No, ‘Rivals’ Season 2 Doesn’t Have a Taggie O’Hara Problem
Therese Lacson is a Senior TV Editor who has been with Collider since 2021. She got started in this business over ten years ago working primarily as an interviewer and critic. At Collider, she works closely with the features team to support the writers and also ideates and develops content daily. She has covered major industry events including Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, Toronto International Film Festival, and San Diego Comic-Con. Although she reviews and covers both film and television, her focus is in television and her expertise is in fantasy and sci-fi genre shows. Her favorite shows to cover include House of the Dragon, Bridgerton, Fallout, 9-1-1, and Rivals.
Editor's Note: The below contains spoilers for Episodes 7-9 of Rivals Season 2 Part 2.Few tropes beat the reformed rake in romance. Famously, they make the best husbands. Yes, it's completely unrealistic and about as fantastical as dragons and unicorns. But within that fantasy of changing a bad man for the better lies the appeal; a shy wallflower who has been neglected by society finds true love with the man everyone wants, but no one seems to be able to nail down. That's the conceit of the relationship between Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) and Taggie O'Hara (Bella Maclean) in Disney+'s Rivals. For some viewers, this dynamic seems to make the romping fun world of Rutshire a little more boring rather than magical, but that's missing the entire point of their relationship.
'Rivals' Season 2 Is Following Rupert Campbell-Black's Redemption Arc
Rupert Campbell-Black is undoubtedly Dame Jilly Cooper's most iconic character. The infamous rake of Rutshire was, at first, notoriously promiscuous and completely irredeemable. In her first book, Riders, he is a cruel bully; he relentlessly cheats on his wife, Helen (Hayley Atwell), and he abuses animals by nearly beating a horse to death after losing a showjumping competition. While Rupert is one of Cooper's juiciest characters, he is also, undeniably, a giant douchebag. It's only at the end of Rivals, when Rupert finds romance with the young Taggie O'Hara, that he becomes a true heartthrob. Through this redemption and change, he goes from being a walking red flag into the biggest wife guy on the planet.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic
Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.
🍂Harry & Sally(1989)
🏀Love & Basketball(2000)
🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)
🚢Titanic(1997)
01
How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
02
What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.
03
How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.
04
What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.
05
Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.
06
What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.
07
Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.
08
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.
Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.
Harry & Sally
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
- You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
- The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
- You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
Love & Basketball
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
- You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
- It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
- You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
Heated Rivalry
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
- You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
- The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
- Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.
Titanic
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
- You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
- The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
- You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.
This is the metamorphosis that's currently playing out in Rivals Season 2, which just returned for more episodes this past Wednesday. Rupert, who began the series having riotous sex in an airplane bathroom with a grubby tabloid journalist, has become a completely new man. Sure, watching Rupert be the biggest lothario in Rutshire is fun, but only through this slow transformation do we actually get to the heart of the character.
Rupert's nuances slowly unfold as his feelings for Taggie deepen, and that love is what makes him one of Cooper's best characters. If Rupert remained the caddish villain he was in Riders, his shtick would quickly stop being charming. In fact, Cooper later introduced a character in her book Appassionata who is essentially the Rupert of the music world, and he became one of the most hated characters of the series because he is completely irredeemable.
'Rivals' Story Wouldn't Exist Without Taggie
On the surface, you might overlook someone like Taggie. You might call her "drippy," say she's a "doormat," or claim that her very presence is ruining the show — things her detractors have proudly declared. To them, she is simply the pretty but neglected dyslexic daughter of the much more interesting Declan (Aidan Turner) and Maud O'Hara (Victoria Smurfit). But the fact of the matter is that the story of Rivals simply wouldn't exist without Taggie.
The entire reason Venturer was created, the entire reason why the O'Haras can still afford to live in Rutshire, the entire reason the franchise battle is even a battle at all is motivated by Rupert's desire to make Taggie happy. He puts his house up as collateral for her; he buys the essentially useless plot of land known as the Bluebell Wood for her; he starts up Venturer and is spurred on to push for its success for her. For a competitive man, it's one of the few times he isn't competing just to win; he's doing it all for someone else.
Compare this to his raunchy romps with Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack), which amounted to little more than just casual sex, or his fiery relationship with Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), which ultimately ends in unrequited love, and Rupert's restraint and dedication with Taggie reveal just how strong her influence is. As the man who once snubbed Sarah at New Year's simply because he lost interest, his new role as her protector and safe haven is only possible because of the changes that Taggie has inspired in him.
Taggie O'Hara Is an Essential Jilly Cooper Character
As an outcast even in her own family — relegated to the cook, maid, and de facto third parent to her sister — Taggie is quick to befriend and defend the other outsiders in Rutshire. She makes fast friends with Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) and becomes her confidante; she saves Charles (Gary Lamont) when she finds him having a panic attack during New Year's, and she speaks up for Cameron twice when Rupert reveals that he has seduced her to steal the IBA application and when he accuses her of being a mole (even though she's also in love with Rupert).
Those who say Taggie feels out of place in a Jilly Cooper story only reveal how little they know about the author's world and her beloved heroine. Maclean, who plays Taggie with aplomb, has spoken several times about how Cooper is deeply protective of Taggie. "I think because there's a lot of morally dubious characters in the show, her want to protect Taggie is to maintain the moral compass within her," Maclean explained during Collider's Season 2 set visit interview. And that morality is not just a random personality trait plucked from a bag; it reflects Cooper herself. At a recent Part 2 premiere screening hosted by RadioTimes, Maclean explained how similar Cooper was to Taggie. "Jilly is Taggie in every way. Jilly is one of the kindest people I've ever met. She probably has the strongest moral compass hidden by an extraordinary sense of humor. She lives and breathes in that character."
On the drama front, Taggie's not deviously plotting like Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) or shamelessly flirting like Sarah, but that's not because she can't do it. The very fact that there are so few genuinely good and morally sound people in Rutshire is what makes Taggie so attractive to both viewers and Rupert — even sweet Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer) is not safe from judgment. Her endearing earnestness, kindness, and unflinching loyalty make her someone viewers are eager to root for. She's a port in the storm in a world where everyone seems to disappoint in one way or another.
'Rivals' Season 2's Biggest Problem Has Nothing To Do With One Character
The frothy fun that is to be had in Rivals always comes at a cost — one that few are ever willing to pay. Characters like Tony, Sarah, Maud, and even Freddie and Lizzie can feel almost melodramatic as they are doomed to make the same mistake over and over again. Taggie serves as proof that as corrupting as Rutshire can be, it is not inevitable that one will be tainted by its wickedness. She is keenly aware of what the price of misbehaving is; she witnesses it every day with her parents. When allowed to romp and indulge in frivolity at Bas' (Luca Pasqualino) toga party, she takes a step back and shows her restraint.
While her maturity and wisdom as a 21-year-old are about as unrealistic as the very concept of a reformed rake, it is nonetheless catnip for those of us who enjoy the romance genre. Taggie helps Rupert break the cycle of behavior that seems to trap everyone else in town, and if you've read even a page beyond Cooper's original novel, you know that falling in love with Taggie does little to dull Rupert's overwhelming charm. If anything, that staunch dedication to his wife makes him all the more attractive. Calling her boring is a fundamental misunderstanding of her character and why she appeals so much, specifically to female viewers. With every scene, Taggie proves she isn't the problem with Rivals — she's the solution.
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