When Fleabag says she can’t imagine being a priest - “Especially the celibacy” - just then, the Priest jumps up and shouts, “Oh! It’s a fox!” Foxes, in that moment, become inextricably linked to his sexuality.
But, apparently, God has not saved the Priest from foxes. “Lucky God got there first,” Fleabag says, perhaps beginning to put together what, exactly, the fox means to the Priest. It’s like they have a pact or something.” He explains that his relationship with foxes began long before he met Fleabag, including one time he was on a toilet in a train and a fox tried to get through the window, and another time he was at a monastery and woke up with a fox pointing at him out his window. “It wasn’t a fox, was it?” He runs behind Fleabag, physically barricading himself from the invisible fox while she laughs at him. “What was that?” he asks, jumping up in terror. “I’ve never felt closer to God.” Just then the Priest hears something rustle in the bushes. Halfway through the season, Fleabag and the Priest drink gin-and-tonics on a bench in the church garden when the fox first appears - right after the Priest tells Fleabag she’s good for him because she makes him question his faith. To better understand this fox theory, it needs to be traced back to its origins. “The fox chases the Priest down the street.” My father’s conclusion struck me like a revelation because he saw what I wanted to see: The fox represented something crucial about the relationship the Priest has with his celibacy.
“Of course they end up together,” he said to me the morning after he finished the final episode. in Renaissance English and multi-decade teaching career has trained him to interpret the world as a literary text. In my search for something romantic to take from the conclusion, I recommended season two to my father, a progressive and rabble-rousing Catholic and, perhaps more importantly, a retired English professor whose Yale Ph.D. And yet a love story that involves three battling wills - Fleabag’s, the Priest’s, and God’s - must surely disappoint one person. It is this counsel that ultimately redirects Fleabag, allowing her to save herself from the self-destruction and grief we saw in season one. When season two of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sexy, wry British comedy begins, Fleabag tells us, “This is a love story.” She falls for a Catholic priest - the Priest (Andrew Scott), as he’s titled by the show - who offers her a kind of pastoral care only a celibate man of God has the time and capacity to give her. In the final scene of Fleabag’s second season, after the eponymous Fleabag has her heart broken at a bus stop, I was desperate for a happier ending.
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