Like most red-blooded oversized ogrefolk, I spend a great deal of time thinking about Bridgerton. Not long ago I paid homage to the very fine writing of the recent revision of Planet of the Apes, and today I’ll offer my regards to the excellent writing bullpen of Bridgerton, especially Geetika Tandon Lizardi and Daniel Robinson, who were entrusted with bringing it all home this season.

Spoilers will follow, so avert your eyes, dear reader, if you would like an unsullied viewing experience.

I won’t dwell on the whole of the current season overmuch. Suffice it to say that the first four-episode segment delivers on some of the critical preliminaries. Our heroine, Penelope Featherington, has all but given up on landing her longtime friend/infatuation, Colin Bridgerton, following an insult she overheard at the end of the prior season. In response, however, she decides to engage with the marriage market earnestly, giving herself a makeover funded in part by the monies she’s earned as the obscenely popular Lady Whistledown.

Penelope confronts Colin with the stinging remarks she overheard, and he apologizes and offers to help her negotiate the market to find a suitable match. We get a glimpse of his sincere regret–a precondition of all that follows–and a gradual elaboration of his increasing regard for her. By the end of the first four episodes she’s entertained and rejected an excellent offer of marriage from Lord Debling. The cleverness of the situation is threefold. At one level it reveals the attractiveness of Penelope, which even the folly of Eloise (who revealed her odd arrangement with Colin to Cressida Cowper, the season’s second-place villain) can’t mess up. It introduces Lord Debling as a genuine prospect, a decent man who really sees Penelope and holds her in high regard, but who also comes with an unusual period defect (he’s a natural philosopher who won’t often be around for Penelope if they wed). And it allows Penelope to confess that someone else holds a place in her heart. And what’s key here is that we, as the reader, love Penelope enough to want what she wants, even though we know Colin, the man she would choose, can be kind of a knucklehead. He’s been on the Grand Tour of the Continent, however, and thinks himself pretty worldly. The first segment ends with Colin all but foisting a marriage offer on Penelope, which she happily accepts after a steamy encounter in a carriage. All seems to be well.

But hovering over it all is Penelope’s secret: that she has been Lady Whistledown all along, an author who has sometimes written teasingly (but always tactfully) of the Bridgerton family. Colin makes it clear that he hates this Whistledown character, and he looks forward to seeing her exposed and disgraced.

The first two episodes of the second segment circle around the issue, with Eloise in particular insisting that Penelope reveal her secret to Colin before they wed. Penelope tries her best, but circumstances intervene again and again, right up until Eloise gives Penelope a midnight deadline to come clean. (For those not in the know, the chief sticking point in this situation is that Penelope was obliged to spill some honest gossip about Eloise, noting that she was spending a little unseemly time in the business district, though in truth she was trying her best to put Queen Charlotte, who suspected Eloise of being Whistledown, off the scent.)

And the Queen emerges as the primary villain in the second half. Though we’ve been given a prequel miniseries to make her seem sympathetic, in Season Three we see her bored and petulant, angry that she hasn’t been able to identify Whistledown so far and that her newly anointed “diamond” bachelorette, Francesca Bridgerton, does not seem at all interested in the vapid marquess she’s picked out for her. (She prefers a fellow named John Stirling, even though he’s not prone to the dramatic course of courtship the Bridgertons usually follow.) Confronted with the insuperable problem of Lady Whistledown, she throws money at it–she promises £5000 (about $100,000 in modern dollars) to whoever reveals the secret to her.

So we’re in a pickle, but one that the mores of the time easily accommodates. Colin, having made the offer of marriage (and having engaged in sexytimes with Penelope) considers it his duty to follow through as a man of honor, even though he’s angry about Penelope’s double identity. Penelope, alas, exposes her secret by rushing to the press to send out a new edition of Lady Whistledown’s hottest gossip. The poor timing, however, is an issue forced by Cressida, who confessed that she was Lady Whistledown in order to avoid a horrid arranged marriage to the repellent Lord Toolbox. She writes a hasty column because she knows that Cressida will be forced to publish her own as proof that she deserves the £5000 bounty, and both she and Eloise (whose cold shoulder has begun to thaw) realize that Cressida-as-Whistledown could do a lot of damage.

