The Ending Of ‘The Buccaneers’ Season 2 Is A Bit Of A Mess

There are many words one might use to describe the ending of The Buccaneers Season 2, but the best one is “messy”. I know that’s part of the appeal; the sordid string of romances and betrayals is, after all, why we tune in, but there’s a distinct ass-pull quality to this finale that I found rather grating. It’s all sudden pregnancies and deliberately obscure motives, dangerous secret brothers, fallouts and record-time reconciliations. None of it seems especially organic, and all of it feels precision-engineered to end this season as dramatically as possible while also, inevitably, courting another.

Some might like all that, and fair play to them, but I wasn’t keen. “She Knows” has the drama but none — or, let’s be charitable, little — of the rooting in character that has made this show very watchable at its best. You’ll see what I mean as we go, since there’s a lot to unpack, so I won’t waste any more time with pleasantries and preamble and instead dive straight into the nitty gritty. First up, ’tis the season. Or the end of the season, anyway.

Having A Good Time, Having A Ball

There’s always a ball, isn’t there? You can’t have a Gilded Age drama without one, much less a season finale, so the back half of Episode 8 revolves around the end-of-season Tintagel Ball. It’s a masquerade for no reason other than to give the costume department an excuse to flex their muscles — everyone looks great, it must be said — and because everything’s a lot more dramatic coming from someone in a mask. They teach you that in drama school.

Understandably, then, the first half of the finale is devoted to setting up all the key plot threads that will be dealt with here. We’ll be going through them one by one anyway, but to summarize, this is what’s going on:

• Theo and Nan don’t want to be together (but there’s a reason they might have to be beyond titles, which we’ll get to momentarily);
• Theo and Lizzy do want to be together, but their affair quickly becomes a scandal;
• Nan and Guy want to be together, but Guy’s married to Paloma, who might secretly want to be with him;
• Hector wants to be with Lizzy.

Phew. See what I mean?

Nan’s Big Secret

The ending of The Buccaneers Season 2 is a particularly stressful one for Nan. In the cliffhanger ending of the previous episode, she discovered that while he was in Italy, Guy married Paloma. She’s still stinging from that in the opening of “She Knows”, but things take a turn for the worse when she discovers that Theo has been sleeping with Lizzy. Nan annoyed me all throughout this episode because the script requires her to forget that almost everything happening to her is a direct consequence of her own decisions. She never wanted to be with Theo and was, in fact, planning to announce their separation at the ball, and she specifically told Guy to get on with his life. She’s annoyed by Theo jumping into bed with Lizzy when she ping-ponged between the two willy-nilly — which is perhaps not the best choice of phrasing here, I’ll grant you — and generally acts like all of this is just happening to her without any complicity on her part whatsoever.

However, there is a reason for this. You see, as we discover a bit later, Nan is pregnant with Theo’s child. This is a bigger deal than it would be under normal circumstances since she has sired the heir to Tintagel. If she and Theo are separated, she’s worried that his family would wrest control of her child away from her and, like Jinny, she’d be powerless to do anything about it. So she’s now considering having to spend the rest of her life with a man who doesn’t love her just to protect her unborn child. It’s admittedly suboptimal.

It’s Patti, fresh from her victory in court, who devises what seems like a pretty foolproof plan. At the ball, which has already scheduled a midnight bombshell, she should announce the pregnancy publicly. This seems like the best option, so Nan readies herself to steal all the headlines. Speaking of which…

Jacob Ifan in The Buccaneers Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+

Read All About It

As soon as Nan discovers Lizzy and Theo’s affair, it’s all over the papers. Naturally, then, Nan becomes the prime suspect in leaking the story to the press, and the other Buccaneers start giving Lizzy askance glances immediately. It’s obvious to the audience that Nan didn’t leak it, of course, but there aren’t very many viable suspects. There’s a bit of a hint that it might have been Blanche, but it turns out that Hector was the one who sold the story.

This is part of a plot that, in his head, must have seemed romantic, but is in truth a little sinister. The newspaper articles don’t name Lizzy directly but imply that Theo has been slipping it to one of Nan’s closest friends, which narrows the suspect pool considerably. Since Lizzy very recently — and very publicly — canceled her wedding, it’s blatantly her, so Hector dives in with a convenient second marriage proposal, which he sells as being an ideal way of protecting her reputation. Lizzy is willing to take this deal, though I’m not sure what Hector would be getting out of it, since he knows good and well that Lizzy doesn’t love him and has been spending all of her free time in Theo’s bed.

We don’t get a proper resolution to this, and it’s all thrown into disarray by the last-minute developments anyway, so let’s move on to those.

The Midnight Bombshell

Theo is now utterly head-over-heels in love with Lizzy, which is a bit ridiculous given how quickly this whole thing came about, but whatever. He’s adamant about making a grand romantic gesture, so when the clock strikes midnight, he publicly announces that he doesn’t love his wife and then renounces his title, so that he’s no longer a duke and Nan is no longer a duchess and everyone can, or so he thinks, live happily ever after.

But he doesn’t know about Nan being pregnant, so his romantic overture puts her in even more of a pickle. Sure, Nan is now “free”, but she needs to keep her pregnancy a secret and go on the run; otherwise, Theo’s family will be all over the kid. And unfortunately, right before Theo stole her thunder, she told Paloma that she and Guy should be together since he deserves the happiness she won’t be able to give him. Paloma seems pretty into this idea — she’s deliberately keeping the annulment paperwork quiet so that she and Guy remain married for the time being — but Guy might not be. Although what is his alternative? He has already spent the entire reason looking after some other dude’s kid.

Nan’s right about one thing, though — Blanche isn’t going to let her lifestyle and status go. She has spent her life making Theo a duke and reaping the rewards herself, and she’s not going to start slumming it in her twilight years. Since she already knew about Theo renouncing his titles in advance, she enacted a master plan, which is to make his apparently dangerous secret brother Kit the duke in his stead.