Bridgerton chose the perfect Polin clips to tease Season 3

February is the month of love, something the hit Netflix and Shondaland series Bridgerton (based on the Regency romance book series by Julia Quinn) knows all too well. For the third year in a row, the show has commandeered the month, and more specifically, Valentine’s Day itself, to showcase exclusive stills and clips, as well as share brand new plot details from its upcoming season, in this case, Season 3, which stars Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton as Penelope Featherington and Colin Bridgerton, respectively.

Two years ago, it was the second season of Bridgerton (starring Jonathan Bailey and Simone Ashley) that received the Valentine’s Day promotional treatment, and last year, fans were gifted brand new content on February 14th from the Bridgerton spinoff series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (starring India Amarteifio and Corey Mylchreest).

Whenever new Bridgerton footage is unveiled, it’s always an especially exhilarating period in the fandom, as it allows viewers a glimpse of the chemistry of the main couple being featured that season, as well as a taste of what they can expect from the show’s overall tone and aesthetic. Famously, in keeping with Quinn’s original book series, Bridgerton leans into a classic romance trope for each of its main pairings, which then influences the corresponding season of the show.

In Season 1, which premiered on Christmas Day all the way back in 2020, the main trope on display was “fake dating,” as embodied to great effect by Phoebe Dynevor (as Daphne Bridgerton) and Regé-Jean Page (as Simon Bassett).

In Season 2, which aired on March 25th, 2022, Bailey and Ashley, as Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma, respectively, presented fans with a delightfully tantalizing interpretation of “enemies-to-lovers.”

This spring, when Season 3 airs in two parts – a first for the series – on May 16th, 2024, and June 13th, 2024, the two leads, Coughlan’s Penelope and Newton’s Colin (affectionately dubbed “Polin”) will take on the trope of “friends-to-lovers.”

This split-release schedule isn’t the only element unique to Polin, however. Unlike the past two seasons of the historical romance streaming juggernaut, these two characters are both familiar faces to audiences. This soon-to-be couple has graced our screens in supporting roles for both of the preceding two seasons of Bridgerton, albeit still firmly in the “friends” stage of the aforementioned “friends-to-lovers” journey. As a result, we’ve already had 16 episodes to get acquainted with Pen and Colin as characters before we’ll then spend eight hours this spring watching them finally fall in love.

It should be noted that focusing the third season of Bridgerton on Polin was actually a departure from the expected order of Quinn’s book series, in which the third novel (“An Offer from a Gentleman”) tells the tale of Benedict Bridgerton, the second-eldest brother, finding love with Sophie Beckett (a character not yet introduced to the Bridgerton TV universe). Nearly two years ago, in mid-May of 2022, Coughlan herself broke the news (check out 25:08 in this video), after months of rampant fan speculation, that Bridgerton’s third season would skip Benedict and Sophie’s romance for the time being, and instead center around Polin (as per Quinn’s fourth novel, “Romancing Mister Bridgerton”). 

Looking back, one of the primary clues that it would be Polin’s turn in the spotlight sooner than expected came late in the Season 2 finale. Colin, after having uncovered a gemstone mines fraud scheme at play that was about to implicate Pen’s family, dances with Pen in celebration at a ball being hosted by her mother, Lady Featherington. Shortly after this dance, however, Pen accidentally overhears Colin telling a group of lords that he “would never dream of courting Penelope Featherington. Not in your wildest fantasies, Fife.” 

This pivotal (and painful) moment is adapted from the aforementioned “An Offer from a Gentleman” book, and it marks a massive shift in Pen’s perception of Colin, who up until now has been harboring years-long unrequited love for the third-born Bridgerton boy. 

It’s with this new impression of Colin, in which he’s finally been knocked off the pedestal Pen had placed him on, that we then segue directly into the events of Season 3 – which brings us to the Valentine’s Day promotional event, and the new Polin clip that was released that day. 

The 60-second clip, presumably from the opening episode of Season 3, is a particularly tense conversation between Pen and Colin, and I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that for me, as a massive fan of these books and this show, this was the single best piece of promotional footage I have ever laid eyes on.

For context: it’s been an unusually long gap between the most recent seasons of Bridgerton, which has meant that we’ve been waiting nearly two years now for any official video evidence of this updated iteration of Polin. As I mentioned earlier, the first footage released of a new main Bridgerton couple is so essential in establishing what to expect for the season itself, making the promo clip selection process especially imperative.

Bridgerton has an admittedly great track record in this regard. In Season 2, for example, the very first interaction we ever saw of Kate and Anthony came in September 2021 at Netflix Tudum, the streamer’s annual global fan event. Kate, after having overheard some particularly unsavory comments made by Anthony at the first ball of the social season, rightfully calls him out and puts him in his place, before walking off with the last word, leaving the man completely stunned (and a little turned on, let’s be real). It was the perfect introduction to the “enemies-to-lovers” dynamic promised in the then-upcoming sophomore season of the show.

For Polin fans, though, two more of these Netflix Tudum events have since come and gone without revealing any comparable minute-long Polin teaser clip to whet our appetites, which makes this new clip’s arrival this month all the more exciting.

