Series 3 is just as much brain candy as the previous seasons! I’m always surprised by how fun I find the show. I love the cheerful color palette and the ladies dresses and stately locales. Just so much fun!

Once again, the main story, the romance, was the most uninteresting bit to me. Most interesting stories in Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte for me have been those “relating to abusive households, forced/arranged marriage, pressures to do with financial ruin, trying to exist within oppressive gender roles that are crushing you” as someone put it. There’s just more meat in those stories than there have been in the romances.

I enjoyed the Bridgertons as a family very much again! I’d have loved to seen more of them as a family, but obviously as the main character was not a Bridgerton this time, that wasn’t possible.

Some random thoughts about series 3:

– Penelope’s glow up – actually a glow down. She looks so colorless and boring and like every other girl after her “glow up” 🙁 I’m also not sure whether that style is actually what she truly wants – I think her colorful dresses and elaborate hair-dos of seasons 1-2 and early season 3 were implied being chosen for her by her mother, and the pastel glow-up was her choosing for herself but I’m not sure whether it’s because those pastel colors are what she actually prefers or if it’s because the Bridgerton and other noble ladies are wearing pastel colors so she wants to look just like them? The thing is, the pastel colors look soooo boooooring on Penelope! It’s like she lost all her individuality. But maybe that’s supposed to be what the character wants? Not to stand out in anyway?
– I don’t feel like Penelope found herself at all, she just goes on as before really. Would’ve been interesting to see what kind of sense of style and character she developed had she found herself and the confidence to be that. In the future-bit at the end, with the babies, she did wore a dress in color and pattern more like the ones her mother made her wear before her glow-up rather than a pastel one.
– Despite all that! I did love Penelope’s pastel dresses as dresses… just not an her. But I’d love to wear any one of them myself and they also would’ve been great for almost any other characters as well.
– I didn’t like Penelope’s glow-up hair at all. It looked pretty and all but It didn’t even try to evoke any sort of a historical feel and were just pure modern or maybe like 1940s style or something and that’s a huge nope for me. Same with her make-up – so modern!
– Penelope did look very pretty after her glow-up… just totally modern and not hint of historical (even fake historical!) feeling to be found in her make-up or hair.
– Penolope is very bitter and cruel in series 2 which particularly comes out as her Lady Whistledown newsletters. She is only lightly redeemed in series 3. She is still not very likable and I’m not really enjoying her. She can be so vindictive, jealous and cruel and uses Lady Whistledown to put people down and even destroy them. She doesn’t seem quite as cruel anymore as she was in season 2, but still. I don’t 100% buy her understanding that what she did was cruel and wrong, and partly it feels like her regeret is more down to getting in trouble because of it rather than true remorse for what she did to other people.
– I don’t like Eloise. She’s so self-centred – her first thought about anything whatsoever is always “How does this affect me personally? How does this affect me as a Bridgerton ie Bridgerton reputation? How does this affect my brother/sister?” and when she and Penelope were friends in season 1, she never really listened to Penelope but projected her own thoughts on her friend without caring what her friend thought. She’s always complaining about her situation but never does anything to change it or try to work within it.
– Eloise’s styling is often weird too. Her hair-cut and styling with all the hair bows seems more fitting for little girls like 6 year olds, not someone who’s I think is supposed to be like 17 at least.
– On the otherhand, Penelope didn’t really open up to anyone either, including Eloise, about her thoughts and then blamed everyone else for her feeling invisible.
– I still can’t tell who Colin as a person is. I barely remember him from series 1 and 2 where he was pretty much a non-entity as far as I recall and all I could say is that he’s the quiet one? Now he came back from a world tour or something something, is suddenly a ladies man (only not really!) and is a writer (maybe? kinda? he’s trying anyway) and suddenly just decides that he’s in love with his good old friend Penelope?
– as far as Penelope’s infatuation with Colin goes, it felt like it never grew into genuine love but remained an obsession and infatuation and that she was simply smug about cathing one of the most eligible bachelors who she had been obsessed with for years.
– The older characters (Lady Danbury, Lady Danbury’s brother, Queen Charlotte and Lady Violet) are still my favorites!
– I LOVED all of Queen Charlotte’s wigs! They were amazing and impressive and worth watching the show just to see them! Her wigs have always been great, but in season 3 all them were the best ever! Also love Queen Charlotte’s dress in the “Penelope reveals herself as Lady Whistledown to the ton” scene.
– Also liked Cressida Cowper a lot in this series! Her hair-dos and dresses are amazing(ly bad but handsome!), and her situation shows well the limits and very few options society put on women in those times. I’d love to have a Cressida series along the lines of the Queen Charlotte series.
– Daphne and Simon really just have fucked off to… somewhere… who knows where, we sure don’t… haven’t they. Are they even alive anymore…
– Francesca and her sweetheart were very cute! I liked them a lot.