It was right for Kate and Anthony to not have a wedding show scene

Okay so I’m going to do something very uncommon, I’m going to defend the writers lmao.

First off, I love Kate and Anthony, and season 2 is my favourite by far (I also haven’t read the book, I’m only going to be talking about the show here). I really believe a wedding at the end of S2 would have undermined the point of the story with Kate and Anthony, and the wider thematic idea.

I would say the overarching theme of season 2 was “love versus reputation/money”. You might be thinking well all the plots in bridgerton do that, but I think season 2 more than others - this was the through line. In comparison, I would say S1 was “love trumps expectations”, S3 was “love reveals all”, and S4 was “fantasy versus reality”. IMO, S2 was the most successful at delivering this theme through our main couple and our sub plots.

Anthony and Kate are two character who are straight jacketed by their duty to their respective families due to the death of their father. We see both of them repress their desire to love as traumatic response to the death and how both had to shoulder responsibility as a result. In turn, both develop a fear of love and how all consuming it can be.

Throughout Kate and Anthony’s story, there are a lot of imagery references to the natural world. For both characters, nature is a paradox. They love to be in nature (riding horses, shooting, by the turtles in the water, playing pall mall) but at the same time fear the overwhelming vastness and cruelty of it due to watching their parent die. Both fear nature - with Anthony it is the bee, with Kate it is the monsoons. There’s also a lot of flower imagery; Kate is ‘thorny’ like a rose, lilacs for first love, lilys for mood, etc.

A lot of the scenes where Anthony and Kate truly ‘connect’ they are out in nature. The first scene in the park, the hunt, the bee, pall mall (where they are both quite literally stuck in the mud lol) - even when they are inside there tends to be the presence of an element, such as the rain storm in the library or the big fire when they are caught by Daphne.

Kate and Anthony are linked by nature, but both are held back by their fear and what they feel is their duty. Their concern to do the right thing for their families, to fulfil societal roles is a manifestation of their fear. They both mean well, but their need to shoulder leads to their love becoming almost controlling. I do not mean this as they are bad people, on the contrary. It’s a deeply human feeling to want to protect those you love. You may even say what worries them, masters them (cleverly put from Eloise, Locke, and our writers).

But their fear leads them to become misguided, to lose sight of what makes us human. This of course plays out with edwina and the disastrous wedding. So blinded were both Kate and Anthony by societal expectation and keeping up appearances they were going to deny themselves and Edwina what is most important - love. Which despite their best efforts, is going to wrestle itself free.

The wedding was the ultimate show of pomp and prestige, it was supposed to be the crowning glory of the diamond and the viscount. With zebras and peacocks and all the ostentatious nonsense associated with royalty. As Anthony says, him and Edwina are supposed to play their ‘role’. But people cannot squish into a role, in the end we cannot be what we are not or think we should be. No matter how grand. My favourite whistledown voice over comes from this episode where she says:

“Marriage amounts to little more than a human ritual. We may not force the rooster or the hen, but we continue to collect eggs. Does that make us more complicated or simply to stubborn to believe that we must orchestrate what nature has already ordained?”

Against all reasonable and rational logic, against what society feels they ought to do, what they feel their role is to play, against ‘human ritual’ - Kate and Anthony fall for each other. Their love is like nature - overwhelming, destructive and awesome. It is not something that needs to be announced in The Times and put in a register and to serve a wedding breakfast for. A wedding is not needed to legitimise them. Their need to live up to societal rules and expectations hemmed both Kate and Anthony in, it is their love for each other that releases them. Their season really challenges us as an audience to think about how innate love is, and the paradox between needing to control love and being controlled by it. Perhaps you could also say the theme for the season was “human versus nature”, as love forced both of them to confront their fears.

In our final episode of S2 when Anthony and Kate tell each other they love each other, it’s the end of the summer season and they are out in the featherington garden, just the two of them - and the roses are in full bloom. Nature ordains. 💐