"A Ballroom Full of the Future:" The Gilded Age Season Finale Recap
May this show run ten seasons!
First of all: Thank you all so much for hanging out with me this season, as this show truly hit its stride. I’ve been team The Gilded Age since season one and I feel very smug about it now that everyone is on the (financially fraught, transcontinental) train with us!
Second: What a satisfying season finale. It had everything: Two glorious balls; one pregnancy; the threat of divorce; a shit-ton of tiaras; emergency surgery on a dining room table; me screaming at Larry to SHUT UP; a magnificent display of illumination; various people giving Elizabeth Kirkland the much-deserved what-for; Agnes getting just what she needs (a job); one swoony proposal; one weird but also delicious proposal; one hat that looked like it fell out of the costume closet for The Crows Have Eyes III; people shit-talking Wagner; and, finally, George maybe getting addicted to laudanum! LET THIS SHOW RUN FOREVER.
The Russells:
Need I say more?
Okay, okay. So, despite having been shot in the chest, George lives, after a VERY tense and dramatic scene where he is raced home from the office in a carriage at breakneck speed. As you can imagine, Bertha is deeply distraught as George is rushed into the Russell dining room to undergo emergency, non-anesthetized surgery with a very brave and level-headed Marian playing nurse. (Meanwhile, Church really responds like a man who’s seen a few gunshot wounds in his professional career; I assume we’ll eventually find out he was a Civil War general.) Bannister spots the commotion and informs them Dr. Kirkland is conveniently located across the street; before running back to grab William: “I should tell you he’s colored?” Bertha: “What do I care? Go get him.” This scene was tense and really well directed. This thing moved.
Additionally: Shout-out to Dr. Logan, played by Dylan Baker (zero Tony awards, but one nomination), who gets to George’s bedside — er, dining room table — way late, because he was otherwise occupied delivering twins, one of which was breech. (Also, in truth, a life-or-death situation.) He is initially abrasive to William but eventually crankily impressed. Because George’s life is saved, and once he’s not lying on a table, he sends a man — presumably a Pinkerton? — to look into Mr. Clay as the likely assassin. “And be as rough as you like,” George directs, in a moment that I’m sure is already a meme in general corners of the internet.
I didn’t really think they were going to kill off the titular figurehead of George Russell Trains ‘n’ Things ‘n’ Stuff ‘n’ More, but, still. It’s a relief. George even tells Bertha to go ahead and have her ball, noting that it would be bad for GRTTSM if there is a rumor that he’s unwell. “I won’t allow you to jeopardize the railroad,” he says, and can we all just sidebar to note that if Bertha made George go ahead with a… train event… while SHE was on her near-death bed so as not to jeopardize Gladys’s marriage, George would have thrown that in her face as being cold and heartless. He absolutely does the exact things that he yells at her for doing. Go to a woman’s suffrage meeting, George, and maybe start thinking about FEMINISM!!!!
Anyway, George is acting totally normal with Bertha — if a little low-energy —and even manages to pull himself together enough to briefly attend the ball and put on a happy face with her… after a stiff slug of LAUDANUM. I know I predicted it would be Oscar who would slide into drug addiction, but now it looks like it’s going to be George, which is gonna be DRAMATIC. Imagine the confrontations! Imagine the drug-fueled errors he might make at Trains ‘n’ Things in an opium fog! Imagine Morgan Spector getting to lurk around giant vases and velvet curtains being secretly addicted to laudanum and probably getting blackmailed, and then being forced (by Bertha, in a wrenching scene!) to the 188mumble version of rehab, where I assume Larry will suddenly also be a drug addiction therapist and will miraculously fix him! WHAT FUN. (I forgot to mention Larry is also doing a lot of work tracking down George’s assassin because now he’s an architect/negotiator/metallurgist/detective. I honestly AM surprised he didn’t help with Dr. Kirkland’s surgery! Next season, I assume he will pop up having invented the smoke detector or something.)
For those of you who didn’t read as many historical potboilers as I did back when we all had more of an attention span, laudanum is opium in tincture form, it’s VERY ADDICTIVE, and apparently, it’s still sometimes prescribed. Let me be clear: I do not want anything to happen to me where they decide laudanum is the best option for my pain management, but I would enjoy getting to tell people that I’m on it.
Anyway! At the very end of the episode and the day after the ball, despite being basically generally reasonable the entire time post-shooting, George tells Bertha that he’s going back to New York and he’s not going back to their house. “I only came to the ball to protect the business. And I know how important it is for you to gain points over Mrs. Astor. I’m just sorry you had to use our daughter as one of your pieces,” he snaps. Bertha finally reminds him that he walked Gladys down the aisle and he snaps, “Which is precisely what I can’t forgive.” Then your issue is with YOURSELF, MY FRIEND!! Bertha did not have a gun to your (sexy) head!
After all of this, he and FUCKING LARRY hop in a carriage and just drive off. I’m surprised the driver can see though the fog of SANCTIMONIOUS SELF-SATISFACTION wafting off both these men. Meanwhile, poor Bertha just cries while watching them leave through an upstairs window. I saw a meme online comparing this last scene with George and Bertha to Rhett Butler leaving Scarlett O’Hara at the end of Gone With the Wind, and it’s a very adept analogy, although “I don’t know what I want,” is no “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But like Scarlett O’Hara before her,1 Bertha is tremendously resilient, consistently underestimated, and extremely stubborn. She will bounce back. After all, tomorrow is another day.
That would have been such a good kicker to this piece but we have miles to go before we sleep and I haven’t even dealt with Larian yet. Ahem: SHUT UP, LARRY!!!!!!!!