'The Bridgertons 2', a smarter and better Regency

At one point in this second —and bushier, smarter and better— season of

(Netflix), Penn Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) confesses to Eloise, the most misfit and rebellious of the Bridgerton sisters (Claudia Jessie) that when you're invisible—she is, far removed as she is from the standard of beauty of the time, of all times, really—when no one's expectations weigh on you, you are free.

Or, at least, you feel it.

Eloise, who still does not suspect that her best friend is the narrator of the story, the feared and mysterious Lady Whistledown —identity that was revealed to the viewer at the end of the first season—, asks her if that is the reason why she follows acting from anonymity.

Penn tells him that it is most likely.

It would seem that, somehow, success has freed Shonda Rhimes —producer of this impeccable

and is allowing her to delve into what was outlined in the first installment.

That is, the starting point of the second is the same, but inverse.

Now it is Viscount Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) who is looking for a wife, and falls in love with the one he shouldn't—the season's

sister— and, of course, there is the attempt to make Eloise look minimally like a

and not be he sneaks away every time he has a dance because it's time for him to

to the game of finding a husband, which on this occasion is repeated as a farce, and one, from the beginning, somewhat more ambitious height, because the absurd and the maladjustment to the system are everywhere.

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There are the boys who are queuing, flowers and all kinds of things in hand, at the doors of the room of Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), the

in question - that is, the young lady that Queen Charlotte (an increasingly, from another world Golda Rosheuvel) decides that she is the most valuable of the season—, but there is also Anthony himself trying to escape making any kind of decision by letting her be the queen, choosing Edwina, who does it for him.

Or Cousin Jack, who saves the Featheringtons from ruin but imposes horrendous decorations on the house.

The men are, in this season more than ever, not so much secondary characters as other types of men.

Men who no longer differ, finally, in practically nothing from women.

Charithra Chandran, Simone Ashley, Shelley Conn and Jonathan Bailey, in the seventh episode of the second season of 'The Bridgertons'.LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX (LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX)

And that, in an artifact of such success, is invaluable.

Let's not forget that

was Shonda Rhimes's gateway to Netflix, after signing a multimillion-dollar contract, and that it managed to become the second most watched series of the year, only surpassed by

.

And it is even more valuable, being treated as it is, a fiction that escapes a past —that of the idealized Regency, satirized in its own way in the novels from which the series starts, the work of Julia Quinn— in which women —but also men— were, at a certain age and in certain environments, little more than cogs in a system that needed them to survive.

Actually, he needed them to make some kind of sense.

And the clash of times — how dare Rhimes, in the midst of a feminist wave, return women to the role of prized dance piece? —, who in the first season, somewhat unjustifiably and clumsily, tried to save himself or fight with sex, an explicit sex that freed the protagonists from even the last corset, here, in a more Victorian sense, it is made from the dialogue and the situation, and a more lush, from the beginning, crossing of plots and subplots that seek , in some way, free themselves from any type of corset.

But it is not a physical corset this time but a mental one.

There are, in that sense, two bombshell characters, two who try to blow it up from within, to add to the seasoned Lady Whistledown (who continues to be voiced by Julie Andrews): Eloise, and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley).

Jonathan Bailey and Luke Thompson, in 'The Bridgertons.' LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX (LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX)

As taken, at the same time, from a novel by Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott, Kate and Eloise are the heroines outside the system.

The first, because all she wants is to go back to India, and forget about the loathsome tea, and live alone, and happily ever after.

But for that she has to

her sister Edwina first.

And her unrepentant way of being is going to complicate things.

Actually, what is going to complicate them is the fact that she won't admit that she has slightly lost her mind over her sister's main suitor, the golden bachelor, Anthony Bridgerton.

But in doing so she will be looping the loop of her little revolution, and admitting that in every revolution there is a theory, and then a practice that, in this case, is carried out in such an inappropriate way that it is most valuable.

Eloise, for her part, as the almost twin sister of Dickinson's Emily Dickinson

substituting boredom for verses and things that shouldn't be said in front of the queen—, is, along with Lady Whistledown, the character who tries to promote that another Regency, cleverly demure this time, in the opposite direction.

Eloise is the most inadequate character, and also the most rebellious, the representative of these times.

And his friendship with Penn is the true diamond of this second installment because it contains both a reflection on the battle that is waged between what it seems —what Lady Whistledown tells— and what it is, and a juicy nod to the fear of the creator to be repeated

Nicola Coughlan and Claudia Jessie, in the sixth episode of the second season of 'The Bridgertons'. LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX (LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX)

“I missed her,” Eloise tells Penelope at one point, referring to Lady Whistledown and her malicious publication —the backbone of the story, in a game of mirrors between what is real and what is told, which is, without a doubt, her main success—, and her friend seems happy, because deep down she is telling her without knowing it that she missed her.

"But now that she's back," she adds next, "she just reminds me how stuck I am."

A line of dialogue that, in itself, contains everything that has changed since the first season, and serves the phenomenon to turn against itself, and become aware of what it idolized - a time that was, above all, a prison—without questioning too much the way he did it.

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