The movie’s trailer was released this morning, and it introduces us to a slightly older Jones, now single and pregnant and—gasp—unsure who the father is: Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy or some new guy played by Patrick Dempsey.
If you read Helen Fielding’s most recent Bridget Jones book, or even a review of it, this is where you might get confused. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which came out in 2013, featured a recently widowed Bridget, raising two kids and back on the dating scene after her husband Mark Darcy’s death. So which is it? Is Darcy alive or dead? Does Bridget Jones’s Baby take place some time before Mad About the Boy, filling in the gap after Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (the 1999 novel and 2004 movie)? Is this a prequel to a sequel? Or is this a separate timeline altogether? Can someone please make me a diagram?
The logistical explanation may be that Bridget Jones’s Baby has been stuck in development since 2009, long before Fielding wrote the third novel, but that doesn’t help any of us deal with the existential uncertainty. Plus, the trailer fails to answer the most important question about the movie, which opens in theaters on September 16: When do Colin Firth and Patrick Dempsey fight while drenched in water?