The plotting on the whole is pretty complex and neatly managed, but what impresses most about the close of the season is the stretch I like to call the Shondaland Showcase, which involves a set of conventions that ends most seasons of the show. In the Showcase each of the featured players is given a chance to shine, to show themselves off in their most authentic light. It’s a tricksy bit of narrative engineering, in that (per the romance genre) the writers have to know what they can withhold till the end. A good example is the sincerity of Colin’s love. Penelope’s mother, Lady Featherington, asks Penelope if Colin actually said he loved her, and she is thunderstruck, because at that point he hadn’t. About two scenes later, however, he owns up to that love fully–tells her he loves her as a dear friend, as a delightful mind, and as a superhot sex bomb. Deferring that admission for a full four episodes would be a bridge too far, so the writers give us what we need and then add the complication of Penelope’s secret.

In the showcase, however, we get what we want to hear beautifully expressed. Penelope’s mother admits that she neglected Penelope for too long, and that she always wanted her daughters to fare better than she did. Penelope, in marrying a Bridgerton that she dearly loves, is the first of her three daughters to fulfill that wish. Queen Charlotte barges in to the marriage morning breakfast of Penelope and Colin like the Kool-Aid man, sending everyone home and insisting that she’s nearly figured out who Whistledown is because the issue defending the Bridgerton family was so neatly timed. (Cressida, helped by her mom, indeed produced an issue, but it featured nothing but the toxic “I’m just asking questions” rhetoric we’ve all come to identify with bad actors. Cressida wonder aloud why the engagements of the Bridgertons were so short, suggesting that they might just be a bunch of trollops. Compared to Penelope’s edition, which was quite gentle to Cressida, it was instantly recognized as a fake.)

Along the way Cressida tries to blackmail Penelope with the threat of revealing her secret, demanding twice the Queen’s bounty. Colin, being Manful McManley, tries to talk sense to her but botches the effort; she demands a full £20,000 to keep the secret. But Penelope has already written Lady Bridgerton and the Queen with her confession, and she promises the Queen a full explanation for her to judge at the ball her sisters are throwing (and which Penelope has secretly funded with her Whistledown earnings). Penelope delivers her speech, and the Queen (via several reaction shots) is duly swayed. It’s a brilliantly-staged set piece, made up primarily of truths about a woman’s situation in society and a promise to write even more responsibly. Colin (who in a prior scene all but pounced on Penelope in public despite refusing to sleep with her on their wedding night and the night after) recognizes and admits that he loves all aspects of Penelope, even the Whistledown thing, and not just because the Queen has all but insisted that she keep writing. So we get what we want, which is simply what Penelope wants, and we get to see her more beautiful and brave than ever.

Even John Stirling gets his own moments in the showcase, first dancing with Francesca at the wedding breakfast to help countenance Penelope’s choice to do so and to prove to Francesca that he can do the unexpected) and later delivering a toast to the whole Bridgerton family, which has accepted him despite his cold brew mode of courtship, so unlike the hot and frothy Bridgerton standard.

The MVPs of the season are, to my thinking, Eloise Bridgerton, who has to subdue her usual sparkle in order to play the devoted daughter and aggrieved friend from whom Penelope kept her secret. For us to be happy with the Showcase we need to see her and Penelope reconciled, and we finally get that reconciliation at the eleventh hour. And Lady Danbury, who scores a rare romance hat trick by a) reconciling with her brother; b) allowing him to pitch woo to Lady Bridgerton, her bestie; and c) by gently prodding the Queen, wondering if she has any plan for what she’ll do after Whistledown is exposed, wondering how she’ll live without all the town gossip Whistledown provides. And of course Penelope, who hits all the notes in her transformation over the course of the season. She was always charming and lovely, but we get to see her ravishing, despondent, and fearless as well, running us through the full array of emotions that come with the travails of the romance heroine.

And the writers stick the landing, not only teaching us what to want but delivering what we want in precisely the way we want it.