The Best Couple in “Queen Charlotte” Isn’t the Obvious

*Spoilers for Queen Charlotte

Okay, I’m not going to bury the lead here; it’s the second most obvious. It’s Brimsely and Reynolds.

George and Charlotte are amazing, don’t get me wrong. I am absolutely in love with them. The meet-cute, the sex scenes, that love declaration, them under the bed, the pregnancy and birth…what is not to love? But my heart and soul belongs to Brimsley and Reynolds. And I want to talk about why.

Firstly, they are our first real LGBTQ romance, and Bridgerton has been starving for that. I’ve been arguing for and advocating for a gay love story since Season 1. If you’re going to build your brand on inclusivity, it should be inclusivity across the board. With Reynolds and Brimsley, we finally got that much-needed representation.

However, why they captured my heart and aren’t giving it back is so much more than what they represent. These characters do so much with so little, and they are played brilliantly. Sam Clemmett’s Brimsely is both strong and sweet, powerful and yet subservient. He plays the dichotomy of best friend with a distance, lover without acknowledgment, dom in a tiny body, with all the complex emotionality, personality depth, and #shortking energy we could ever dream. Freddie Dennis’s Reynolds, meanwhile, had a much more stoic demeanor, and yet was emoting so powerfully with his eyes I was reading worlds into his performance I don’t think was meant to be there. From the sheer chemistry he had with Corey Mylchreest (further solidified by my discovering that they are real-life besties), it had me suspecting that Reynolds was in love with George. I may even develop a fan theory on that at some point, but we’ll see. The larger point is that Reynolds’s care for George, and Dennis’s remarkable ability to show a depth of feeling between himself and his King, was unmatched.

Now for the two characters together. There is something so satisfying about being dropped into the middle of their love story. There’s no are they or aren’t they question about their sexuality, for them or for the audience. There’s no questioning within themselves; they know what they want and they go after it. Stories of awakenings and awkward or steamy first times for LGBTQ couples are absolutely well and good, and I’m hoping we get some of those in future Bridgerton stories as well. But it’s extremely enjoyable and satisfying to watch these people be comfortable in who they are and what they want, even if they have to hide it under the pretense of “refreshments.”

I’m definitely going to have a whole post on their sex scene, so right now, I’ll just say it’s a great scene. It gave me everything I ask for in a sex scene and then some — one of the best in Bridgerton history.

As the story of these two progresses, we see the central conflict for them is as the King’s man and the Queen’s man. While Charlotte and George are estranged or in conflict, so too are they. It makes for a really fascinating problem of loyalties, particularly for Reynolds as he cares immensely for Brimsely, but it’s clear his first loyalty is to the King. And that makes sense; George isn’t just his employer, but his monarch, and obviously his friend. Brimsely doesn’t have the same relationship with Charlotte yet, and to add to that, Charlotte isn’t the one keeping secrets. Reynolds’s own evolution I think could have been better served if he’d taken more steps to actually get Charlotte there, but in the end, his arc is clear that he wants what’s best for George even if George doesn’t see that it is what’s best.

For Reynolds and Brimsely, their conflict was never really of their own making, and once Charlotte and George are fully on the same team, their men can be as well. Their bathtub scene made me tear up, and it’s clear they have something profound. The dancing that transitions from two to one absolutely shattered me, and not knowing what happened is a profound lesson in storytelling.

Less is more with these two. They are built to be in the background, spending their whole lives there. And while this show gives us glimpses into who they are, what they want, the lives they’ve led, it doesn’t give us everything. A great love story, at least for me, is full of yearning. For Reynolds and Brimsely, that yearning is omnipresent as they have to yearn in public and express in private, as they get to be together but not together, as they get their happy times but have it snatched away by some force we don’t know. Did Reynolds die? Did he leave for some reason? Maybe we’ll never know, but the final look on Brimsley’s face says it all. It’s bittersweet, and that’s enough.

While George and Charlotte delivered remarkably in this series as well, my heart and soul is with Brimsely and Reynolds. They aren’t the main characters even of their own stories, and yet managed something beautiful, profound, and thoroughly theirs all the while. That’s something I will happily never get over.