Jace Lacob: You mentioned the kiss, and I figured that we would actually see that in this episode, and I’m glad that we did. But what’s interesting to me is that when the Duke recounted this kiss, he said Eliza was crying because her dog had died. Here we see that her grief is far deeper than that. It’s jealousy over William joining the police force, something denied to her as a woman.
CLIP
William: I’m thinking about joining the police. Your father said he’d put in a word for me.
Eliza: You’re joining the police?
William: I still don’t know if I actually will, but they say the money’s quite good. God knows what I’d look like in the uniform.
Eliza: This damn…
William: Here, let me.
Eliza: No, I’m more than capable of doing it myself, thank you.
William: Have I upset you?
Eliza: No, it’s just this dog. This stupid, damn dog! It’s not fair William, it’s not fair.
William: Please, just stop crying.
Jace Lacob: And then she kisses him. How much is this act about Eliza exerting an agency here that’s denied to her elsewhere?
Rachael New: Oh, absolutely. It’s all about that. We had a lot of fun talking about the kiss. We were both in agreement straight away that it should be her. Because it’s much more fun, with Eliza as well, I don’t know how well you remember the conversation in season one about the kiss, but she was adamant that he kissed her and it was like, no, she kissed him. So yes, there is an awful lot of female empowerment there. But very early on, we decided it should be her to be the one that makes the move on him.
Ben Edwards: And also, again, if you watch the exchange between them in the pilot episode in season one, they talk about the fact that yes, he was consoling her over her dead dog. But then she says, and then they talk about the fact that she slapped him. And when we came to write it, we were like, I think that would ruin a really lovely moment if they kiss and then she slaps him. So, what we feel is that somehow, they misremembered it and that perhaps there’ll be another occasion in the future when they were younger where there was an attempt at a kiss and maybe she did slap him then. But that was one of those things we looked at and we just thought that would ruin a really beautiful moment if she suddenly slapped him.
Jace Lacob: He also recalls this as a “chaste kiss” when what we see here is anything but that. But my bigger question about that, that you’re touching on Ben, is what does this particular moment say about memory, about perspective or even about gender?
Ben Edwards: Well, certainly in terms of memory, of course, your memory changes, doesn’t it? It doesn’t stay the same. You project onto it what you want to project. And with the slap thing, again, we could argue that she thinks, well, I didn’t want that to happen, she’s rewritten in her head. But in terms of gender, yeah, absolutely. It’s good that she’s an unconventional person that doesn’t behave with the mores of the time. And therefore, her kissing him is very on brand with Eliza, rather than just waiting to be kissed.
