Diksha Sundriyal
Apple TV+’s ‘The Buccaneers’ arrives for a second season, bringing Nan and her friends another storm of love and conflict. The second season picks up where the first left off, on Nan and Theo’s wedding day, shortly after Jinny and Guy’s departure. While her sister is saved, it puts a new problem in front of Nan, who is in love with Guy, but had to go through with the wedding with Theo to save her sister. At the moment, she didn’t think about anything other than getting Jinny far away from her husband James Seadown’s clutches. But now, she must confront the reality of being the Duchess of Tintagel. SPOILERS AHEAD.
A Major Truth About Nan Comes to Light
While everyone enjoys the party, Nan becomes anxious about having married Theo, even though she doesn’t love him. While she promised his mother, the Dowager Duchess, that she would go through with the wedding in return for Jinny’s safe passage out of the country, she now has reservations about living a lie with Theo. While she battles the thought of telling him the truth, Patti has a new problem to deal with.
At the end of the last season, she found out that Nan’s birth mother is in the castle. She had lied to Nan about her birth mother’s death, and she worries that if her daughter finds out about this lie, she will never forgive her. Patti searches around the party for the said woman, and she finally comes face to face with her. It turns out that this woman is none other than her sister, Nell. She wasn’t invited to the wedding because Patti didn’t want Nan to find out about her, but once Nell discovered that Nan knew about Patti not being her birth mother, she thought that Nan was privy to the whole truth now. But she finds out soon enough that that is not true.
The thing is that Patti and Nell have not been in touch for many, many years, nineteen years, to be precise. When Patti had just given birth to Jinny, eighteen-year-old Nell slept with her sister’s husband, Tracy. While Patti is aware that her husband has had many affairs over the years, the fact that her own sister betrayed her is something she couldn’t forgive. So, when Nell got pregnant and then left Nan in her care, Patti decided to raise the child as her own and broke off all connections with her only sister. But now, Nell is here, and so is the opportunity to mend broken ties. When the time comes to leave for America, Patti chooses to embark on that journey with her sister, leaving her cheating husband behind. Before that, she tells Nan that it has been nineteen years since she and Nell spoke to each other, giving her a hint that Nell is her birth mother.
Nan’s qualms about spending the rest of her life with Theo in a lie are quietened after she has a conversation with Nell, who, fortunately, happens to be around at the time. She advises the new bride to go with the flow, because what is done is done, and the most important thing is that Theo loves her. Nell decides to take her advice, and she and Theo make love by the beach where they first met, but at the same time, she can’t help but think about the night she spent with Guy. Still, Nan tells Theo about Jinny and how she ran away right before their wedding, though she skips the part about her sister being under Guy’s care at the moment.
Conchita Finds a Way to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin
While Nan manoeuvres her new life as the Duchess, Conchita has a lot to handle in her own family. At the end of the last season, she discovered that her father had lost all his money, which would have helped her and Richard break away from his family and move back to America to start their own life. But not only do they not have that support system anymore, but another problem has surfaced in the form of Richard’s father’s impending death. It seems that the old man is not going to survive for long, which means that the title and the responsibility now fall on Richard.
The responsibility of being Lord Brightlingsea means that he has to take over the financial woes sown by his father. The fact that the family is on the brink of financial ruin calls for desperate measures. At first, Conchita tries to find something that they can sell, like a summer home or some paintings. However, when her in-laws refuse to do that, she is forced to turn to other means. Before she looked at the family’s accounts, Conchita had a chance encounter with a woman from America, who revealed that she had come to London to find a husband for her daughter, Cora.
While they have a lot of money, the lack of titles and connections means that no one is paying any attention to them. Conchita realises that she can be that connection for them for a price, which will help her family stay afloat for a while. While Cora looks forward to landing a Lord, or higher, for a husband, Lizzy finds a prospective romance of her own. At Nan’s wedding, she caught the eye of a man named Hector Robinson. When she showed interest in him, Theo encouraged her to have a conversation with him, but things didn’t turn out that way. Now, Lizzy finds Hector standing outside Conchita’s house, looking for Lizzy, expressing his interest in meeting her at the black and white ball, which is the next big occasion in town.
Nan Makes Waves as the New Duchess
As the days pass and Nan worries about her sister, the Dowager assures her that she has made sure Jinny is safe and advises Nan to focus on her duties as the new Duchess. But then, James shows up, hounding Nell about Jinny and their unborn son. When she confronts him about his abuse, he refuses to show any remorse and expresses his conviction about finding Jinny at all costs. Sure enough, Nan finds Jinny and her sudden disappearance on the front page of the newspaper, which worries her about her sister’s safety.
When Nan asks her mother-in-law about Jinny’s location, she is told that it’s better if she doesn’t know. The Dowager also clarifies that, given that Jinny has run away from her husband with their yet unborn child, she is seen as a criminal in the eyes of the law. This means that should she return home, she will have to face the consequences. However, if she stays away from the country, the law will not bother with her because she is the Duchess’ sister. That still doesn’t change the fact that James will never stop looking for her, and with Jinny’s name in the newspapers, things will get even more difficult for her.
While Nan cannot control James, she can do something about the newspapers. The Dowager tells her that once they find a new gossip to report, they will move on from Jinny. So, Nan decides to become that gossip. At the black-and-white themed ball, where she is supposed to give her first appearance as the new Duchess, she goes dressed in red. This certainly catches the eyes of everyone present there, and with her status in society, this is something that must be reported in the newspapers.
The effect is clear the next day when the newspapers quickly move on to talking about Nan’s dazzling appearance, and the story about Jinny is pushed to the corner, or not reported at all. This shows Nan’s resolve to protect her sister. However, by turning the attention towards herself, she has also done the exact opposite of what her mother-in-law advised her to. She told Nan to keep a low profile because, as an outsider, things could get very difficult for her very quickly in the English high society, of which she has barely scratched the surface.
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