The Buccaneers ‘Women or Wives’: Conchita fights for her marriage as Jinny and Nan both receive proposals

The Buccaneers Season 1 Episode 2 Recap and Review

What happened in The Buccaneers Season 1 Episode 2?

A house party! Conchita rented a house ostensibly for a girls’ weekend, but it was actually an effort to win back her husband’s affection.

Key points about episode 2:

🌸Seadown was a monster. Lizzy had first hand experience on this, which made her frightened for Jinny, who accepted Seadown’s proposal. 

🌸Nan told Guy about her parentage, which prevented him from proposing to her. By the time he got back the next day, Theo was there, on his knees, asking Nan to marry him. 

🌸Conchita and Richard reconnected, then were torn apart again by a misunderstanding.

🌸Honoria’s iciness thawed, and she and Mabel grew closer.  

Full recap and review

The Buccaneers glossed this episode with a weekend house party — with young rich people doing young rich people things — but this was an episode with much heartbreak and darkness and fear and the tiniest sprinkles of hope. The lure toward an eye roll at American heiresses wasting time playing sardines (hide and seek) with their penniless British aristocrats was skilfully done. Every time the episode started to tether toward boredom at the one percent one percent-ing at Runnymede (they have their own waterfalls?), it pulled back with an adroit gut punch. ‘Women or Wives’ was The Buccaneers giving several examples of doing what it does best, hiding impactful, serious storylines amidst frothy displays of excess. 

Seadown was the sinister figure that stalked the episode. Nan returned from her month-long exile at Cornwall to find Jinny, who had danced with Seadown three or four times, hopeful at a proposal. At the supposed girls’ weekend that Conchita planned, however, Seadown started ignoring Jinny, who was happily drinking champagne and dancing, and turned his attention toward Lizzy. 

Of course Lizzy played the courtship game with Seadown, that was what she came to England for. When they walked into a bedroom alone together, it was Lizzy who tried to initiate a kiss. Instead, Seadown told her to go to a lounge chair and undress. This went way, way beyond what was expected amongst young people spending time together with marital hopes. In Lizzy’s face and shaken voice was shock and fear. Seadown menacingly repeated his command. As his own sister Honoria later told Mabel, Seadown was a monster.  

Eventually, he left her there, naked and alone, after telling her not to move. It was not clear how long she remained there frozen in trauma. Seadown sent a male servant to tell Lizzy that he had gone to bed, and that he would see her at breakfast.

The following day, after he had broken one, he went to break another. Seadown proposed to Jinny in front of everyone. Jinny, the daughter of a kind and gentle woman who tried so hard to find acceptance in New York society where the St. George money was too new, the young American who came to England determined to marry an aristocrat, naturally said yes. 

Immediately, Seadown showed what Jinny could expect as his wife. He pulled her away from her happily celebrating friends so they could be alone. He told her he was glad she was back to herself after last night’s silliness. What silliness? That she showed a little confidence and sass? That she drank champagne with her friends? This abusive broke dude. Jinny’s face showed that she heard the warning bells though she may not have recognised them as such.

Jinny’s younger sister Nan spent most of the weekend walking in the gardens, struggling to process Jinny’s revelation whilst having no one to talk to. When Guy showed up, Jinny’s loneliness was such that she poured her secret to him. Guy had been thinking of proposing; his father gave him his mother’s ring in the first episode. He felt the weight of Nan’s revelation, however, and left. 

The following day, he came back, his feelings for Nan clearly overpowering his reservations over marrying a woman born out of wedlock, in a society that would do more than frown on that. He arrived too late. Theo, the Duke of Tintagel, tracked down Nan, the one person he knew liked him as he was, without knowing nor caring about his title, and proposed to her.

The woman who arranged the girls’ weekend in an effort to win back her husband’s affection found herself winning and losing at the same time. For all of Jinny’s famed beauty and Nan’s smarts, it was Conchita who was the undisputed Queen Bee of the Gilded Age It Girls. The confidence and outsized personality was authentic, of course, as was the postpartum struggle and the sinking realisation that her battle to get the man who loved her in New York to love her in England as well was even more uphill than she realised. 

