Is Penelope Settling?

Let’s talk Bridgerton Season 3.

Dearest Gentle Reader…

Greetings from Los Angeles, where it is somehow 15 degrees cooler than it is at home in Philadelphia!

I’ve been here since last week, visiting my siblings, dropping my teenager off at film camp, writing about Justin Timberlake and thinking about Bridgerton. 

Like everyone else, I binged that third season as soon as it dropped. I love the show. I love the world-building. I love  the gowns and the wigs and the home interiors. I love Lady Danbury and Queen Charlotte, and love to hate the Featherington women. But I struggled a little with this season, mostly because I could not buy its central romance. Not because I agreed with the Internet dim-bulbs yapping about how a woman that looked like Penelope could ever land a hunk like Colin Bridgerton. 

No, indeed. My issue? I thought that Penelope was settling. 

I thought she picked the wrong man. 

Think about it: the Penelope Featherington we’ve come to know over three seasons is a badass. A brilliant and commercially successful writer who’s managed to live a double life right under the ton’s nose and make a fortune in an era where the only way a woman could get money was to marry it. Penelope is clever and accomplished; progressive and independent…and, sometimes, she’s petty and vengeful and unkind. She’s every woman! 

And how can Colin Bridgerton compare? Pen’s done all of that, and he’s done, what, exactly? A gap year? 

Maybe I need a Season One rewatch to remind myself that she’s been in love with him forever. I know the show wants us to believe that they’ve got history, and that they’ve bonded over writing. Except I think Pen’s a talented, observant, witty chronicler of the people around her, and Colin…kept a sex diary. I think Pen’s impressed by Colin’s writing not because of the excellence of his prose but because he’s writing about sex! 

Let’s be honest. In the game of marry, sleep with, kill, Colin Bridgerton is Option Two. He’s a pretty face and a nice pair of shoulders….but he’s not even independently wealthy. As the third son, he isn’t going to inherit the coronet or the land or the fortune. In the Regency era, second sons of nobility went to the army, and third sons went to the church, but my sense of Colin (at least, made-for-TV Colin) is that he’s going nowhere, and that his life plan, assuming he has one, is to hang around the family and live on whatever Anthony gives him. No job, because he doesn’t need one, but also, no calling. No passion.  

On the other hand, Lord Debling? I know he was merely the show’s romantic red herring, but in my heart of hearts I was hoping that he and Penelope would end up together. Lord Debling is smart. Well-read. Handsome. A good dancer, who’s clearly happier staying home with a book (he’s so me for real). He has his own interests, and plenty of money. Best of all, he was willing to give Penelope her space and her freedom, letting her manage his estate while he wandered the world doing some…nature…thing. He was the total package! 

But Pen and Colin were written in the stars – or at least in Julia Quinn’s source material. The problem was, I felt like, in order for the match to work, the show had to knock Penelope down a bit, making her ditzy and clueless in a way I found hard to buy. Lots of smart people are anxious, stammering wrecks in social settings, but I thought there was too much gasping (some of it was possibly corset-related), too much hand-wringing and bosom-heaving (related note: how glad are we that we’re not living in an era where the beauty standards require women to walk around with their bosoms hoisted up to their chins?). In short, there was far too much of Pen as damsel in distress who needs to be rescued, when she’s already saved herself, and is on her way to saving her family, with the money she earned in secret. 

I was happy that the show gave Penelope a moment, in the final episode, to address the Queen, take ownership of her work as Whistledown, explain her less-kind moments and the power that writing gives a young woman who feels herself envious, overlooked, imperfect, not what the world wants her to be. That hit home. And Colin’s speech, about being proud to stand beside her, was also lovely. 

But the idea that Penelope and Colin are well-matched, and are going to be happy together? I’m not buying it. 

Meanwhile, was I the only person who watched the Featherington’s ball and thought about Dominick Dunne’s PEOPLE LIKE US? That novel also features a huge, important party where butterflies were released at a climactic moment. Unfortunately, Dunne’s “bugs,” like Icarus, fly too close to the sun. They were fried by the theatrical spotlights, and plummeted onto the party guests as butterfly corpses, prompting mucho disgust and a stampede for the door. It’s a hilarious, memorable scene, and I wonder if anyone in the “Bridgerton” writers’ room ever read it.  

Did you?