The Buccaneers Recap ‘The Perfect Duchess’: But is she?

The Buccaneers Season 1 Episode 3

Summary:

The girls were invited to the Duchess of Tintagel’s private ball. Nan found out that Theo and Guy were old friends. After Guy decided he would not tell Theo about Nan’s secret, Nan told Theo she would marry him. Jinny and Seadown eloped. Conchita and Richard were going to work on their relationship in New York. Mabel and Honoria kissed. 

Full recap and review:

The conflict between Nan and Conchita had been brewing since the first episode, and it spilled on the night that introduced Nan to society as the Duke of Tintagel’s very possibly future bride. As Nan stressed over the weight of her secret, her uneasiness over this quick proposal, and her conflicted feelings about Theo’s best friend Guy, Conchita also stressed over her marriage and her husband’s family’s persistent disapproval of her, all whilst they embraced their second son’s wife Jinny. For Conchita, everything came easy to the St. George girls. For Nan, the friend for whom she had shown her support and devotion all these years could not even give her one night to shine.

It was a fight that was consistent with The Buccaneers’s insistent light on the internal lives of young women. Nan wanted one night to be about her and that was valid. Conchita wanted her husband’s love and affection, and that was valid too. There was painful truth in the angry words they both said, and much to unpack once they had calmed down. That was not going to happen that night, not with the rain pouring heavily outside and Nan confused between duty and desire, between living a privileged lie and feeling the relief of just uttering the truth. 

Theo knew that his proposal was a shock to Nan, and he asked her to marry him without her knowing his rather massive ‘context’, so he asked for one night, one night to show what their life together could be like. If she decided it was not a life for her, then they would end the almost but not quite engagement.

By all accounts, Theo was truly captivated by Nan. His desire to show and share with her his own internal life was genuine. They connected through art and appreciation of his lands when they first met. Now in his home as his potential bride, he showed her his sanctuary, where he retreated from the world to paint. The two of them dipping their fingers in blue paint and touching the canvas and later each other was a sweet scene.

In a private conversation with his old friend Guy, Theo gushed about Nan. His mother declared his face never once softened the way it did when he mentioned Nan’s name. There were no major red flags on Theo that would readily make us viewers think this hasty almost engagement was a bad thing. But the very perfection of it all bugged me.

So, after all the anti-Americanism we saw from Richard’s family, we met a much higher ranked, much wealthier Duchess, and she was completely fine with her son marrying an American he barely knew? She asked Nan what she loved about her son and did not even wait for a response. It was almost like she just wanted her son married and was relieved that Nan at least appeared appropriate and amiable. Her ready acceptance of Nan was the red flag.

Theo needed to marry out of duty, but Nan did, too. Back in New York, money much older than theirs would have been thrilled to have a daughter of the house marry into a dukedom. When Theo proposed, part of Nan’s confusion must have been the expectation from society that she would accept the proposal, of course she would, she had to, that was a proposal every girl wanted. Nan was freer in her thoughts and deeds, but she remained a lady of her time.

She was also a lady whose mind was uneasy. In her loneliness, in her lack of anyone she could speak to, she told a virtual stranger at the time, Guy, about her secret, the fact that she was born out of wedlock, a product of her father’s indiscretion. Guy had no high rank and no money, but even he had to pause and consider the implications of marrying a woman of uncertain birth. Nan was drawn to Guy, but when he left that night at Runnymede after learning her secret, a part of her closed off from him. 

Guy understood more than Nan the social risk to his friend Theo if it ever came out that Nan was a bastard. At the very least, it was something Theo needed to know before they married, a risk that he needed to decide for himself if he wanted to take. He was set on telling Theo, until he wasn’t. That decision meant that there was no impediment to the marriage, that he would lose Nan to his best friend, Nan, who did not know that he went back to Runnymede in the morning, who only found out after she had already told Theo she would indeed marry him. 

Was Nan deceitful toward Theo? Yes, but I would not judge her too harshly. Nan was a product of her time. She would have been raised from birth to think that to marry well was her life’s goal. No one could have anticipated that a duke would want her as his wife, but he did, and at the time and society they lived in, it would have been madness to sabotage that with a secret that, as far as Nan knew, was contained. And so she could only agree as he asked to come to New York with her, to meet her parents, to get to know her better. 

