Benedict Bridgerton Brings Himbo Charm to Bridgerton Season 4

[The following contains spoilers for Bridgerton Season 4 Part 1.]

As Bridgerton arrives at the halfway point of Julia Quinn's eight-book series, some of its supporting cast have run into a narrative roadblock. With each Bridgerton sibling set to star in their own season, the later ones can't experience any major character development until it's their time to shine, leaving a couple of them trapped in a holding pattern. Eloise (Claudia Jessie) is now on her fourth season of reiterating the same basic arc, cast as a grumpy proto-feminist who objects to the frivolities of high society. Meanwhile, the lighthearted Benedict (Luke Thompson), Season 4's co-protagonist, has just spent three seasons struggling to find some purpose as a wealthy but aimless second son. 

In each of those last three seasons, Benedict embarked on a new journey of breathless self-discovery without meaningfully growing as a person. First, he learned about the wonders of premarital sex. Then he launched an artistic career and made some bohemian friends. And in Season 3 he learned that he's attracted to men as well as women. 

Benedict's bisexuality is the only one of these storylines that felt genuinely revelatory, but each one warranted the same level of internal turmoil. By Season 4, this has had the effect of making Benedict seem rather innocent and oblivious compared to his peer group of upper-class men. The guy truly seems like he was born yesterday, stuck in a cycle of "discovering" things that a man of his age and status should already understand. Despite his rebellious self-image as a carefree sexual libertine, he is, at heart, kind of naive. 

If we'd been forced to wait any longer for Benedict's solo season, then this repetitive tone of wide-eyed revelation would surely tip over into absurdity. As it stands, his cluelessness is a surprisingly pleasing fit for a romantic drama about class divides. 

Season 4 is a Cinderella story, introducing the lovable Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) as the illegitimate daughter of an earl, who died young and left her in the hands of his malevolent new wife. Forced by her stepmother to work as a housemaid, Sophie is caught between worlds, benefiting from the education of an upper-class lady but lacking any access to money or connections.

Taking an illicit break one night, she sneaks into a masked ball. There, she meets Benedict. Their chemistry is instantaneous, and for Benedict (who, unlike Sophie, has copious free time and no serious problems to worry about) their encounter becomes a source of all-consuming obsession. After this mysterious masked beauty flees the ball at midnight, he spends weeks trying to track her down. Meanwhile, predictably, he and Sophie end up meeting again under different circumstances, where they hit it off for a second time despite Benedict failing to recognize her. Soon he's caught in a love triangle between a woman he can't identify and a woman he can't marry due to the drastic discrepancy between their social classes.

This love story works in part because Benedict is such a himbo. His sisters joke that he's a rake, but while he does like to party, he has none of the moral ambiguity that's typically associated with rakishness. He's a kind, well-meaning person whose best friend is his sister, and his initial encounter with Sophie is pretty chaste. He's just thrilled to meet a smart woman who speaks her mind and sees through his glib facade.

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In Episode 2, Benedict interrupts a group of rich men while they're sexually harassing one of Sophie's coworkers. Sophie is a bystander, looking on as Benedict fights the main assailant and forces him to apologize: a confrontation that results in both women being fired from their jobs, rendering them unemployed and homeless outside a country house in the middle of the night.

Benedict's automatic reaction here is to be chivalrous and moral, yet he's also dangerously ignorant about the thorny politics of the situation. After unintentionally causing further problems for Sophie and the other maid, he promises to find them new jobs and give Sophie a lift in his carriage, warning her about the dangers of traveling alone — except even this is an unthinkingly risky proposition, because while we know he isn't a threat, it's still scandalous for him to invite an unchaperoned woman for a carriage ride in the dark.

Benedict has rarely had any reason to examine his own privilege, and when it comes to his relationship with Sophie, this is both a blessing and a curse. Men of his class are meant to view servants with polite indifference, but he immediately sees her as a person worthy of attention. When their midnight journey leads them to spend a few days together at his country house, this private proximity creates a safe space for them to bond. But it's an artificial sense of safety, and the household servants remind Sophie that any hint of an affair could ruin her life: an issue that's barely on Benedict's radar. Later on, he alights upon what he believes to be a perfect solution. He can ask Sophie to be his mistress, the traditional framework for affairs between rich men and lower-class women. He has no idea why Sophie might find this offensive. 

