Anthony’s watch is a physical manifestation of the trauma surrounding his father’s death. In season 1, he often checks it while with Siena. When she jokes that she will someday “take it apart bit by bit”, he emphasizes its importance as an heirloom passed down from his father, yet he resents its implications. Here the watch-checking signifies the burden and call of the familial responsibilities Anthony seeks to escape through Siena.
By season 2, Anthony’s duties as viscount can no longer be avoided. Early on he’s seen checking his watch as he methodically seeks out a wife. The scene, cut in hasty montage, is notably scored to an orchestral cover of Nirvana’s “Stay Away”. The opening lines? “Monkey see, monkey do (I don’t know why).” Anthony’s trauma only allows him to pursue marriage transactionally, a series of empty gestures. He is afraid to go past the surface because his construct of love is inextricable from grief, loss, and resentment. As he tells Lady Bridgerton, he desires a partnership “untouched by heartbreak and the ravages of grief” that his father’s death wrought.
Anthony’s defensiveness is grounded in an overwhelming fear of death, of leaving someone with the unexpressed grief and trauma he was left with. Anthony is haunted by time -- by how suddenly it can be taken away. The foundation for the watch motif is laid in season 1, when Lady Bridgerton catches Anthony checking it and remarks, “Time, as we both know, is certainly of the essence.” Her observation underscores the watch’s symbolic import as a metaphor for Anthony’s anxiety around mortality.
When Anthony turns the watch over and over in his hands or checks it as tic, we are seeing him grapple with his fear of the future or lack thereof. In episode 8, Lady Bridgerton urges Anthony to visit the bedridden Kate. “I do not have time for this,” he replies. Jonathan Bailey doesn’t play Anthony’s response as impatience, but almost as a plea. Anthony is not sure if he has the emotional capacity to confront Kate’s accident and what it means for him, the near impossibility of opening himself up to more loss. “I was fearful of losing you,” Anthony tells Kate just before they mutually declare their love for one another. His ability to succumb to love is predicated on finally naming his fears.
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