"Welcome to the Sober Circus:" The Gilded Age Season 3 Premiere Recap

DRAMA ENSUES! Also... is Larry maybe dumb?!

Photograph by Karolina Wojtasik/HBO

First off: WTF, CHARLES FANE, how very dare you — and to the nicest person in Manhattan, no less. Whoever this so-called “Elsa Lipton” is, she’s surely not worth this! Of course I looked her up, but Elsa Lipton doesn’t appear to be a real person, although I assume she’s based on someone who will be revealed in the fullness of time. When I Googled her, I just got this recipe for crockpot potatoes. Aurora said her husband’s affair partner is “shady,” but I hope she also shows up¹ and announces she’s just invented onion dip mix.

With that: Welcome back, friends, to a fresh season of The Gilded Age. This season’s reviews have thus far been excellent — we don’t get screeners, so I can neither confirm nor deny, but the premiere was a treat and the teaser for the rest of the season looked juicy. I’m excited to find out what happens together. (If you need a refresher of what happened last season, you can catch up here.) Without further ado, please put on your wackiest hat and pack your opera glasses, and let’s get into it.

The Fanes

Absolute dillweed Charles Fane comes home late and tells Aurora, the nicest person alive, that he’s MET SOMEONE and he wants a divorce, and because the only grounds for divorce at this period in time is adultery, she has to file. Because he’s the adulterer. This will — as we learned from the Adventures of Jeanne Tripplehorn in season one — basically ruin Aurora socially. Ada tries to assure Aurora that they’ll still have her for dinner, even when she’s been soiled by the public shame of divorce, but Agnes is like, “Hmmmm, certainly, but she might feel… uncomfortable in a group.” (Ada and Agnes are having a low-level fight for power in terms of who is the actual boss of the house in the wake of Ada’s Surprise Fortune bailing out Agnes’s Surprise Financial Ruin, which is honestly quite funny. I’m sure Ada will snap eventually — or Bannister will — but for now, let’s all enjoy the ride.)

This character development kind of comes out of nowhere — the whole of the previous season, the Fanes seemed totally devoted² — but I don’t really care because (a) we spent so little time with them in private that there’s some plausible deniability here, and (b) this is a juicy plot development with real, serious emotional stakes and ergo, I will allow it. Julian Fellowes is reliably excellent at writing women as real people — imagine! — with real problems, and he’s always clearly understood that whom to marry is often a woman’s most pivotal and life-altering choice, especially in this time period. This is a throughline in The Gilded Age, as it was in Downton Abbey, and it seems like we’re going to be diving into the topic with both feet this season.

The Scotts

Not a ton has happened here yet, beyond two things: The Christian Recorder, and its editor, Mr. Benjamin Tucker Tanner,³ has agreed to publish an excerpt of Peggy’s novel, which is wonderful news — although they also want some chapters she hasn’t even written yet, which is every writer’s nightmare. Also, Peggy has caught some sort of terrible respiratory disease, requiring her parents to come to tend to her because Agnes’s doctor is a racist and won’t do it. (Agnes basically vows to ruin this man’s life and she will definitely carry through.) I would be more concerned about Peggy — everyone knows that when a character in a period piece starts coughing, she’s as good as dead — except she showed up in the teaser for the rest of the season looking fantastic and possibly being in a love triangle. (I assume she is sent to Newport for The Sea Air and meets someone, but time will tell.)

The Russells

Let’s start with George, whose plot is the most divorced from everyone else — no pun intended — and who has not yet returned home to find that Gladys has run away to elope with Billy Carlton before her mother marries her off to Hector, the Duke of Buckingham, Bertha’s most treasured and important scheme which is already well underway. Instead, George is out in Morenci, Arizona, with his right-hand man, Clay, because he’s had a brainwave: a train….that goes all the way across the country!!!! The issue is that a bunch of what he calls “stupid clodhoppers” own copper mines on the very land he wants to cut through with the train. There’s a lot of blah blah train talk here but the gist is that George thinks he’s smarter than all these prospectors (he isn’t), and he wants to get his hands on their land, but doesn’t really care about the mines. (I suspect one of these mines is going to hit and then George will regret letting the people he thinks are hicks keep it, and the Wikipedia about this town backs me up.) The western stuff here is very silly and also fun; at one point, someone in the local saloon shoots off a gun with joy after winning a poker hand, an emotional yee-haw that George seems to find amusing. As I’ve mentioned previously at length, as cliché as some of this is, I appreciate that Julian Fellows does seem to enjoy Americans and America in general; Peter Morgan (No Relation) would have made all the copper miners dumb dingdongs with no front teeth who were constantly chewing on hay and falling into horse troughs.

