Bridgerton Season 4 Review | A Kiss For The Romantically Injured

The promise of the Bridgerton series has never been about scratching a simple romantic itch. It has always been about tugging at our deepest desires, of surrendering to impulses and fancies. We enter with the belief—despite any previous discontent with the last seasons—that passion, affection, and imagination will couple with sexual tension, difference and errors in judgement to stir us into a state of total feeling. We watch to be transported to a time and place where the disorderliness of desire and the textures of life mingle in the most extraordinary ways. And yet, there is always the flicker of the real, the possibility of love existing beyond class, race, gender and ethnicity. The stakes are immense; one imbalance in the general tenor, and the subterfuge shatters; the spectator curses the makers for having sold a ruse. Too much reality, and resolutions seem like cop-outs that dissolve conflicts; too little reality, and the whole affair gets dismissed as untrue. 

The first four episodes of the fourth season were released on Netflix yesterday, with the remaining four scheduled for February 26. They take forward the story of Lady Bridgerton’s second son, Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), as he forays into finding love. He is handsome, in fact cute, as he feels out of place in “good society”, and his role in this Cinderella-esque season reformulates the trope of the prince as a rake, without tarnishing his fun-loving, pleasure-seeking persona. Early on, the season nods to a scene in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005), where the camera tracks Betsy, the maid, as she hums while completing chores in the Bennet household. The scene is comparable to how the film introduces Elizabeth, though Betsy has limited screen time. In Bridgerton, Mrs Wilson, the housekeeper, is tracked similarly, with the ladies and lords of the manor blurring out of focus as she makes her way down to the servants’ stations. There is a hint of Downton Abbey (2010-2015) in that the workers’ perspective, their voices, are heard. 

So, the spectator first encounters class hierarchy in the prince’s (read Benedict’s) house rather than where our Cinderella, Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha), is placed. By allowing the rather coarse rewriting of class divide to move inward, not outward, it subtly chips away at the nobility of our aristocratic protagonist. Placed inferior in stature to Benedict, Sophie, an orphan and the illegitimate child of a nobleman, is outspoken, curious, learned, but also caged, enraged and longing to belong in society. We are instantly drawn to her innocence, individuality and spirit.

Meanwhile, Lady Whistledown’s (Julie Andrews) identity is disclosed to the town as her relationship with an ever-demanding Queen Charlotte becomes increasingly fraught. Lady Danbury’s wish to retreat from the happenings of the royal court leads her to propose Alice Mondrich as the queen’s lady-in-waiting. This general shift in character placement may explain Michaela’s (John Kilmartin’s cousin) surprise visit to her brother and Francesca Bridgerton’s house in London near the end of the fourth episode. Though the series explores Lady Bridgerton’s sexual self-expression, it nonetheless insists on keeping her tied to her maternal role. This grip is so tight that it hurtles across affliction, maternal formality and societal restriction without giving Violet Bridgerton enough room of her own. 

However, these are but secondary considerations across the four episodes from “The Waltz” to “An Offer from a Gentleman.” We keep close to Sophie and Benedict, tickled by the tenderness they display towards one another and how they beguile each other. Seeing them cross paths only to diverge again raises the spectators’ hopes, longings and expectations. It is the femininity of Bridgerton’s rhythm that assaults its male characters. Benedict’s incessant drawings of a masked Sophie at the ball, from as many perspectives as his memory permits, is only one part of how she consumes him. He gravitates towards her in a fashion that fits how women conceive of love’s labour from men. A button Sophie fixes, far from being registered as a casual domestic detail, tortures Benedict. Consciously and subconsciously, he restlessly toys with that button, his hand seemingly incapable of divorcing from the memory of Sophie’s touch.  

So far, this season of Bridgerton successfully offers its women spectators a canvas on which to feel with their bodies, to imagine being touched, loved, dreamt about, and drawn not as muses but as subjects and objects on their own terms. Perhaps the most difficult discourse to get somewhat right is women’s bodies and their desires. It leads us to hope that when the self aches terribly from any vacuum created in the wake of vulnerability, it shall be softly filled by a most desired kiss. But in all this, the final scene lacks the sensuality and urgency we come to expect from Sophie and Benedict. It not only feels rushed but choppy, as if a lacklustre intimate encounter foreshadows his insolent offer to her. 

One can only hope that the remaining episodes deliver on their promise to satisfy the dearest, gentle spectator, or at least to kindle a swoon.