As this upstairs/downstairs romance develops, Benedict continues to search for his mystery woman, in a subplot that often strains credulity. Much like the secret identities for masked superheroes, we must simply suspend our disbelief when Benedict fails to recognize Sophie on sight. It would make a lot more sense if he were explicitly characterized as face-blind, but instead we're treated to a drawn-out storyline where he (assisted by Eloise and Nicola Coughlan's Penelope) attempts to investigate all the young ladies of the ton, questioning them about their outfits and activities during the masked ball. Benedict can't even narrow things down by hair color or ethnicity, or put together the obvious clues regarding Sophie's identity: a servant with a suspiciously posh accent and advanced education, whom he coincidentally finds equally fascinating to the lady at the ball.

Tellingly, Benedict and his allies are so blinkered by class expectations that they never even consider that the masked woman might be a gatecrasher, disguising her lower-class origins with a borrowed gown. Similarly, they don't acknowledge the myriad other reasons why she might fail to resurface: controlling relatives, a prolonged trip to Europe, a secret engagement to someone else, etc. His investigation is almost comically haphazard, further illustrating the imbalance of personal stakes this season. While Benedict blunders around quizzing debutantes about their ballgowns, Sophie is being bullied and then fired by her abusive relatives, leaving her scrambling to find a new home and employment.

In a show where everything revolves around getting married to your one true love, we know that Benedict and Sophie's problems will be solved by their Happily Ever After. But for now, their respective struggles are intentionally uneven. Sophie risks social and financial ruin if she gets caught having an affair with an upper-class man, whereas Benedict would only face disapproval from his relatives. 

In order to navigate this conflict successfully, he will have to confront his own class privilege — a journey that wouldn't really work with a character like his elder brother Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) or Season 1's Simon Bassett (Regé-Jean Page). As worldly, even cynical men, they lack Benedict's charming obliviousness, which doubles as an open-minded enthusiasm to learn and grow. Like many men of his class, Anthony did actually have a mistress at one point: an opera singer whom he supported financially. Even though they were both aware of the class dynamics at play, their relationship still ended on hurtful terms, with Anthony's mother telling him to break things off. 

Benedict, however, spends the first half of Season 4 seemingly discovering the concept of classism for the first time, an arc that overlaps with him learning about the stresses faced by young women on the marriage market. Once again, we return to his impressive lack of awareness about the world around him. 

Even though he grew up with several sisters (including the marriage-agnostic Eloise), Benedict apparently hasn't considered the pressure that women face to find a husband. During his first meeting with Sophie, she gently scolds him for complaining about all the debutantes battling to land a wealthy bachelor. She explains that these women have spent years training for this moment, aware that their one goal in life is to be attractive to worthy suitors. As ever, Benedict internalizes this information with a pleasant lack of ego, subtly setting him apart from the male leads of previous seasons.

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Yes, Benedict's worldview is shaped by class privilege in ways that sometimes put Sophie at risk. However, he's also miraculously free from toxic masculinity. The innocent quality that fueled his earlier journeys of self discovery is also what makes him an ideal partner for Sophie, displaying admirable flexibility and willingness to learn the viewpoints of others. It makes for a refreshingly different dynamic to the way Simon, Anthony, and Colin (Luke Newton) were (in one way or another) quite dominant figures in their respective romantic arcs. They had to be softened by love, which isn't a problem for Benedict. 

Season 4's love story is founded on a perilously unequal power dynamic, so it requires a male lead who doesn't throw his weight around. Benedict isn't necessarily passive, but his instinct is to be friendly, inquisitive, and supportive, and he's happy to concede ground to people with less power than himself. These qualities occasionally made him seem silly or unserious in previous seasons — something he's well aware of, given his wry acknowledgement of his image as a shallow, frivolous bachelor. Yet this also leaves him perfectly primed to embark on a sincere relationship with a woman like Sophie: a relationship that finally, after years of drifting, gives him something meaningful to fight for.

Bridgerton Season 4 Part 1 is now streaming on Netflix. Season 4 Part 2 premieres Feb. 26.