Bridgerton, season 3: the end of part 1 decrypted

“This shift in power dynamics between the couple is fun. She's the one with the power now.”

We will have to wait a few more weeks before we get the answer. Part 1 of season 3 of The Bridgerton Chronicles ended with a huge cliffhanger that kept fans in suspense… Spoiler alert!

In the final moments, Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) posed to Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) this question that she had once desired so much. “Penelope Featherington, will you marry me or not?” Yes or no ? Suspense!

“If you had asked me that at the end of season 1, the answer would have been obvious… but so much has happened since then,” confides the actor Luke Newton at Entertainment Weekly. “She's been through so much. She's almost incredulous and doesn't actually understand, because she hasn't seen what he went through and this process that led him to ask her that…” The roles are reversed and this “changing power dynamics within the couple is fun. She has the power now. He asks her: 'Please marry me. Let's spend our lives together. I haven't stopped thinking about you for months.' Except she seems to be saying, 'I haven't stopped thinking about you for years, so it's not fair.' It's an important scene in the books, and it was very important for us to keep it true to the characters and their story and not overly romanticize it.”

The suspense is still limited, if we are to believe the showrunner Jess Brownellwhich explains that Bridgerton is a “happy ending series. They lived happily… But how did they achieve it? This is what we expect to see. And it’s not exactly going to be an easy path.” In other words, she will eventually say “yes”, but maybe not right away!

Above all, the story of Colin and Penelope should be complicated by the young woman's secret. In the books, Colin already knows that she is Lady Whisteldown, but not in the series… unlike his sister, Eloise (Claudia Jessie), who knows the truth.

“While the book highlights the hunt for Lady Whistledown and Colin discovers Pen's secret much earlier, we made another choice”continues the showrunner. “We've been following the hunt for Lady Whistledown for two seasons and that story needed a break for a while. Especially since we had Penelope looking for a husband, which isn't as specific in the books. It seemed important to give this a real place, without her secret identity overshadowing the storyline. But Lady Whistledown's secret will come back in the second part…”

The first part of season 3 of The Bridgerton Chronicles is currently online. Part 2 will be released on June 13, 2024 on Netflix.