'The Buccaneers' Season 2: Off The Rails and Loving It

O, The Buccaneers! Your bounty of logic-defying, totally absorbing, and utterly bonkers plot developments and out-of-character character beats are a boon to exclamation point-laden group chats and comments sections across the internet. Your first season had its fair share of forehead-smack-inducing moments, but for Season 2, you’ve gone into overdrive, and attention must be paid. 

This season has given viewers both the types of twists we expect from a soapy teen historical drama, and ones that provoke more of an “are you serious right now??” response. Nan learning at her wedding that her birth mother is her mom’s sister, Nell? Who then vanishes by the end of the season premiere? Sure! Marriages of convenience, extra-marital liaisons, leveraging one’s privileged position of wealth and social status to rescue one’s sister from an abusive marriage – all expected and even welcome. a

Today, though, we are here to talk about the cream of the bumper crop of silliness offered up thus far from Season 2. I have a list nearly as long as my arm, but for the sake of my sanity, I’ve pared it down to just the three wildest things happening on The Buccaneers. We have one episode left, and things can only get more bananas from here, so strap in!

One of the big, overarching themes of this season is best summed up as Never Allow Teenagers To Marry. It’s easy to forget that the young folks’ many instances of fiery loins and often-changing affections are developmentally normal, and it’s their early marriages that are largely to blame for the problems they face. When 19-year-olds (they all seem to be 19, somehow?) wed in a world prior to no-fault divorce, the totally expected ebb and flow of their relationships is unavoidably extra complicated and socially dangerous.

For example, Nan is married to Theo, Duke of Tintagel, but prior to their wedding, she consummated her mutual, burning love with Theo’s bestie, Guy. Following their three-month honeymoon, Nan still pines for Guy but also sincerely wants to make her relationship with Theo work. Even though she decides to put her feelings for Guy in the rear view, her relationship with Theo becomes untenable when he figures out Guy and Nan’s hanky-panky, and worse, that his own mother knew about it and didn’t tell him. Whew! 

But wait, there’s more! If Theo won’t have anything to do with her, Nan figures, she may as well pop over to Italy to try to reunite with Guy, who’s living there to protect her sister Jinny (and Jinny’s adorable baby, Freddie) from Jinny’s horrible and abusive husband, Lord Seadown. Somehow, on this show where no romantic pairing is ever entirely off the table, Jinny and Guy haven’t succumbed to their proximity, social isolation, and general hotness. That’s probably just as well, since Nan 100% assumes that she & Guy will rekindle their romance the moment she arrives, but I think that’s a bit of a missed opportunity for even more relationship drama. I’ll continue to keep that hope alive for Season Three!

Naturally, after some bickering, Nan and Guy do get back together, but no sooner has the post-coital lavender haze dissipated than Nan high-tails it back to England to advocate for a bill enshrining more women’s rights so that women like Jinny aren’t stuck forever in abusive marriages. What’s Guy to do but have a one-night love affair with their beautiful neighbor Paloma and – whoops! – accidentally, drunkenly tie the knot with her? 

I haven’t even talked about two major romantic revelations and entanglements. Richard’s sister, the long-suffering Honoria, is a very efficient young woman, announcing to her imperious mother that she’s going to France to teach for a spell and then planting a big ol’ smooch on Mabel in front of God and everyone! Career pursuit and coming out all in the space of 3 minutes, I must respect it. Let us not forget, however, the shenanigans Theo gets up to in Nan’s absence. He embarks on an affair with Nan’s bosom friend Lizzy, who is – not to put too fine a point on it – already engaged to Hector, a lovely, handsome, progressive young member of parliament. Hector is, of course, the son of Theo’s mother, Blanche’s long-lost love, Reede. Children! Please, hold your horses! Speaking of horses, all of this leads me to the next utterly bonkers aspect of the season: distances and speed of travel.

We’ve all watched shows or films that force us to suspend geographic disbelief. We know you can’t realistically make two zippy little round-trips between Los Angeles and San Francisco twice in one day, but we’ll set that aside every now and then for the sake of pacing. The Buccaneers positively sneers at such picayune concerns, brazenly asserting that one could easily hop into a carriage and pop down to Tintagel from London in the morning and be back home for a (very) late supper. 

Today, in the year of our Beyoncé 2025, that 260-mile drive takes about 5 hours, one-way. In the late 1800s, prior to the existence of motorways and personal conveyances capable of traveling more than 15 miles per hour, we’re talking about a multi-day journey each way. Long story short: there’s absolutely no way that Dick and Conchita would set out for a ball at Tintagel, bedecked in all their geegaws and finery on the afternoon of the event. There’s also no way that Lizzy would be able to jump in the carriage to pop down to Tintagel to smooch Theo; the distance, likely bad weather, and lack of good roads all make an impulsive booty call nigh on impossible. 

Credit where it’s due, though: The Buccaneers does right by Nan’s journey across the Atlantic to pop in on the proceedings of her parents’ divorce trial. The voyage at this time, by steamship, would have been a 7 to 10-day journey, and Episode 7, taking place six weeks since Lord Seadown shot and killed his brother (and the series’s best male character) Richard. 

Current songs re-arranged for series set in the 19th century are a mainstay of the cheeky historical fantasia. Perhaps in keeping with its exploration of the effects of brash Americans – we are North American scum, as Wet Leg put it in their LCD Soundsystem cover for the opening credits – marrying into the buttoned-up British aristocracy, The Buccaneers has long staked out territory in the land of purposeful anachronism. No Vitamin String Quartet covers for this show, only pure, uncut original recordings. Taylor Swift! Yeah Yeah Yeahs! Japanese Breakfast! 

Something I noticed this season that I’ve either forgotten from or failed to pay attention to in the first season is that the characters seem to hear these post-Y2K songs just as we do. When Theo wakes up, alone and free at Tintagel after Nan and Blanche both depart, he doesn’t just dance around to a song in his mind. He seems to be able to hear Bleachers’ song “Modern Woman” as he capers about, Tom Cruise in Risky Business-style. A dance scene in an earlier episode features Blanche and Reede cutting a dignified rug to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” A seventh episode callback to Guy and Nan’s first season stairway-and-balcony pas de deux at the courthouse between Guy and Nan, set to Taylor Swift’s “Lover”? I both relish it and have questions. Should I just relinquish those questions and chalk it all up to the big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff theory of time? 

If so, perhaps that will explain another time-related issue that seems to have hit its nadir in episode six, “Every Single Piece of My Heart”: pacing. This episode shoehorns about three episodes’ worth of plot into its 49-minute runtime! 

This includes, but is not limited to: a gap in the Lizzy / Theo / Hector triangle timeline where a couple of scenes between Lizzy and Hector as they discuss postponing their wedding; Jinny and Guy dashing back to England from Italy in pursuit of liberating Freddie from Seadown; Seadown subsequently provoking Jinny into a fully justified public freakout that results in her being carted off to an insane asylum; The Dowager Lady Brightlingsea confessing to Dick that she was wrong about what an evil so-and-so her younger son is and imploring him and Honoria to rescue Jinny and Freddie from their imprisonment at Aunt Emily’s estate; and Dick getting shot and killed by Seadown as he tries to prevent Seadown from taking his own life. My head is still spinning