'Sanditon' Season 2: Episode 4 Recap

Lady Denham's annual garden party serves as the highlight of this episode of Sanditon, an hour that has everything you could possibly want from a show like this: Multiple men bristling over their shared attraction to the seemingly only eligible women in town, a post-proposal near-drowning, a largely performative sugar boycott, and a dramatic archery competition that sets Charlotte's two handsome new love interests directly against one another.

And it's all certainly entertaining enough: Colonel Lennox turns out to be capable of a surprising amount of pettiness when the reclusive Mr. Colbourne deigns to attend the party with his niece Augusta, Georgiana's speech about the evils of the slave trade is true enough though I doubt it will keep the town's sweet tooth at bay for more than an afternoon's worth of preening about what good people they all are, and literally everyone tries to tell Allison that her new man hasn't been entirely honest with her, but she refuses to believe them until he practically lets her die in the pond. Everyone gets to wander around wearing beautiful spring dresses in gorgeous weather, and you'd never know that half the attendees are miserable and most of the town is broke.

Charlotte remains awkwardly stuck between the man everyone seems to think she should be with (Lennox) and the one she clearly wants (Colbourne). The show is doing its best to nudge us in its preferred direction---how else would Lennox suddenly become so deeply comfortable with essentially ripping off the entire town?---but, unfortunately, Colbourne is not doing a lot to help himself here, forbidding Charlotte from seeing Lennox again and being so generally offputting that it's no wonder he rarely leaves his estate. I'm not sure that Sanditon wanted to further convince people that Sidney Parker was always the best choice for its heroine, but whew even dead he often still comes off better than both these men.