Poldark season 3 premieres on PBS with Valentine Warleggan, more

The Poldark season 3 premiere arrived on PBS Sunday night, and if you watched the show you had to love it, right? British drama is back on PBS!

What we don’t want to do in this weekly article is regurgitate everything that happened, largely because we already did that for the UK airings of the show. Want our full CarterMatt review of this episode? Check it out over at the link here.

Instead, our objective for these weekly highlight pieces for PBS is to focus on some of the notable moments of the episode, the ones that will be remembered and stand the test of time. Here, it feels pretty darn clear that the major one will be the arrival of Valentine Poldark to the series. The birth itself was complicated, especially when you discuss the nature of the child’s paternity. What the series has done a remarkable job of in this episode is keeping the nature of the boy’s true father reasonably ambiguous. While there are some signs in terms of the timeframe that it belongs to Ross, it’s not like someone is bringing out Maury Povich onto the stage in order to declare one way or another that Ross is the dad.

What’s almost as important as the birth itself in so many ways are the wide array of other issues that the birth is causing. Take, for example, George Warleggan wanting Valentine to be the only target of his mother’s focus, and how this baby being there could change how much time Ross may choose to be around Trenwith. With this baby comes complications; luckily, few shows play complications as well as Poldark, and Ross does have plenty to attend to on his own homestead. He also has a marriage with Demelza that is need of great repair. (Side note: Did you enjoy seeing the debut of her brothers during the episode tonight?)

The effectiveness of the scene

One of the things that Poldark writer Debbie Horsfield does so well is avoiding the typical super-soapy love triangle. It would have been so easy and effortless for her to introduce situations for Ross to go back and forth between Demelza and Elizabeth, but it’s rather lovely that he doesn’t do that. Instead, she draws a distinction between the person he really wants and an incident that happened in the past. This is important so that we don’t waste a whole lot of time thinking about the story of these characters in that sense — after all, you should also remember that there are plenty of other stories coming up in which Poldark can distract you and make you almost forget that Ross / Elizabeth was ever a thing … almost.

What did you think of the Poldark season 3 premiere on PBS, and was there a part of this story that you enjoyed the most? Be sure to share in the comments!

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