The Artful Dodger Season 2 Review: Jack Dawkins and Lady Belle’s Romance Shines

The Artful Dodger Season 2 confirms the show is at its best when the focus is on Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Lady Belle Fox’s (Maia Mitchell) feverish romance.

Their relationship sparks conversations involving class differences, identity, and control. 

Outside forces — specifically Lady Jane (Susie Porter) and Fagin (David Thewlis) — are crucial to understanding how prejudice and familial bonds are hurdles that Belle and Dawkins are desperately trying to overcome.

Season 2 picks up six months after the events of Season 1. Despite Dawkins saving her daughter’s life, Lady Jane continues to let prejudice fuel her reasoning for prohibiting Belle from seeing him. She refuses to see any other aspect of Dawkins besides a con artist and writes off her abusive control over Belle under the guise of protectiveness. 

Lady Jane: Well, if it’s a cage darling, it’s a gilded one.

Fagin harbors a similar apprehensiveness toward Belle. It manifests in his deliberate choice not to deliver the letters she writes to Dawkins during his time in jail.

Lady Jane and Fagin are two sides of the same coin, and the show does a masterful job in highlighting how they’re cruel in their own ways. They’re both under the impression that they’re doing what’s right, even when they deeply hurt Belle and Dawkins, respectively.

It’s a twisted web of care and control, and such complexity is essential when crafting a story where class is integral to how characters are perceived and treated.

Belle and Dawkins converse under the confines of the night, which forges the forbidden element of their relationship.

The reality of their situation berates them at every turn. Eventually, it starts to seep into the cracks of their own perception of one another. 

Belle and Dawkins perceive control differently, and with such a specific level of distinction that Brodie-Sangster and Mitchell curate exceptionally. Its conflicting nature elevates their stories both apart and together. 

Belle’s insistence on thinking about the future to maintain her own identity is her centering herself in a world where she does not want to conform to her mother’s expectations. Belle initially tries to push Dawkins away because she wants to secure a future with him that’s untouchable by others (namely, her mother).

Yet it’s heart-wrenching to watch how she cannot stay true to her word as her love for Dawkins outweighs any of her mother’s threats. 

On the other hand, Dawkins does not have the luxury of dreaming about his future. He has to think from moment to moment, and that contributes to the high he gets from performing exhilarating tasks under pressure.

Dawkins clings to the heady rush because it’s the most stable part of his life. 

Belle: How can we spend a life together when you insist on courting danger at every turn? 

Dawkins: It’s the only time I ever feel alive. When the world is crumbling… it’s in that madness that I find clarity.

For better or worse, Dawkins’s identity is shaped by what he can chase. Letting that part of him go altogether is not accurate to his character arc thus far. However, his steadfast love for Belle is untainted by his past. Thus, Dawkins recognizes that despite the trials and tribulations he and Belle face, his love for her is not bound to arbitrary societal rules. It is theirs alone. 

For the majority of Season 2, Belle and her mother’s suffocating tensions simmer at a consistent pace as well.

It boils over in a catastrophic argument after she catches Belle and Dawkins together on The Artful Dodger Season 2 Episode 6, “Bellybutton.”

Watching Lady Jane disown her daughter is a throat-clenching moment, and Mitchell and Porter deliver some of their best work of the season.

One thinks after seeing her daughter on the brink of death, Lady Jane is cautious in pushing her away, but it’s quite the opposite. She holds no space in her heart for explanation or empathy. She uses her role as a mother, one that’s supposed to be nurturing, and substitutes it for acting like a dictator over her daughter’s life.

Lady Jane’s rigid mindset is a direct result of her addiction to obsessive control. She thinks it’ll ground her when, in fact, she’s isolating herself and hurting Belle in the process.

Safe to say, things get worse before they get better.

In a somewhat repetitive though still hitting its emotional beats, Belle actually ends things with Dawkins; however, their “breakup” all but lasts one episode. While Brodie-Sangster and Mitchell bring hard-hitting performances, the short stint in their relationship only serves its purpose for a dramatic reunion in the finale.

The conflict between Lady Jane and Belle wraps up somewhat lazily, considering their unstable dynamic is consequential throughout the season.

When Lady Jane is on the edge of death thanks to a cholera outbreak, her life is in the hands of Dawkins. It’s only then that she comes around to Belle’s love for him.

Lady Jane has to go through a near-death experience to empathize with her own daughter. It reiterates how she cannot even see Belle’s perspective without going through something tragic herself. 

Belle and her mother’s reconciliation is not reflective of the intensity and accurate pacing of their climactic fight. Rather, it’s quite rushed.

After the dust settles (Lady Jane is alive and well), Dawkins and Belle’s reunion is clearly on the horizon. While a bit cheesy, it’s an important scene because it speaks to the future of their relationship. 

Their rekindling happens by the sea in all its glittering possibilities.

For Dawkins and Belle’s reunion to occur by the ocean’s edge, it reflects the freedom they can finally experience. It also sparks the potential beginning to a longer arc of Dawkins learning how to live not out of fear, but hope. While recognizing that just maybe, he doesn’t have to carry all his old behaviors and patterns. 

Stray Thoughts

• Devil’s Elbow is a seamless addition to expanding the show’s lore. 
• Too much screen time focuses on Dickie. 
• Dr. Sneed’s character development comes out of nowhere. 
• Belle’s father punching Dickie is deeply satisfying. 
• Inspector Boxer is just as dull as Gaines. 
• Hetty deserves a proper storyline. 
• The emotional moment between Belle and her father in the finale is beautiful.  

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What did you think of Dawkins and Belle’s relationship this season of The Artful Dodger? Share your thoughts in the comments below! 

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Season 2 of The Artful Dodger is streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu.

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