THE GILDED AGE: Who Is In Charge Here?

Pin

And we’re back! Bertha is scheming! Gladys is plotting! Ada has had her bitch powers activated! Hot Beard pounds a table! Oscar is a sad gay! Peggy gets a cold! And poor Aurora Fane receives the worst fucking news of her life. Oh, we are SO back — and we expect the culmination of every single one of these plotlines to be silly and nonsensical, because that’s how Sir Julian Fellowes (creator of The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey) rolls.

Bertha is once again in a tizzy as she makes arrangements for John Singer Sargent to paint Gladys’s portrait before the Duke comes back to New York. She reluctantly consents to allowing Gladys out of her crate to breathe some fresh air, but insists that she come back in time for her sitting because “Nothing can go wrong now.” “What’s so special about now?” the fatally clueless Gladys asks. She knows her mother has designs to marry her off to the Duke, but seems completely in the dark that the plans are already under way, which is strange, because everyone else in society seems to know about it. She meets up with her soon-to-be-dead suitor, who tells her that “My chief ambition in life is to interfere with your mother’s plans.” They giggle over their naughtiness, seemingly unaware that he will shortly be found face-down in a ditch with Bertha’s footprint on his back.

Meanwhile, Larry and Marian are a thing, but they’re not an official thing; not yet. Marian doesn’t want scrutiny with two failed engagements under her belt. Larry tells her not to make him wait too long. There is literally no reason whatsoever to drag this storyline out given the time period. It’s not like Marian is weighing her options (although she does have a new job), and since Ada’s more or less paying for everything, there’s really no one standing in her way. Agnes won’t like the match, but she can’t do a thing to stop it. Granted, Bertha’s going to hit the roof, but Larry doesn’t seem concerned. Then again, Bertha’s children both seem to be pretty naive about what their mother is capable of.

Pin

Downstairs at the Russell household, the ladies maid and the formerly French chef are still a-courting, but he receives a mysterious letter that he predicts to be bad news because “these things usually are.” It’s very strange, but our version of this episode cut off before he could finish that sentence: “… when Julian Fellowes is doing the writing.” What news could that mysterious envelope contain? Well, we know it’s not a secret wife, a secret son, or a secret daughter, because Fellowes already cycled through those plots in the first two seasons. Perhaps he has a secret cousin or a secret aunt. Perhaps it will turn out that he really is French.

Hot Beard meets with some mustaches in the wild west and everyone in the scene works their asses off trying to get through some typical Fellowes dialogue about business matters, meaning it’s vague and obvious at the same time. “Make me rich!” Hot Beard bellows at his Sith Lord-voiced secretary. “Make us rich too!” a bunch of mustaches yell back. “Stupid clodhoppers!” he calls them. Someone fires a gun. Then Hot Beard stands up. “I have to go, or I won’t be rich anymore!” he bellows as he leaves. Fellowes will spend half an episode explaining a place setting or some obscure social rule, but he completely loses interest in explaining anything to do with business, law, or medicine, which is hilarious, because he constantly returns to plotlines centered around exactly those three areas.

Having said that, one of the better developments so far this episode is the willingness to portray George and Bertha as fairly awful people. Fellowes famously couldn’t allow his Downton Abbey aristocrats to have much in the way of flaws, but you really can’t portray the American robber baron class as the scrappy upstarts without coming across pretty silly. This will never be a nuanced or even particularly intelligent show and we don’t really want it to be, but some of the character work this episode felt more mature and realistic than usual. The Russells are assholes because there’s literally no way they wouldn’t be. More interesting to us was the willingness to show, for instance, how money has changed Ada or how servants like Adelheid, who got kind of nasty to Jack for the sin of accepting a cup of coffee, can be just as viciously classist as their own employers, if not more so. We don’t want to get too optimistic about such things, but it appears that in its third season, The Gilded Age is ready to grow up. We credit a lot of this to Fellowes’ co-writer Sonja Warfield.

