Sanditon airs Sundays at 8:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream. WTTW Passport members can stream the next episode now. Recap the previous episode.
Yet another event is approaching in Sanditon, and once again a last-minute kink might derail it. Tom and Arthur are preparing for a ball that much of London’s high society is planning to attend, but the shopkeepers have refused to supply it until the army’s debts are paid. Tom comes clean to Arthur about his own debt to the army, and Arthur insists that he tell Mary while Arthur tries to salvage the ball.
But Mary is off to Lady Denham’s for whist. Lady Denham shares that she has heard from a friend that Colonel Lennox’s company has a reputation for drinking a town dry, running up debts, and then disappearing overnight. Since they are war heroes, there’s no legal recourse.
When Mary reports this troubling news to Tom, he in turn reveals his own debt, explaining that Lennox deliberately trapped him. She’s incensed: Have you learned nothing? she asks. After everything Sidney did for you? She must explain to her clueless husband that Sidney was in love with Charlotte; he married Eliza to settle Tom’s debts.
Charlotte is struggling to understand her own feelings. Georgiana and Alison keep encouraging her to return Lennox’s interest, but she is drawn to her employer Alexander Colbourne—although she has been avoiding him since his rude behavior at Lady Denham’s garden party. When they do finally cross paths, he tells her he regrets the way he and Charlotte parted then, but won’t apologize or explain.
After learning of Augusta’s fear that she won’t be able to attend the ball because of the garden party fiasco, Charlotte speaks to Alexander on her behalf. He offers a bit more of an apology, and then Charlotte argues that her position readying Augusta and Leonora for society is untenable if Alexander won’t let them attend events. Then you have some thinking to do, he responds.
Alison has…
