Warning:
Bridgerton Season 3 spoilers ahead! If you haven’t seen it— Go watch it!! It’s my favorite season of any show I have ever watched!!
My mom just watched Season 1— YAY MOM! (But also, mom, don’t read this just yet!)
Dearest Gentle Readers,
Season 3 of Bridgerton had me on the edge of my seat and crying my eyes out— more than once. As usual, I do not expect my reaction to be the general consensus; however, this time I have a specific reason why.
This particular season was one I was looking forward to. The main love story includes my favorite character on the show: Penelope Featherington. But the relationship between her and Colin Bridgerton, with its classic friends-to-lovers trope, reminds me so much of Zach and I’s relationship, it took one episode to make the comparison. Like Colin and Pen (as Colin lovingly calls her), Zach and I were friends for some years before dating. We had to navigate the fact that I fell for Zach when I first met him and he only realized his feelings for me years later after an eye-opening dream. After our first kiss, without much explanation or time passing, the seriousness of our relationship was cemented and we were on track toward forever before I even knew he was calling me his girlfriend. Bridgerton fans— sound familiar?
But Part 2 of Season 3? There are no words… but I will attempt to find them.
Penelope starts her publication when she feels truly invisible and powerless in her life. Her family doesn’t respect her opinions, she struggles with social anxiety, and her crush doesn’t like her back (yet), but she has a secret talent: she is an exquisite writer. She uses this skill to covertly publish a gossip column in the Society Papers, which is a fancy pamphlet in which she shares information she has learned while going unnoticed in public. Her writing becomes a tension point in the ton. Most everyone enjoys tuning in to the hot gossip, but there are some— those specifically named in the column, like the Queen— who look negatively upon a mysterious author parading her opinions under the sexy pseudonym of Lady Whistledown.
“It’s appalling, what a shame!
They’ll disgrace their family name”
There are consequences to her writing. When her best and only friend Eloise finds out, Eloise stops speaking to her. When her mother finds out, she is heartbroken that Penelope would write such things, about her family and herself. When her husband-to-be finds out, he loses all trust in her and doesn’t understand why she wants to continue the column at all. But perhaps the most frightening plot point for me was Penelope being publicly hunted down by the perhaps-mentally-unstable Queen. I am most likely still traumatized by the romance comic I was reading that turned into a horror story out of nowhere, so I was very distracted by my fear of what the Queen was going to do to Penelope once she found out who was poking fun at her for years. Thankfully, Bridgerton remained a textbook romantic drama with no bloody visual! (PHEW. I can sleep easy at night.) For the full scene where Penelope confesses, one of my favorite scenes in a long list of favorites from this series, click here.
Along with the fear of unknown consequences from unpredictable authorities who wished to unearth her identity, Penelope was given a sort of ultimatum: she could continue to be Lady Whistledown or become Mrs. Bridgerton and put her precious column to rest. Even after I stopped worrying about Penelope being murdered, I felt anxious— like I was the one hiding my identity from the queen. Like I was the one needing to choose between two desires of my heart. Well, because I was. Would I choose to be seen as I am or to be accepted by the majority? Part 1 of Season 3 had mirrored my past; would Part 2 mirror my future?
And did I want it to?
(Spoiler alert: yes.)