The Gilded Age recap: It’s a nice day for a doomed wedding
“Close Enough To Touch” boasts hot priests and even hotter sabotage
TV Reviews The Gilded Age
Finally, real messiness has hit The Gilded Age. We’re talking light poisonings, forbidden marriages, torch-wielding mobs—Sunday night’s episode gifted us all that and more as we enter the back-half of season two.
Things kick off at the Russells’ Newport abode, where everyone is in an absolute tizzy getting ready for the big Duke of Buckingham dinner, no one more so than Bertha (Carrie Coon). She’s passive-aggressively picking out Gladys’ outfit (“I would like to choose my own clothes!” “But your choice would be wrong, my dear”), shooing a heartbroken and hungover Larry (Harry Richardson) all the way back to Manhattan, and having extra staff brought up from the city to supplement Church (Jack Gilpin), Mrs. Bruce (Celia Keenan-Bolger), and the rest of the usual downstairs help, including a sous chef who might just have a sinister connection to one scheming Mrs. Winterton (Kelley Curran). But more on that in a bit.
At the Van Rhijn residence, Ada (Cynthia Nixon) is suffering from her own bout of anxiety: It’s time to tell her deliciously judgmental older sister about her upcoming nuptials to her very own hot priest, Reverend Forte (Robert Sean Leonard), which will be happening in a week’s time. (Girlfriend’s been waiting her whole life for this: “I don’t need a long engagement,” she quips.) And she’s right to worry: “This is very melodramatic. Are we to witness your will?” Agnes (Christine Baranski) harps before Ada can even get to the good bit.
Marion (Louisa Jacobson) and Oscar (Blake Ritson) are positively thrilled for their long-suffering spinster aunt, but not Agnes—she shuts down the celebratory calls for champagne and declares that not only will she not be attending the wedding, but she forbids Oscar to as well. “Mama, this is harsh even for you,” he chastises his mother, but Mrs. van Rhijn ain’t budging one bit. Ada is understandably upset with her sibling, even refusing to join her at meals, but isn’t quite getting to the real root of Agnes’ dissatisfaction: If Ada and Hot Priest marry up and settle down, Agnes will be left all alone, a worry she tearfully shares with the Reverend when she unexpectedly drops by the rectory. However, our hunky clergyman stands firm. He’s not going anywhere so she better start picking up what he’s preaching.
Hopping below the Mason-Dixon line, things are initially going swimmingly for Peggy (Denée Benton) & Co. in Tuskegee. Booker T. Washington (Michael Braugher) has successfully unveiled his new dormitory, the female students are all in awe of Peggy’s successes up north, and affairs are pleasant yet professional between Peggy and her editor, T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones). All of that goes up in flames, nearly literally, during a dinner out at a local Black-owned restaurant when two white men barge in and start causing a ruckus. Things get physical when Fortune intervenes, leaving him and Peggy on the run and hiding out in a barn as an angry white mob searches the town for them. “My mother warned me but I never could have imagined this,” Peggy distresses. Her editor comforts her, which leads to her editor smooching her, but the pair thankfully stops themselves before things go too far.
And that’s only the tip of the drama this week: Apparently, Mrs. Winterton has been conspiring with several Russell staffers to ruin Bertha’s big dinner, including hired chef Mr. Schneider and footman Peter Burns. Mrs. Russell is distracted trying to wingman the duke with her daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), but Watson (Michael Cerveris) comes to the rescue. The eagle-eyed valet catches Schneider going all Phantom Thread on a sauce pot and assertively cancels the first course before it reaches the table, and he tips off Church (Jack Gilpin) about Peter’s treason, banishing the young servant from the dining room before a plate could deviously end up in the royal’s lap. Watson, you’re a G. All in all, the duke’s dinner is a triumph, much to Mrs. Winterton’s vexation. (“I wouldn’t admit it if they tore my fingernails off to make me.”)
