Summary
The Buccaneers is moving fairly swiftly in Season 2, and Episode 4 reaches some major turning points in several key storylines.
To give credit where it’s due, I didn’t expect The Buccaneers to rocket through Season 2’s overarching plot the way it does in Episode 4. “Ice Cream” – so-called in honour of the actual frozen treat and the more metaphorical idea of a snatched moment in paradise that quickly melts away – gets a lot of mileage from its core storylines, particularly Nan’s “reunion” with Guy, Jinny’s lingering fear of and inability to escape from Lord Seadown, and Theo’s very sudden affection for Lizzy. But the recurring theme is that none of the good things can last, and none of the bad ones can be evaded forever. It’s bleak in that sense, even though it has its upsides.
And you can see this everywhere. Dreams are rotting away in real time and leaving only reality behind, and reality is uncompromising, especially in a Gilded Age when women have no rights, station matters more than anything, and sometimes the best solution is to endure your own worst nightmare for the sake of someone you love. Let’s talk about Nan.
So, after departing Tintagel in the previous episode, Nan makes her way to Italy, thus inadvertently leading Lord Seadown right to Jinny’s doorstep. I didn’t anticipate all this would happen as quickly as it has, but it’s probably for the best. Nan’s reunion with Guy and Lord Seadown’s ambush of Jinny are not the ends of these respective stories, but instead major turning points. And it’s more interesting that there are no easy or objectively correct answers on either side.
Nan and Guy rekindle a flourishing romance, for instance, but it’s so obviously temporary that it has a much different quality from their earlier interactions. Nan seeing a newspaper headline that reminds her of the work she’s doing for women’s rights politically, brings her crashing back down to reality. Guy doesn’t take the news that she intends to return to England without him to protect her sister in the only way she can especially well, but on some level, he must understand, in the same way that the audience does.
The only downside here is that it’s reiterative of the arc Nan has already been on. Realising that she had to sacrifice her own happiness to protect her sister was essential to her Season 1 growth. Her fleeing Tintagel to come to the same conclusion feels like an odd deviation to take; one suspects it might have been more of a way to get Lord Seadown back to Jinny, and get Nan out of the way so Theo can pursue other matters (more on this in a minute), than a subplot deemed essential on its own terms.
Harder to swallow is Jinny being swayed by Lord Seadown. In the classic manner of the serial abuser, Lord Seadown says all the right things and plays the exceedingly nice guy full of good intentions and false promises he clearly doesn’t intend to keep, but in the absence of Guy or Nan, Jinny seems to fall for it. It’s a little unclear how liable she is to return to England, but it’s definitely a possibility, and would have the knock-on effect of making Nan’s sacrifice utterly pointless (but, in this case, in a good way, dramatically speaking.)
Guy Remmers in The Buccaneers Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+
And again, you can sort of see Jinny’s logic. A life on the run doesn’t feel sustainable for somebody raising an infant, and she’s shacked up with the man of her sister’s dreams, ruining her life by extension. She snatches glimpses of the happy, idyllic life Nan and Guy could be having if it weren’t for her, and this obviously factors into her decision-making process. That sacrificial sisterly instinct works both ways. It’s all decent character development and doesn’t feel like it’s happening just for the sake of creating drama.
What does, though, is Theo’s incredibly sudden relationship with Lizzy, which takes some major strides in The Buccaneers Season 2, Episode 4. In true Duke fashion, Theo turns up at Hector’s fundraiser auction and spends a fortune on a bit of ceramic tat, a pretty transparent look-at-me move that Lizzy rightly calls out. But it only seems to make her more attracted to Theo. They kiss in a scene that is unintentionally very funny given the intensity of the music, and later sleep together, fully committing to an affair despite Theo being married to Nan and Lizzy only a fortnight away from her own nuptials.
It does feel like it’s coming out of nowhere to create a more hostile environment for Nan to return to. Perhaps The Buccaneers has a certain quota of saucy content it’s contractually obligated to meet – one can never be sure. These more contrived relationships are ironically of much less interest than, say, the discussion of love shared between Blanche and Hector, or Mabel’s pining for a same-sex relationship with Honoria that would never be accepted in polite society, but still seem to hog almost all of the focus and are presented as the “big” moments of the episode.
Either way, The Buccaneers is moving at a surprisingly fast clip in Season 2, which is welcome enough. It’ll be interesting to see how a lot of this unfolds, especially the decision Jinny makes and how Nan will be forced to navigate Tintagel’s politics now she has become “the other woman” behind her own back. I would still like the show to spread its focus more evenly, but you can’t have everything, and if nothing else, it does seem like there’s a clear plan for the episodes to come. Just don’t expect any of the characters to enjoy them much.
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