Nan had a spark about her, a calm intelligence, beauty, but I could mostly say the same thing about her friends. And this was what gave me pause about this episode – Outside the ballroom, as Nan, decked in a lovely gown and wearing the jewelry the Duchess gave her, told Mabel that she was pretending to everyone, Mabel assured her she was allowed to feel special. Nan had spent years in the shadow of Conchita’s vibrance and Jinny’s beauty. Tonight, all eyes were on her. All that was fine, the approving looks were fine, but someone from the crowd murmuring that Nan was the ‘perfect Duchess’ went a bit too far for me. That moment needed to be earned, and by episode three, we have not gotten there yet.

What the show has done incredibly well so far was the subtle terror of Jinny’s situation as she was now married to James Seadown. Her parents were planning a massive wedding in New York, but the two decided to elope. The surface happiness was there, a husband wanting to be alongside his wife all the time had the social coating of devotion. But it was, so very clearly, an abuser isolating his victim from her support system. Jinny’s sister Nan could not even get a word with her. Seadown was always there, his body blocking the door so Nan could not make eye contact with Jinny, his voice calling for Jinny so that she had to rush out after barely a minute with Nan. He did not even allow her to say goodbye to anyone as they hurriedly left Theo’s castle after the ball. He was making himself her whole life in a profoundly terrifying way. 

Jinny’s quieter personality may have endeared her to Seadown’s parents, but Conchita knew her skin colour was part of it too. ‘Will I ever be good enough? I’ve tried being me and I’ve tried being someone else. Is there any point in me trying at all?’ Conchita asked her question with pained resignation, and Lady Brightlingsea’s ‘Don’t raise your voice’ response was more telling than anything else she or her family has yet done. ‘My voice isn’t raised’, Conchita softly pointed out, as her husband’s family tried to paint her what she was not. 

‘She’s just doing it for attention’, Nan told Richard rather crossly, when Conchita ran into the rain and had everyone worried that she would slip and fall off a cliff. Nan had been in the middle of her own pained conversation with Theo when Jinny interrupted them because of Conchita’s flight. ‘But Nan, I’m her husband. So it’s my job to give it to her’, was Richard’s response. Indeed it was, and husband and wife reconnected in the rain, with him reiterating his love and her remembering it. Richard suggested that they both go to New York, where their love begun, the place where they worked as a couple, and Conchita agreed. 

‘The Perfect Duchess’ was Nan’s introduction into the world where she would occupy the highest perch should she decide to marry the Duke of Tintagel, but it was the slow horror of Jinny and Seadown’s relationship that struck me the most. The way the episode handled their story was so tonally on point, it felt like watching an accident in slow motion but being unable to stop it. This is something I intend to keep an eye on during this slow watch of The Buccaneers Season One before we head into Season Two next week – when Nan’s sister and friends are navigating stories with very serious implications, would her story of whether she would become a duchess or not not feel rather small?

Rating: B

Strays:

🌸Lizzy returned to New York with Mrs. St. George and Mrs. Elmsworth.

🌸Nan told Conchita and Mabel that Theo made her feel like she could escape, that she could forget who she was. 

🌸Conchita had been putting on this character of an obedient and demure wife. 

🌸Conchita hired Ms Testvalley, which she thought Richard’s family would approve of since she used to work for them, but they did not.

🌸Mabel was not happy with Honoria’s casual indication that her family accepted Conchita and Jinny merely for the money. They later made up, and kissed in the rain.

🌸Nan and Theo went riding, and Nan was a confident rider that she left him behind and ran into Guy. 

🌸Theo to Nan: ‘Everything, it seems, is immeasurably improved by you.’

🌸Duchess to Guy: ‘Thank heavens, someone I don’t despise!’

🌸This was the episode of Nan and Theo’s first kiss. 

You can access Recap Lab's full coverage of The Buccaneers via this link.

Writer: Katherine Jakeways

Director: Richard Senior

Original Air Date: November 8, 2023

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