Diamonds: A girl’s best friend, or her worst enemy? This season on Bridgerton, it could go either way. Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), who has yet to pick a young lady to be her “diamond” of the season, feels challenged – threatened, really – by Lady Whistledown, who has written that the Queen is afraid of making a poor choice. However, it seems like Francesca Bridgerton (Hannah Dodd), piano player extraordinaire, might be her best hope for diamond status. Meanwhile, Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) is out there in these streets trying to charm the young men of London (with Colin Bridgerton’s help), but she’s struggling to sparkle.
Let’s start with Colin Bridgerton, a man who is trying to be a friend to women: not only is he advising Penelope on all things charm-related, but he’s out in the world engaging in threesomes and trying to please as many ladies as he can before he has to settle down with just one.
Colin has offered his help to Penelope find a husband, but there’s a catch: he wants to keep these charm lessons secret, so he doesn’t ruin his own chances of finding a woman. If he were seen in close contact with Penelope, people would talk, and not kindly. The one person who does know about these lessons is Eloise (Claudia Jessie), who is still angry with Penelope and wants nothing to do with her, but finds Colin’s charity to be kind but still probably a bad idea..
While Penelope is trying to find a husband, her sisters Prudence and Philippa seem to be shirking their one duty, producing an heir. Their mother Portia is desperate for one of them to get pregnant in order for the child to inherit the family money, but neither of the sisters is all that interested in having sex (and, as it turns out, Philippa doesn’t even know how. This is what happens when you teach abstinence-only sex ed!). It’s an interesting element to throw into Penelope’s storyline because, while she wishes to get married so she can leave the family home and gain some independence, wouldn’t it be something if she actually were the one the marry and produce the first heir?
During Colin’s first lesson with Penelope, he tells her that she’s not innately awkward, she just needs to get into a comfort zone so she can be herself. He invites her to the Bridgerton home, which is the one place she tells him she feels most comfortable, and he challenges her to pretend he’s a suitor and have a go at some flirtatious conversation. She intensely stares at him and tells him, “Your eyes are the most remarkable shade of blue, yet somehow they shine even brighter when you are kind.” She obviously has a way with words, but her gaze and her intensity are enough to make Colin realize for a hot second that his old friend Pen is sexier than he thought. But in the midst of this lesson, Eloise returns home, and Colin shuffles Penelope to the study to hide, knowing Eloise would be angry to find Penelope in the house. In the study, Penelope reads Colin’s journal which is essentially a sex diary written during his time in Europe, and it’s hard to tell if she’s disappointed in him, or jealous that she’s not a part of it.
He’s disappointed in her, however, for reading it, and when he lunges to take it from her, a glass falls to the floor and as he picks up a shard, he cuts his hand. She wraps the cut in a handkerchief, and once again, the sexual tension between them is palpable as she caresses his hand in hers. At the ball they attend later that night, Penelope finds a groove flirting with a couple of different men, and as Colin watches her, his jealousy grows.
But the night’s vibes are ruined because soon, everyone in the ballroom is talking about how Colin is offering his charity to Penelope. Everyone is cruel and unsubtle about the fact that they think Penelope is a lost cause and an eligible bachelor like Colin is wasting his time on her, and she runs out of the ball a wreck. Eloise, who had told her new bestie Cressida Cowper about Colin’s helping Penelope, blames her for spreading the gossip, but alas, Cressida wasn’t the one to blab. It was Miss Livingston who overheard Eloise talking, and Cressida points out that Eloise is the one who blabbed in the first place about Penelope, because when you point a finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.
When Penelope returns home, she dons her Lady Whistledown cap and immediately starts to write a new column, taking aim at herself. She scathingly writes that Penelope Featherington is a hopeless spinster after all, putting in to words what everyone else in society seems to be thinking. Colin comes to her home to visit and reassure her she’s not a spinster, but Penelope is despondent, telling Colin she’s nothing more than a “sad, stupid girl who believed she might possibly had a chance at love.”
She then asks Colin for a favor. A kiss. She explains, she has never been kissed, and she could die tomorrow without ever having been kissed, and she can’t live with that thought. “I do not wish to die without ever having been kissed,” she tells him. Colin’s never seen Penelope in this kind of state, so he agrees to the kiss and, even though it was just another act of charity, it doesn’t seem entirely selfless because it sure seems like he enjoyed it.
Bonus Bridgertons:
- Francesca may not be interested in playing games to become the Queen’s diamond, but her piano-playing impressed the Queen so much that it might make her a lock to be diamond of the season. Gotta love how Lady Danbury is always pulling strings behind the scenes. (Speaking of Danbury, who do we think her unexpected visitor is??)
- The Mondriches, now living in a palatial estate thanks to their inheritance, are struggling amid their transition from working class to members of the ton. Alice especially feels uncomfortable literally and metaphorically wearing the clothes of the upper crust and gaining a position she didn’t work for. Will assures her though that no one else in the ton worked for their money either. Ton burn!
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
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