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Spoilers ahead for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cMark gone.\u201d<\/p>\n Those are the only two words Ren\u00e9e Zellweger<\/strong>\u2019s Bridget Jones can conjure for her diary on the day that her husband, Mark Darcy (played, as always, by Colin Firth<\/strong>), dies. In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy<\/em>, the fourth installment in the franchise<\/a> streaming on Peacock February 13, Bridget has gone from being a \u201csmug married\u201d to a designation even darker: a widow.<\/p>\n Fans fell in love with Bridget and Mark\u2019s Jane Austen\u2013inspired romance across three films\u2019 worth of makeups and breakups. After meeting not-so-cute at her parents\u2019 holiday party in 2001\u2019s Bridget Jones\u2019s Diary<\/em><\/a>\u2014if you\u2019ll remember, he calls her a \u201cverbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother\u201d\u2014Darcy famously finds that he likes Jones just as she is. They\u2019re on-and-off during the sequels, like 2004\u2019s The Edge of Reason<\/em>, which includes a randy romantic detour in Thailand with Hugh Grant<\/strong>\u2019s Daniel Cleaver. But by the end of 2016\u2019s Bridget Jones\u2019s Baby<\/em>, Mark and Bridget finally ride off into the sunset with their newborn son, Billy (played in the new film by Casper Knopf<\/strong>).<\/p>\n It\u2019s only after the couple settles into domesticity and welcomes their second child, a daughter named Mabel (Mila Jankovic<\/strong>), that tragedy strikes. As Bridget says in the franchise\u2019s first film, \u201cIt is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.\u201d In the fourth installment, we learn that Mark, a human rights lawyer, has been killed in a land-mine accident while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan.<\/p>\n Mark meets the same fate in the 2013 Helen Fielding<\/strong> novel on which the film is based. \u201cPain and confusion and those sorts of things are where the jokes come from,\u201d Fielding told Time<\/em><\/a> in 2013 about why she had to kill off her leading man. \u201cThere has to be an integrity to what those jokes mean.\u201d In 2016, tragically, life imitated art, and Fielding was left to raise her two children alone after her own ex-husband\u2019s death.<\/p>\n Rest assured: In Mad About the Boy,<\/em> Bridget\u2019s oldest son is something of a \u201cminiature Darcy,\u201d as Grant\u2019s Cleaver says. \u201cHis presence is very much there in the book and in the child,\u201d Fielding said of the film\u2019s source material back in 2013, recalling that she jokingly told Colin Firth: \u201cHis memory will live on and he will rise from the dead rather like Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n She wasn\u2019t far off. Firth\u2019s Darcy looms over much of the fourth Bridget Jones<\/em> film, which begins on the fourth anniversary of his death. His son Billy is still grieving, which impedes his ability to socialize at school; his daughter Mabel asks each man who enters their life, mailman included, if they are to be her \u201cnew daddy.\u201d And then there is Firth\u2019s literal presence in the film. Darcy appears in spirit form during key moments in his family\u2019s life\u2014when the children make homemade cards for his birthday, release balloons on his death anniversary, and during a primary school musical performance that will leave viewers misty-eyed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n