Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Bridgerton Season 3, Part 1
It’s been years in the making: Bridgerton‘s Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) finally crossed the threshold from platonic friends to passionate lovers at the end of season 3’s busy first half. The closing minutes are about as romantic as it gets, albeit in classics Bridgerton fashion ends the last episode of part 1 with a cliffhanger.
“It’s nice for people to have some time after the first four episodes to regroup and also enjoy the season,” Bridgerton showrunner Jess Brownell told Yahoo Entertainment. “There’s definitely a bit of organized chaos at the end of episode 4, so people might need a little break after that.”
After Penelope’s suitor, Lord Debling (Sam Phillips), removes himself from the marital fray because her affections lie elsewhere, she runs out of the ball in tears and heads home in her carriage. At this point, Colin realizes his feelings for her, stops the carriage and joins Penelope for a heart-to-heart talk.
Colin confesses that he is deeply in love with Penelope, which leads to her saying that she wants to be more than friends. Things heat up quickly, leading to a steamy sex scene in the carriage, considered one of the couple’s spiciest moments from author Julia Quinn’s book. Romance Mr. Bridgerton.
When the carriage stops abruptly in front of Bridgerton’s house, Colin stuns Penelope with a sudden proposal: “For God’s sake, Penelope Featherington.” Are you going to marry me or not?”
How’s that for a cliffhanger?
“It was very important to us that Colin’s feelings for Penelope started to develop before Lord Debling came on the scene. That’s why Debling doesn’t become a bigger character until episode 3,” Brownell explains. “However, his appearance does put a timer on things, allowing Colin to figure out the feelings that had already developed.”
She sees their first kiss in episode 2 as the turning point for Colin to face the feelings he has had for a while.
“The first kiss is a moment when his feelings become more clearly different than him,” Brownell said. “If you look at the story, the seeds of changing his feelings are planted in him realizing that Pen is angry with him because Colin often takes Pen for granted. If she is suddenly no longer there, he unconsciously says, ‘I don’t like that. I enjoy having her in my life.” He may be out of touch with what those feelings are, but that’s when he realized deep down, “I really care about this person.”
The palpable tension leading up to Penelope and Colin’s caress was surprisingly HBO-inspired Euphoria.
“When we were planning episode 4 and everything leading up to the carriage scene, I was rewatching season 1 Euphoria. There is an episode that takes place almost entirely at a fair, and the tension in that episode increases incrementally. There is a soundtrack that builds up bit by bit and makes you feel all this fear,” Brownell explained. “I listened to that soundtrack on repeat as we were making this part of the episode, and I loved the feeling of things getting crazier and crazier, and the dance set was a great way to emphasize that.”
Brownell’s goal was for viewers to feel that buildup.
‘You have Pen dancing with Debling and suddenly Colin comes and then Cressida comes [Cowper], and things just keep growing,” she explained. “It’s very deliberately chaotic, leading to this final moment where Colin admits his feelings.”
Brownell said she was “excited and optimistic” about writing the silent carriage encounter between Penelope and Colin, especially because “Nicola and Luke, as actors and as people, have a great friendship, and a huge part of this story and this season is about love based on friendship.
“It was exciting to write a different kind of sex scene – a sex scene where there is real tender openness and depth,” she continued. “There is laughter. We don’t often see laughter in sex scenes on television, and I think there’s real beauty in that.
In the book, Colin’s marriage proposal comes after he finds out that Penelope is Lady Whistledown. At this point in the series, only Eloise (Claudia Jessie) is aware of Penelope’s secret.
“We felt like we had been playing the story of the queen hunting Whistledown for two seasons, and we felt like we needed to take a break from that storyline,” Brownell said of the switch. “That will be a bigger thread in the back half.”
When Part 2 drops on June 13, “Polin,” as fans affectionately call the couple, will be in the honeymoon phase. With Penelope’s Lady Whistledown secret looming over their heads, it will likely cause romantic turmoil when Colin eventually discovers her secret.
“Narratively, it was very useful for us because it’s a huge secret hanging over this new romantic couple, but what allows us in the back half – as viewers will see – is to spend more time in the love bubble between Colin. and Penelope,” Brownell said. “In past seasons we’ve had to create direct conflict between the couple, but we didn’t have to do that as much this season because once that secret lands, it’s going to turn everything upside down.”
The last four episodes of the season promise to be even more dramatic.
“The back half is basically an inverted world of the front half,” Bronwell teased, hinting that there is “plenty of plot” they have yet to discuss.
“If the front half is rom-com and lightness, playfulness and awkward banter, the back half is a steadily rising arrow of tension. That little bit of chaos you saw at the end of Episode 4 continues to build in the second half,” she said.
Bridgerton Season 3, Part 1, is streaming on Netflix. Part 2 starts streaming on June 13.