Will Ada’s wedding be so fortunate? Though she luckily has Marion as a maid of honor, who enlists cousin Dashiell (David Furr) to walk the future Mrs. Hot Priest to the altar, she still doesn’t have Agnes’ blessing. (“Et tu, Bannister?” the latter lady moans as her butler makes off for the church.) It ends up that the blushing bride doesn’t need Dashiell’s help at all. Oscar movingly rebels against his mother and ushers Ada (who, yes, is giving Midsommar vibes in her florals) down the aisle. But it isn’t the only surprise cameo at the ceremony. Yes, not a moment too late, Christine Baranski shows up, majestic in maroon, to support her little sister on her big day. And there’s not a dry eye in the house.
Stray observations
- George “Hot Beard” Russell (Morgan Spector) is too busy shitting on workers’ rights to attend a trustees’ meeting on the soon-to-be-unveiled Brooklyn Bridge, so he sends Larry to do his bidding. While there, sonny boy discovers that the engineering brain behind the impressive build is not actually Washington Roebling as believed, but his wife and fellow architect, Emily (Liz Wisan). It’s a nifty bit of real-life history, that one of the world’s greatest landmarks was secretly the doing of a woman, but it’s handled with such girl-power anachronism (“It’s a shame, an unjust shame!” Larry laments to the rafters) that it’s impossible to take seriously.
- Speaking of “impossible to take seriously,” the show’s hat game has gone full-blown Georgia O’Keefe. They’ve got poor Maud Beaton bopping around town in a purple number that looks more suitable for Skinemax than Max.
29 Comments
8,8,8!
It was so odd — for a moment it seemed like George thought it was a good idea? What, is he going to turn out to be progressive?
I feel like this show is basically Downton Abbey with all the interesting bits turned way down. Remember in the third episode of Downton when the Turkish ambassador tries to seduce Mary and then dies in her room, and they have to sneak his corpse back to his room to avoid a scandal? With this show’s approach, Mary would have immediately rebuffed the Turk, and then he would have developed a mild cough before departing uneventfully. Either that or she would have spent like six episodes slowly realizing that he’s a cad.
The Turner-ruins-dinner plot would have been far more interesting if her evil plan had started to work, only for Bertha to figure out some clever way to save the day once it looks like things are about to go south. Instead, the downstairs folks immediately figure out that the bad guys are up to something, and thwart them (twice!) before anyone upstairs even knows about it. Only George has a clue, because he notices Church replacing the footman, but he still had no idea what specifically was going on, and no agency in that storyline.
Agnes being bitchy about Ada’s wedding at least provided some solid dramatic conflict, and although it was a little pat that her entire “No! …okay, yes” arc is sorted out by the end of the episode, at least there was some actual drama.
I still enjoy watching it, mainly because it’s pretty and crammed full of great actors, I just wish it was more compelling and would lean into drama instead of tending to shy away from it.
…so what you’re saying is that it’s Downton for Americans…
I thought Downton was Upstairs/Downstairs for Americans
I loved that film until Stephen Fry turned up. And I love Stephen Fry. Then you realise that Fellowes can only write exactly 2 types of characters: 1. Aristocrats.2. Their servants. He has never met anyone even remotely middle-class in his life.
I was actually thinking of the 70’s series that ran for 5 years on Masterpiece Theater back in the Alastair Cooke days.
You’re gonna have a lot of egg on your face when the Russell manor is firebombed by anarchists
Hey, I’ll gladly accept said egg if it means we get something interesting. Also: Mmmm, egg.
There used to be a telenovela show that also taught the viewer Spanish, and Gilded Age feels like a version of that where they’re tricking us into learning history by teasing drama plot lines that never reach their potential.
And speaking of the Downton similarities they seem to be setting up a retelling of the Cora/Earl Crawley story with Gladys and the Duke. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out in an upcoming episode that he is very much broke and Bertha would be all too happy to assist in order to make her daughter a Duchess. Honestly it would be strange if the series didn’t at some point tell the not uncommon story of the British aristocracy essentially selling titles to the American elite in exchange for large dowries to prop up their estates. Winston Churchill’s mother was from a Gilded Age New York family and his first cousin’s wife was a Vanderbilt!
