Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Episode four of the “Bridgerton” series spinoff “Queen Charlotte” picks up right where episode three left off. A disoriented young King George is being bathed by Queen Charlotte and his bodyman Reynolds as Charlotte demands that Reynolds and her bodyman Brimsley tell her what is going on with her husband, whom she’d just pulled out of a hole in the garden as he ranted at the sky. Neither Reynolds nor Brimsley speaks.
In a show that jumps between a young Queen Charlotte’s origin story and the “Bridgerton” present-day timeline, this episode gets even more complicated as it delves back into a past we’ve already seen from Charlotte’s perspective in order to see what George was up to the whole time.
It begins with George working in a field before he’s interrupted by Reynolds with news that his mother Princess Augusta has arrived and has found him a queen. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the young King George III in the previous three episodes, it’s that George is also a farmer.
Whereas his mother and the Parliament want George to marry and produce an heir, George believes he can rule in a better way by devoting himself to the agricultural sciences and improving farming techniques like using horses instead of oxen to plow fields and produce cheap bread for the people.
Too bad neither his mother nor the powerful lords are buying that reimagining of kingly duties. And the rest of the episode retreads word for word entire scenes we’ve already seen, with the added context that George has been suffering at the hands of a sadistic doctor that his desperate mother brought in who intends to…
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