The Queen’s Gambit is an absorbing drama. It generates unlikely tension from chess and gives Beth Harmon a complicated interior life shaped by ambition, loss and dependence. Yet the series’ treatment of race and bisexuality deserves closer attention. The characters Jolene and Cleo are granted limited inner lives while their choices primarily redirect, stabilize or elevate Beth.
The result is a familiar representational problem: marginalized characters appear to broaden a story’s world, but the narrative ultimately values them for what they provide its white heterosexual protagonist. Jolene’s support enables Beth’s recovery and return to competition. Cleo’s presence coincides with Beth’s relapse and professional defeat. That contrast is not incidental to how viewers are asked to understand each woman.
Jolene and the limits of representation
The series acknowledges racism in Beth and Jolene’s childhood environment. Jolene understands that race affects her likelihood of adoption, while later scenes place Beth among white middle-class people whose homes and language reflect the prejudices of the period. These details establish context, but context alone does not amount to a sustained critique.
Jolene is the only significant Black character, and much of her role is organized around Beth’s needs. At the orphanage she offers practical knowledge, companionship and protection. Once Beth is adopted, Jolene largely disappears from the narrative. Her return occurs precisely when Beth requires emotional grounding and financial help.
The character is intelligent, professionally ambitious and pursuing legal work, yet the story gives little space to those goals. Instead, her savings and labor become resources for Beth. Jolene funds a costly trip even though Beth owns a home and has had little contact with her for years. Her generosity closes a structural problem in Beth’s plot while leaving Jolene’s own future mostly unexplored.
Chess, masculinity and belonging
Chess is both Beth’s refuge and the institution through which the series measures her achievement. Men introduce her to the game, compete against her and later become collaborators. Several former rivals contribute strategic knowledge before her decisive match. Their collective support signals that Beth has earned a place within a male-dominated world.
This is part of the program’s appeal: Beth repeatedly defeats people who underestimate her. But the series makes her unusually secure among the white men surrounding the game. They admire her brilliance, invite her into their circles and urge her toward sobriety. Their attention becomes a stable network of professional and emotional validation.
Women are less consistently associated with chess or disciplined ambition. Beth’s adoptive mother is loving but also connected to alcohol and instability. Jolene understands Beth’s needs but remains outside the chess world. Cleo knows little about the game and represents a glamorous alternative to its discipline. These divisions shape which relationships the series ultimately treats as constructive.
Cleo and the coding of bisexuality
Beth meets Cleo through Benny, a competitor and romantic interest. Cleo is cosmopolitan, elusive and detached from chess. When the two reconnect in Paris before Beth’s important rematch with Vasily Borgov, an invitation for a drink leads to a late night. Beth arrives at the match unprepared and loses.
The scene is deliberately ambiguous about the extent of their intimacy, but it clearly codes their encounter as queer. It is also the point at which Beth’s existing alcohol dependency becomes most damaging to her career. Cleo then disappears, leaving the consequences with Beth.
Cleo did not create Beth’s dependence, and Beth remains responsible for her decisions. Nevertheless, the sequence draws on a recognizable trope in which bisexual women are represented as exciting but unreliable disruptions to heterosexual stability. Cleo has little perspective of her own, making it difficult for the series to complicate that association.
The contrast between Cleo and Jolene
The construction of these two characters is most revealing when viewed together. Cleo is alluring, transient and associated with a loss of control. Jolene is dependable, nonsexual in relation to Beth and associated with recovery. One interrupts Beth’s progress; the other absorbs the work and cost of restoring it.
Neither woman receives the narrative investment granted to Beth’s male chess peers. Cleo’s motivations remain opaque, while Jolene’s education and career recede behind her willingness to help. The story uses difference to create emotional and thematic contrast without allowing either character comparable complexity.
Jolene’s intervention prepares Beth to reenter the chess community. Her former competitors then collaborate across distance to help her plan the final match. Beth’s victory brings together personal recovery, professional recognition and Cold War symbolism. Marginalized women help move her toward that conclusion, but the conclusion belongs to Beth and the men who share her game.
What a more complete reading reveals
Criticizing these choices does not require dismissing the series’ craft or Beth’s appeal. A work can be visually accomplished and emotionally compelling while relying on limiting conventions. In fact, its strengths make examining those conventions more useful: audiences are more likely to absorb assumptions embedded in stories they enjoy.
A fuller narrative might have shown Jolene making decisions that were not calibrated to Beth’s crisis, or allowed Cleo an identity beyond danger and glamour. It could have explored Beth’s sexuality without positioning queer intimacy beside professional collapse. Such choices would not require changing the central plot; they would simply recognize that supporting characters possess lives beyond their function for the protagonist.
The enduring question is not whether The Queen’s Gambit includes Black and bisexual characters. It is whether those characters are allowed agency, consequence and interiority of their own. On that measure, the series’ elegant surface conceals a conventional distribution of narrative power.