The Turner-ruins-dinner plot would have been far more interesting if her evil plan had started to work, only for Bertha to figure out some clever way to save the day once it looks like things are about to go south.I mean, she/they got pretty close — they had to scrap an entire course because the borrowed chef tampered with the sauce. Even so, I wholeheartedly disagree. I actually loved that the staff noticed something was wrong and were able to save the day. The scenes leading up to it, I was wondering how, in that vast open kitchen, with people tasting dishes all over, they were going to ruin it. It would make the staff look incompetent if they missed it, and it would honestly get boring if Bertha was the hero yet again.
Didn’t have to be Bertha. The point is that there was absolutely minimal drama mined from the subplot. We get the gist that Turner is trying to sabotage the dinner, and then when the shenanigans begin, literally instantly the plot is thwarted. We barely had time to worry that anything bad might happen before the show assured us that, nope, it’s fine.
There’s lots of ways it could have been played to be more interesting: commentary on the upstairs not being aware of how the downstairs is protecting them, or letting the first course be ruined but then everyone’s cool with it anyway and Turner doesn’t get what she wants (to embarrass Bertha). Or even letting Turner’s plot succeed, and Bertha gets embarrassed, and then have the storyline extend to the Russells figuring out that the saboteur works for Turner and getting revenge on her later. Anything except for “plot instantly thwarted.”
Maybe. It’s entirely possible that I just hate Turner and thorn-in-your-side characters like her so much that I was relieved her plan was thwarted immediately. I don’t know if it was one of the reviews or someone’s comment where they said that while Bertha is a long-term planning girlie, Turner just doesn’t have the patience to really put together a plan to take her down, and I agree. Her rage burns bright and hot, whereas Bertha’s simmers, which is why I believe ultimately she’ll come out on top. Also, I just realized, I’m not intentionally following you around these reviews, I’m just going through all of them after binging the second season and apparently I find your comments the most thought-provoking. 😅 Sorry!
It’s more the one-dimensionality that makes Turner less interesting to me, and also that it’s so obviously a reworking of the “vengeful maid” plotline from Downton Abbey (Cora’s maid O’Brien who caused her to miscarry), but not done nearly as well.The drama on this show is frequently downplayed, or an easy out is given to the characters. It already feels like they’re going to have George grow a conscience and go easy on the striking workers and make them a deal, rather than try to crush them like the real-world characters he’s based on actually did, for the obvious reason that you can’t really expect to have a main character of your show be presented as generally likeable and then have them do horrific things. (I could be wrong; we could see George try his hardest to union-bust, but have the show treat it as Not That Big a Deal, or handle things off-screen so that it doesn’t reflect as badly on George and doesn’t paint him as a villain.)
Downton did sort of the same thing, where the Granthams’ noble status was treated by the show and almost all the characters as a Good Thing, with even the most notable anti-royalist character (Allen Leech’s Tom) eventually going, eh, they’re not so bad. TGA is doing the same “these are good people and we’re not going to question the system that gives them such immense wealth and power” thing DA did.
And don’t worry, I didn’t think you were stalking me. (Although maybe now I am. 😉 )
“We barely had time to worry that anything bad might happen before the show assured us that, nope, it’s fine.”That seems to be the consistent m.o. for the whole series. What seem like the biggest, juiciest, most dramatic plot developments are resolved and forgotten in about an episode and a half, tops. The whole conflict around Aunt Agnes’ refusing to sign off on Ada’s marriage was introduced and dispensed with in the course of a single episode. George’s legal troubles stemming from the train derailment seemed like it was going to be a big important arc but again was fixed in one episode. Bertha’s discovery of and anguish over George’s “betrayal” and their in-house separation – ancient history now! Larry’s affair with Mrs. Robinson maybe stretched onto two eps before being cleanly ended. True, the alarm clock plot and the one servant’s painful drama with his daughter and son-in-law are bent stretched longer over the season.