This exclusive scene, during which Pen discloses to Colin that she did, in fact, overhear what he said to the other men about never dreaming of courting her, is exactly what we’ve been waiting for. At each of those past Tudum events, fans had been collectively anticipating – and then were collectively disappointed when we didn’t get – a moment where Pen calls Colin by the more formal, less familiar “Mr. Bridgerton” to his face for the first time, and guess what?

That’s exactly what we finally got with this Valentine’s Day clip. The interaction literally opens with Pen saying “Good night, Mr. Bridgerton,” before Colin inquires about her lack of a chaperone. From there, the conversation devolves into Pen’s designation of herself as a spinster and Colin’s subsequent denial of this, and then Colin’s correct observation about their altered, more strained dynamic. “Something wrong, Pen? Between us, I mean?” he asks her, before going on to explain how, contrary to last season, she did not respond to any of the letters he’d written to her during his travels in the off-season. [Sidenote: the hope that this specific detail – Pen’s radio silence with regards to Colin’s letters – was a longstanding wish of one of the hosts of the What A Barb! A Polin Podcast, and I was so very delighted on her behalf when I first witnessed this dream of hers become a reality thanks to this clip.]

It gets even worse for Colin than merely unanswered letters, though, because Pen’s not finished. Rather than his claim that he misses Pen successfully melting her cold shoulder (as he no doubt expected it would), Pen shocks Colin by revealing that she did, in fact, bear witness to his loud declaration last year that she was never going to be someone that he courted. She then delivers the following final fatal blow:

“Of course you would never court me. I am the laughingstock of the Ton, even when I change my entire wardrobe. It just never occurred to me that you, of all people, could be so cruel.”

It’s obviously a great, long-awaited scene, and I’ve already lost count of the amount of times I’ve watched it in the last two weeks since its release.

Interestingly enough, and at risk of contradicting everything I’ve just said, this Valentine’s Day clip actually isn’t the very first footage of Polin that we received, because just two weeks before the day of love, the show had unexpectedly shared a short snippet of a Polin scene from what is thought to be Episode 2. This small moment shows Pen and Colin in the midst of a lesson on how to attract a suitor, which we already know from the official synopsis will be Pen’s primary motivation this season.

“Your eyes are the most remarkable shade of blue,” she tells Colin, them both completely lost in the moment. “And yet somehow, they shine even brighter when you are kind.” They both come to their senses a few seconds later – this is just practice, after all, certainly not the real thing – and Pen fumbles through a “I might say something like that, if you were a suitor” excuse, while Colin, clearly caught off-guard and overcome by Pen’s words, takes a swig of lemonade and points out “Well, that was rather direct.”

It doesn’t take a historical romance expert to detect the drastically different tones on display between these two Polin scenes released thus far.

And that’s what’s so brilliant about them.

Pen and Colin having an awkward but still funny and undeniably romantic moment in the Bridgerton drawing room feels exactly in line with what showrunner Jess Brownell has promised for Season 3’s overall romcom vibe:

“I think of Colin and Pen as being characters who bring a lot of comedy to the show. So I think we’re gonna get to play a lot of that this season. But I want to balance that out with quite a bit of sexiness and romance.”

Conversely, seeing Pen confront Colin about his cruel comments from the end of last season and subsequently ice him out – she’s never once called him “Mr. Bridgerton” prior to now – is much more reminiscent of Kate and Anthony’s early Season 2 antagonism. This animosity, especially from Pen’s perspective, is a far cry from the classic “friends-to-lovers” dynamic being touted for Season 3. However, given what transpired between them at the Featherington Ball, it’s absolutely warranted – and a necessary place to start.

Back in May 2022, when Polin’s season was first confirmed, by far the biggest concern my close friend and I had about the upcoming story, and the primary source of our reservations about the decision to deviate from the order of Quinn’s novels, was the fact that, thanks to Colin’s words, he and Pen are not currently poised to experience a “friends-to-lovers” romance.

The way we saw it, either Bridgerton would designate the preceding two seasons as the friends stage and make the third season more angsty and emotional on the way to Pen and Colin becoming lovers, which wouldn’t really hold true to the essence of the trope, but would be accurately reflective of where the characters are at heading into their season.

Or, we worried the show would completely gloss over the Polin drama presented in last season’s finale, invalidate the huge cliffhanger they left us on, and instead elect to start the third season with Pen and Colin far-too-easily back on good, comfortable, familiar terms, their friendship once again intact, in order to tee up the “friends-to-lovers” arc as planned. 

As you can tell, neither option – yet another highly dramatic main couple dynamic, of which we’ve already had two, or an unsatisfying resolution to a prior cliffhanger – felt particularly preferable.

Thankfully, then, these first two clips have managed to assuage nearly all those fears from years past. In the span of a single minute, the Valentine’s Day clip provides fans with the reassurance that the tension set up at the end of last season wasn’t just going to be immediately forgotten or resolved off-screen, and the February 1st clip demonstrates what’s unique about Polin and their forthcoming love story.

And that’s such a relief.

We may still be a ways away from the premiere of Part 1 of Bridgerton Season 3 on May 16th, but given my affection for the first two snippets of Pen and Colin that we’ve been granted thus far, it’s safe to say that I anxiously await whatever else they have in store for us in the coming months!

All episodes of Bridgerton’s first and second seasons, as well as Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, are currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.