Ada has her temperance meeting and Agnes does everything in her power to punish her for it. Unfortunately, as Ada somewhat coldly reminds her, she doesn’t actually have much power anymore. The thing about the Temperance movement is that it wasn’t entirely misguided given the context of the times. With the industrial revolution and the subsequent crowding of urban areas, alcohol abuse was rampant and at the center of a whole range of social and criminal ills, ranging from domestic abuse, poverty and illness, to criminality, hygiene, public disorder, and even STIs. It’ll be interesting to see if the show will provide any nuance, but it’s probably just another plotline to show how Ada’s changing. Between the temperance movement, the way she’s throwing her weight around with the servants, her constant reminding her sister that she pays the bills, and the somewhat coldly clueless way she tried to get Oscar out of his funk we’re seeing one of the more interesting character developments in this episode. We figured the money was going to make Ada a little more assertive, but Fellowes is turning her somewhat strident and potentially unlikable, which is a fun way to take the character. Agnes was always sharp-tongued with a heart of gold. It’ll be interesting to watch Ada become the opposite: fatally polite, but judgmental and cold.

Pin

Mrs. Charles Fane regrets she’s unable to attend tonight’s performance of “La Traviata” at the Met because her husband’s a low-down, dirty dog. Agnes is beside herself. Agnes is perpetually beside herself. “I don’t understand,” she intones upon hearing the news of Charles’s unhappiness. “You have a nice house, you have money, people come to your dinners. What more is there?” The Agnes Van Rhijn Guide to Life. Granted, she has a point. This development really did come out of nowhere, involving characters that have been peripheral at best up until now. There are no emotional stakes because it’s not like anyone watching had been invested in the Fane marriage. “We want different things,” he tells her. “Things are not as they used to be.” None of this lands because we don’t know what things they wanted or how things used to be for them. On the other hand, a divorce plotline has the potential to be pretty juicy, especially since Agnes made it clear her social life would be over and Aurora’s refusing to petition for a divorce. This could get deliciously messy. We just wish we cared more about the people it was happening to.

Larry is going to turn Jack’s clock into money but he doesn’t know how it works and Jack is doubting his business prowess, with good reason. Meanwhile, he’s managed to offend the Russell household staff while his own work mates are urging him to stand up for himself more as he questions the arrangement that has him serving soup to his ostensible business partner. We couldn’t understand the point of this storyline when it was first introduced, but Jack’s clock is actually yielding some interesting interactions.

Peggy gets a cold and for once on this show, what seems like the usual low-stakes problem actually becomes a believable danger, partially because of the limitations of medicine at the time but mostly because of the naivete and cluelessness of her white benefactors, who wait too long to call a doctor, waste valuable time calling one who’s not likely to treat her, and fail to inform her family that she’s ill until she’s in danger. Granted, this is all probably a setup to introduce her next boyfriend or something, because every time something interesting or historically resonant happens around Peggy, Fellowes winds up saddling her with a silly soap opera plotline instead. Still, we appreciated the subtle rebuke of well-meaning white people. Of course we know that Peggy’s not in any real danger because she’s got a novel that’s about to get some publishing attention.

If. there’s one thing Carrie Bradshaw’s literary agent Mrs. Fish loves more than a hideous dress, it’s drama, which she indulges in at the opera, letting Gladys sit in her box with her suitor and warning Larry that Bertha’s got plans and there’s no stopping them. Larry suggests to Gladys that she should consider eloping, because he doesn’t share her belief that her father will save her from marriage to the Duke. This family’s kinda fucked up this season and we LOVE it. It’s getting all Dynasty up in here and that’s exactly what the show’s needed.

Pin

Mrs. Carlton, Gladys’s would-be mother-in-law and obviously a very stupid woman, gushes to Bertha about their children’s upcoming wedding. Bertha’s eyes briefly flash red. Fellowes will construct entire narrative universes around people who adhere to extremely strict and rigid social conventions and then have some of them act as if they’re completely ignorant of said conventions. The idea of a suitor’s mother making comments about a wedding without ever having announced a courtship, or even speaking to the bride’s parents beforehand, is just silly. Bertha lays down the law to both her children, and in doing so, she sure does make it sound like she’s not too happy with the marriage she has. “If I had been given what I have planned for Gladys, I would have finished up queen of the world.” “Don’t you know a bad marriage is a prison?” With the two of them on opposite sides of the country, we’re curious to see what the dynamic will be when they’re back in the same room — especially with the show’s newfound commitment to making them both kind of deliciously awful. Gladys does the only sensible thing available to her when she realizes her mother’s immovability: She puts on a really ugly hat, packs her bags, and heads off to Scandal Town.

[Picture credit: Karolina Wojtasik/HBO]

• Reviews
• The Gilded Age
• The Gilded Age Season 3
• TV Reviews