope Featherington masquerades as gossip columnist Lady Whistledown, and effectively broke up with her; Penelope then overheard Colin Bridgerton saying — to a gaggle of dudes we’ve never seen before, i.e., indiscriminately — that he would not DREAM of courting her, EVER, HOO BOY, WHAT A TROLL. Both of these are big breaks from the book: There, it’s Colin who discovers Penelope’s identity, and this moment came from being harassed by Violet about getting married; Colin said he wouldn’t be marrying Penelope, but he would have said the same thing about ANY name that came up, and it just happened to be hers. The TV version was more pointed and EXTRA, which is true of Lady Whistledown in the series as well, so the path to true love has a lot more potholes.

As we suspected, they’re making Francesca a bigger character now than she was in any of the books until her own. You might remember last season, Eloise was a total hot mess, squirmy and completely unable to look at anyone in the eye or even speak a sentence. None of that ever made sense to me, because Eloise was always very quick with a sarcastic retort, and the idea that she couldn’t keep her shit together in public was bananas, even if she had no interest in the marriage mart. Francesca is the opposite: She’s so calm, she’s practically comatose. It’s like they upgraded Eloise’s software: Francesca isn’t into any of this either, because she'd just like to be left to her piano in the peace and quiet, but she knows how to walk into a room without either of her eyelids twitching and she does not speak like she’s been given a very short time limit. She is ALSO missing a personality, but hopefully we’ll get to that.

Violet and Francesca. Photo courtesy of Netflix.

For now, we just have dribs and drabs of her looking pensive, and a boring scene where Violet uses music as a metaphor for marriage, to try and ensure that Francesca will open herself up to it. Francesca just sort of sits there. This would be so much more interesting if, when Violet left, Fran opened up her pianoforte and pulled out a brick of cocaine. Instead she just stares up at the portrait of Whatsit and Violet Bridgerton looking cuddly, and then buries her nose in her sheet music. Wait, is she the Mary Bennet of this situation? So Daphne would be Jane, Eloise is Elizabeth, and Hyacinth is probably Lydia. No one is Kitty, because even Kitty wasn’t really Kitty. Actually, maybe that makes her the Gregory Bridgerton of Pride & Prejudice.

Now, let’s tango with our leads.

Colin has returned from his Travels to Foreign Places. And much like Dr. Rod Randall from The Sun Also Sets, he’s seen things while he was in Europe. European things. Presumably unlike Dr. Rod Randall, Colin was not decapitated in a tractor accident in the Yukon while driving in a pink convertible, before having his head reattached in a precedent-setting two-day operation. Although that might have been an elegant way to recast. Instead of a new or reattached head, Colin simply returns with a tan, some muscles, a slick veneer to charm the ladies, and what appears to be a light man-perm. I can’t decide if it’s MEANT to look like Colin is trying on charm like he’d try on new pants, or if he’s just come home a smooth operator who enjoys seeing the effects of his European Things on hordes of women. It comes off like the show is breaking a sweat to sell Colin as a charismatic social draw, but Luke Newton, bless him, is not (yet?) adept at playing Captain Finger Guns, the Mayor of Rizz Island. It doesn’t help that for two seasons they wrote Colin as humorless, despite him being super charming in the novels. They do, however, juice him up here by having him strip off his shirt and take a gentle ribbing from his brothers about his newfound physique. Not that we knew what it was like before. It’s Colin’s first skin shot. They grow up so fast.

Over at Chez Featherington, Portia is still supposedly very garish and tacky, but the problem with that is that Polly Walker looks good in everything and they aren’t REALLY trying that hard to hide it: