By: Bintou Secka
Synopsis
Episode 3, “The Art of the Swoon” is an episode dedicated to Daphne’s sexual awakening. The episode opens with Daphne having what passes for a sex dream when you’re an early-19th-century virgin.
In this episode, we get to learn what life was like for younger women in the 19th century.For instance, young women were not exposed to sex, until marriage. In Daphne’s case, she didn’t even know what it was to begin with.
Mothers in that time period failed to educate their daughters on the topic. They did this in order to keep their little girls clueless and not explore certain fantasies.
Episode 3 in some ways can be seen as a historical romance with our main love interests. We see Simon and Daphne’s love blossoming as things have started to become more steamy between the two. It is fair to say the sexual tension is high.
The show is basically a fairy tale story, with subgenres incorporated. For instance, The Duke represents The Prince, Daphne, The princess, we have the Queen and lastly the Featherington sisters play the role of the evil stepsisters.
The historical details reinforce who the show’s target audience is and from this episode as viewers, we see a lot more explicit scenes added to the storyline. From this, we gather we might not be getting our average, innocent childhood fairy tale. This one has got some spice.
Review:
Some will argue that the strength of episode 3 is that it engaged a new demographic due to the addition of more mature themes. It appealed to an older audience.The series really started to pick up from this episode as the romance beagn to flourish.
From episode 3 we really got to see the raw and uncut version of Daphne and Simon’s love story.
Another strength that can be given to episode 3, is it exposed its viewers to more historical features of the 19th century.
As well as entertaining its viewers with the growing passion in Daphne and Simons’s love story, we also learn about society and social issues of that era.
This episode could however be criticized by some in the sense that it may be a bit too explicit too soon. From the first 2 episodes we got the sense that Bridgerton was child friendly, however from episode three we find out, that is not quite the case.