Gotta make sure we get plenty of time with that alarm clock!Yeah I don’t know what happened with this show. Fellowes has definitely shown he can create good material, but he’s also a self-important royalist dipshit, who might have fooled himself into thinking he’s creating Important Drama here and not realizing how inert it is.
Agreed. The whole plot line was Wyle E Coyote vs Road Runner stupid. Quite honestly, the whole war between Winterton vs Russell is beneath the entire show because there’s no reason for it. Bertha didn’t do anything personally to Mrs Winterton. If the best this show can do to drum up drama is “Basic bitch is butt hurt because her former mistress’ husband said no”, then they need new writers.
I totally fagged out on Bertha’s stunning dinner gown and jewelry for the Duke’s dinner…As well as Ada’s gorgeous wedding floral headdress. Kasia Walicka-Mamoine and her crew just absolutely outdid themselves, (as they have always done on this series.) The Bertha vs. Mrs. Winterton rivalry, attempted Duke dinner sabotage by Mrs. Winterton and the staff’s ability to detect and diffuse the possible dinner gaffs…Allowed Carrie Coon and Kelley Curran to do their wonderful seething best camp performances. I absolutely howled at that.
I also loved how dramatic the music was as the soup made it’s way to the Duke! The tension almost reminded me of the scene where the Titanic hits the iceberg in the film, but with….soup. There is definitely a camp aspect to the show that adds to the entertainment while also being well balanced.
I thought the exact same about Maud’s hat. It could not have been unintentional.
I keep waiting for this show to veer toward Billions, and reveal that the Russells have a D/s thing going that involves bondage and golden showers.
That kiss with Peggy was so odd. Literally hiding out from a lynch mob, would anyone feel inspired to get romantic? I get that this show really veers toward the silly, but this is one of those moments where the gravity of the history being depicted is way too heavy for the standard tone of this show. Also, this show is truly unparalleled in its meticulous dismantling of every bit of drama it creates — as seen with Watson’s seemingly effortless ability to ascertain the entire dinner-ruining plot. It’s truly astounding how obsessed Fellowes is with deflating all the tension before it can really build.I say all of this as someone who watches every damn episode basically as soon as it’s available. Low stakes? Costumes? Count me in, baby!
Isn’t Fortune married? I distinctly remember him mentioning his wife in one of his first appearances, because I had been thinking it would be cliché but not terrible if he and Peggy got together, but then he talked about his family.
Worse. He’s married AND he and his wife are still grieving their lost child. I think a show with more complexity could handle an affair like this but this show isn’t really built for it. And the moment itself, given the mob, just felt like not the time to be swoony about a coupling.
Oof, I forgot about the kid. I sort of understand getting caught up in the “thank go we didn’t die” moment, but I’ll be perfectly content if it just stays a little awkward and doesn’t turn into a full-blown affair.
Respectfully, why is this just a recap? You grade it, but give no opinion. I’ve already seen the episode…I think it’s really important to point out how it’s in terrible taste to use a KKK lynch crowd to move forward a superfluous b-plot love story. Peggy has already been through enough (remember how she lost a child?), why must she be the one to shoulder all the real world trauma of racism while the white people only have to worry about spilled soup? Julian Fellowes should stick to his wheelhouse – upstairs/downstairs drama of a bygone era, revolving around who gets to dust the aristocrats nightstand. Plus, as a British Baron, I’m going to be bold enough to assume that he doesn’t have much experience in the post-emancipation life of a Black person in the US.Side note:
Honestly, give Christine Baranski the award, just for the “Ha!” alone.Also, the costumes for this season are on another level. Even Bertha’s white house gown was something straight off the runway.
My review, from the perspective of a musical theatre fan desperatly hoping that they finally let one of the dozen major musical theatre stars in the cast actually sing something at some point:Grade: F
I’m giving Bannister all the credit for changing Agnes’ mind when he said if she did not attend her sister’s wedding she may well regret it forever.And hey, lots of the hats are ridiculous, but I liked Maud’s lavender one.