There was Conchita, doing headstands and sitting on the grass with her legs spread out. There was Conchita, unable to stop her tears as she casually mentions how that had been happening since she gave birth, a stark reminder that this was a young woman suffering from postpartum depression whilst in a country not her own, with her husband frequently away. There was Conchita shaking her bum at her husband, after telling Nan, ‘...if I can’t make him love me the way he used to, to remember who I am and not just look at me with disappointment, then I shan’t survive this.’ Conchita as the married woman was chaperone to her single friends, and she tried to give them a fun weekend, but her mind, her energies, were on her husband, to the point that she missed Nan’s almost desperate attempts to have a conversation with her about her secret. 

Conchita’s efforts worked, to some extent. She and her husband spent the night rekindling their love. When she woke up and he was not beside her, she still carried her hope, until she overheard him speaking to Ms Testvalley outside. Richard said there were women and there were wives, that his mother was right, that Conchita did not fit and never would. A heartbroken Conchita walked away before she heard the rest of what Richard said, his proclamation that she was an addiction, that he loved her and would never stop. 

The episode’s sweetest scenes belonged to Mabel and Honoria. ‘Sometimes you just need to breathe, don’t you?’ Mabel told Honoria, recognising the human behind the stiff English aristocrat. It was Honoria who found Mabel’s hiding place whilst they played sardines; instead of revealing her, they sat there together inside the closet and talked in tender intimacy. I look forward to seeing how the show handles their relationship. 

‘Women or Wives’ managed to give important character beats to all five It Girls whilst deftly handling some sensitive issues. What began as a seemingly frivolous house party turned into an emotionally layered episode, exploring power, vulnerability, trauma, and the quiet wars women fight behind closed heavy doors. 

Rating: A

Strays

🌸Conchita was mad at Nan for not being there for her when she gave birth. The friends later made up, but though Nan tried, she never got to tell Conchita the secret that had been weighing on her, that of her birth.

🌸Conchita: ‘Girls, have you not noticed? We’re not them. We’re Americans. When did we ever care what people think of us?’ Um, back in New York, where you girls had to live under the reign of the old rich who despised your new money?

🌸Conchita: ‘Yes, I planned this weekend. And England will be horrified, of course. But that’s perfect for England. They love being horrified.’ Hahahahahaha. I felt like The Buccaneers writers noticed how certain tabloids behaved during, you know, and laced the show dialogue with biting accuracy toward a very specific group, those who read and believe said tabloids. 

🌸Guy practically begged Conchita for an invitation to the weekend. 

🌸Theo and his mother hosted Jane Hopeleigh and her mother. Her mother was oblivious, but Jane looked like she recognised the awkwardness of the meeting and what was displeasing Theo. 

🌸After brooding on the balcony of his castle, The Duke of Tintagel ran to the sea naked and swam, which seemed like important information to add here. 

🌸Guy: ‘You seem more still.’ Nan: ‘You’re the first to notice.’ Nan’s friends were going through some serious things so her melancholy, her feeling of being hollow, was going unnoticed until Guy arrived.

🌸Seadown to Jinny: ‘In England, Miss St. George, we find presumption unappealing.’ Jinny to Lizzy: ‘In England, they find presumption unappealing.’ Jinny already mirroring Seadown’s words whilst he manipulated her was chilling. 

🌸Ms Testvally eyed Richard and Conchita whilst they kissed, and later as they walked away. 

🌸Guy said he had experience in the world thinking badly of him. Hmm what is this about?

🌸Nan mentioned Amy Fairchild from Saratoga, who was born out of wedlock, and I wanted to include her here in case we meet her. 

🌸Jinny said she found a letter on their father’s desk about Nan’s parentage, which included insults and arrangements for money. 

🌸Conchita: ‘I want him to desire me, not pity me.’ ‘He mustn’t see he’s breaking me.’

🌸Conchita tearfully said everything hurt, and this poor woman who was one month from giving birth had sex with her husband the night before. Poor Conchie. 

🌸After Jinny accepted Seadown’s proposal, Lizzie seemed scared for her. 

🌸Nan to Theo: ‘I’m impossibly pleased to see you.’ But she did not look all that pleased to get his marriage proposal?

Writer: Katherine Jakeways

Director: Susanna White

Original Air Date: November 8, 2023