Eventually George gets a telegram saying that there’s “a run on the Metropolitan National Bank”⁴ and “they’re accused the president of stealing funds,” and he and Clay discuss how they’ve “only just survived the failure of the Marine National,⁵ and John Eno taking millions from the Second National.”⁶ Obviously! Anyway, George leaves Clay behind with instructions to make him a deal — or else! — while he heads home to deal with Yet More Tiresome Bank Drama.

Now, when this telegram came, and George was like, “AGAIN! UGH, why do these banks keep collapsing!!!??!! This is so aggravating!” I wondered if it was going to turn out that Larry had sent it as a lie to lure him home to save Gladys. But (a) that all actually happened, (b) also, as we’ll soon discuss, Larry is maybe too dumb to think of this, and (c) Larry could have wired him the truth, and George would have come home anyway. At any rate, George is gonna be unhappy when he gets back from a relaxing Western jaunt cracking heads together to find Gladys has run off after a fight with her mother where Bertha basically tries to convince her that marrying for money, position, power, and authority is a better move than marrying for love. As predicted by soothsayer Larry David, George will be getting upset.

That scene between Gladys and Bertha was really compelling because I could honestly see both their points: Gladys, of course, has the entirely defensible position of wanting to marry someone she loves, a man who also seems totally normal and reasonably socially acceptable, and to whom she is, by all accounts, essentially already engaged but for the official parental bits. But Bertha truly believes she is doing right by Gladys by setting her up to have what Bertha calls “a powerful, interesting life,” and Bertha is also not wrong that, especially in this time period, the best way for a woman to keep and obtain financial and social security was through a good marriage — not in the sense of an emotionally healthy one — and Gladys should be sensible in her choices.

I also loved the scene where the mother of Gladys’s sweetheart spilled the beans to Bertha about what she believes is an impending engagement between their children, and Bertha is simply not having it. It was DELICIOUSLY awkward and mildly scary, and it was fun to watch Mrs. Fish sit between them and process that she’s going to pay for going behind Bertha’s back to help the young lovers canoodle at the opera. (And she’s also gonna love that for the story, if nothing else.) (It was driving me crazy trying to figure out how I knew the actor who played Billy’s mother; it’s Victoria Clark, two Tony awards. I still have no idea what I recognize her from,⁷ but she’s been in tons of stuff.)

Speaking of love, Larry and Marian seem to be… at least adjacent to it. Despite the snow, it’s now “nearly spring,” and given that we ended last season in October, they’ve been walking around and sharing confidences for about five months now. But Marian isn’t ready to go public with this budding romance so soon after breaking off her last engagement. And she’s also not as sure about the future of their romance as Larry is. I was wondering what plot obstacle was going to be thrown in their way, as they’re clearly the End Game⁸. (I think?) Marian noting that it’s distasteful to get engaged so quickly after breaking off another engagement is wise, and I also have to agree that it’s probably a good idea for her to chill out romantically for a little while, because she does seem to have bad instincts there. (It’s possible that the other romantic obstacle might be that Larry is perhaps a bit of a congenial doofus.)

I feel like I’ve covered Gladys already — she wants to marry Billy while Bertha is hellbent on marrying her to the Duke, and ergo she’s packed a bag and hared off into the snowy night. If this plot continues to follow Consuelo Vanderbilt’s life closely, I look forward to the scene where Bertha threatens to murder Billy (very plausible), then pretends to literally be dying (less so). For what it’s worth, “William Carlton” does not seem to be a real person; the man to whom Consuelo was secretly engaged ended up sleeping around a bunch after their break-up — I’m reading between the lines — but seems to have bounced back just fine.