Photo: Karolina Wojtasik/HBO
Spoilers for the season finale of The Gilded Age follow.
And so, the third season of The Gilded Age comes to a close — not with a bang (that was the last episode) but with a break. Though George Russell (Morgan Spector), who was shot by a hired assassin in the penultimate episode, survived, the near-death experience taught him to reconsider continuing his relationship with his wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon). Sad for Bertha Russell, certainly, but everybody else seems to be in a good place. Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) ends the season engaged, and Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga) now actually likes her arranged marriage. Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon) are back to being happy sisters. Even Oscar van Rhijn (Blake Ritson), whose sometimes-lover died in a deeply random carriage accident earlier this season, has found a suitable lavender marriage for himself in Bertha’s former maid turned sugar baby. Look, this is all nice, but it’s past time for The Gilded Age to heighten drama. The people crave blood. It’s time to kill off a major character.
Like soap operas, The Gilded Age is melodramatic and often ridiculous, with a world populated by stock characters who live through endless plot twists. But if nobody important can die, the stakes level out. Both times someone was in deathly peril this season, the show went on to telegraph that they were never truly in danger. First, Peggy fell sick and a white doctor refused to treat her, which, it turned out, was just a device to introduce her to the hot new guy, Dr. William Kirkland. Then, George Russell neared financial ruin after overextending himself to make a country-long railroad. Ultimately, his son Larry (Harry Richardson) found him the cash he needed when some copper mines had more copper than they’d thought. Then, George was shot (gasp), but by the 20-minute mark of the next episode, he’d officially survived due to the smart work of Peggy’s beau. And so, ultimately, he ended the season as rich and alive as ever, just angrier at his wife.
By point of comparison, look at Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes’s previous show, Downton Abbey. In the third season, two of its top characters, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and Lady Sybil Branson (Jessica Brown Findlay), died from a motor accident and post-childbirth eclampsia, respectively. It was a shocking reset — I personally remember my seventh-grade history teacher calling out of school to mourn her favorite heartthrob’s death —