‘The Gilded Age’ season 3, episode 5 recap: boys and their toys
Gladys is obviously unhappy in England; Larian is happening; Aurora is navigating divorce purgatory
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SEASON THREE OF The Gilded Age feels like it’s entering its second act. After the season’s marquee wedding episode last week, where do our wealthy New Yorkers go from here?
Well, there’s lots to chew on. Gladys was obviously going to be unhappy in Sidmouth, though Hector is at least making an effort to accommodate. Peggy’s past and present collide, leaving her to confront her career as a writer or to fulfil her social role as a wife and mother-to-be. In a win for The Gilded Age fandom, Larian is happening! Ada communicates with her dead husband, and to that we suggest she try pottery. And Aurora is navigating divorce purgatory in Newport.
Below, we unpack the events surrounding the wedding of the 19th century.
Duh, Gladys isn’t happy in England
Rather than erasing Gladys from the show once she tied the knot last week, we’re following her to Sidmouth, the ancestral estate of the Buckingham duchy. We’ve been riding for hours, the heiress says to her new husband. Don’t worry, babe. Sidmouth is just that big a property, he says wryly. (She likes the sound of that.) We get a grand aerial view of the computer-generated palace; maybe the show’s co-creator Julian Fellowes (of Downton Abbey fame) can’t call on any more abbeys to shoot in. Anyway, she’s greeted by the merry townfolk wanting to catch a glimpse of their new American duchess, while a dinner will be thrown later that night to celebrate their arrival.
Meanwhile, Duke Hector’s sister, Lady Sarah, will be mentoring Gladys in the ins and outs of being a duchess. While she wouldn’t have ever been the duchess herself, it’s a role she’s inherited since their mother isn’t around. The first brush of this was at how she’d prefer Gladys’s vulgar Sargent portrait to stay in New York, and how Gladys is only familiar with new houses. It didn’t stop there. At dinner, she pokes fun at Gladys not being equipped for dry English humour and how she didn’t stand up with the rest of everyone after supper. Are you waiting for port? the duke asks his wife. (In other words, was she waiting for a top up of her wine.)
Adelheid is the only comfort from home for Gladys in England. The lady’s maid is enthusiastic and can’t wait to learn how to serve her duchess. That comfort was quickly squashed: Sarah fires Adelheid and books her on the first ship back to New York. Gladys sends a letter to her family back home with haste, which her father waves in her mother’s face in fury – of course, she’s miserable in England! He still feels some guilt for not trying harder to stop the marriage, but the news drives a deeper rift in the Russells’ marriage.
Peggy’s beaux fight it out
Running into an ex proves to be an evergreen awkward situation. The courting couple, Dr. Kirkland and Peggy, run into Mr. Fortune, her former editor at The Globe newspaper, during the sports game that opens the episode. Kirkland is gentlemanly towards Fortune, curious about Peggy’s life as a journalist. But when Fortune offers Peggy an assignment to interview Mrs. Harper, a suffragette in Philadelphia, she’s trepidatious about accepting, possibly to temper her ambition to fit the wife/mother bill in front of Kirkland.
She eventually accepts with her boyfriend’s support, now making plans to head there alone. It’s a surprise, then, when Fortune turns up at the train station waiting for Peggy. Kirkland basically tells him to F-off in the most polite, genteel way possible, which sends him to grab his lapels. With Peggy now headed for Philly, her two lives are fracturing.
Boys and their trains
I usually start to go on my phone whenever George talks business, but the man is in shambles this episode. He’s now fired his general counsel, Clay, and has enlisted Larry to help with the business, sending his son to Arizona. (Also, whatever happened to the young Russell’s aspirations to be an architect?)
George then asks his wife to throw a lavish dinner for Mr. Merrick, who owns the Chicago train line that would make George’s cross-continental route a reality. She pulls out all the stops, but Mr. Merrick turns out to be a massive flirt, impressed with Bertha’s ambition. I’m sensing a theme here: every man in Bertha’s orbit recognises her formidable social prowess.
Everyone but her husband, that is, who voiced that he felt cuckolded during the dinner. Merrick dives up a hefty price, one George knows he’d be advised against. Back to him and Bertha, the man is blind. Constantly pointing the finger at her, supposedly making him “weak”, it’s not looking good for Mr. and Mrs. Russell.
Larian is happening!
It’s a win for the Gilded Age fandom! At long last, the 61st Street neighbours are engaged. He first brought it up with his father, who now wants to make a more pronounced effort to support his kid’s love choice, unlike he did with Gladys. (We knew this would happen – Larry is a man, after all.) Marian’s aunts can’t be more pleased (though Agnes is feeling existential while also finding out that her footman is now richer than her). Bertha was the last to find out, told to her in the most inconvenient way possible: while entertaining Mr. Merrick. For now as she faces her guest, she has bigger fish to fry.
Afterwards, Larry celebrates his engagement with his Harvard old boys at ‘Haymarket’, a millionaire boys’ club with upmarket prostitutes. He corrals Jack to come along and embrace the lifestyle of a deep-pocketed man. While Larry’s buddies are busy getting lap dances (how can they feel anything with all those bustles?), he spots a familiar face in a woman wearing a red dress as she escorts her client to a private setting. He approaches her: “Are you Maude Beaton?” The grifter who swindled Oscar Van Rhijn makes her return to the series. Although why she’s turning tricks after her successful con is yet to be seen. Maybe she ran through it like water? Did she have a co-conspirator she worked for?
Oscar finds out from Larry and then tells his ex-boyfriend/confidant, John Adams, over lunch. The natural course of action is that he confronts her at Haymarket, but John reminds him that, while she put the Van Rhijns in a financial rut, marrying her as his beard would’ve ruined her life forever. Sure, it’s rational thinking, but she still would’ve robbed him. And for that, I hope he confronts her – it can only get messier.
Ada should try pottery
Another theatre legend (why I don’t need closed captions to watch this show!) to join The Gilded Age cast is Andrea Martin as the psychic who Ada enlists to summon her late husband’s spirit. The widow and mystic are joined by other members of (what we’re calling) The Dead Husbands Society, as they finally pierce the veil, getting whole statements from the other side. He loves you, and he’s sad to see you this way, are very basic conclusions to make about a woman in mourning. But it gives her much needed closure about moving on, one she announces to her sister that she’s ready to wear lilac and violet again – very ghostly colours. If she wants to hit dial on that spirit phone again, might we suggest doing some pottery à la Ghost?
Go (Mamie) Fish!
As you know, a certain wealthy, high-powered CEO just got caught cheating on his wife at a Coldplay concert. How the proceedings of the divorce are set to unfold in the coming weeks, but we can say for certain that the world is on the wife’s side. To the extent that such neat inception points exist in real life, however, Aurora Fane isn’t being saved here. After a couple of episodes of not following this storyline, Aurora is facing the social shunning she anticipated. As she explained to her cousin Marian: the wife will get the properties, but the husband takes the friends and social circles. And at a time when the wife’s role was a wholly social one, Aurora is left high and dry, poised to live the rest of her days alone in her Newport house.
At Mrs. Astor’s Newport party, the other women dodge Aurora like the plague. The only person that comes up to her is Bertha, who compliments how well she looks given the circumstances. We learn that Mrs. Astor only invited Aurora to keep the gossip hounds chewing on the doe-eyed divorcée; meanwhile, Astor’s daughter is embroiled in a cheating scandal of her own. In a surprising change of tone, Mrs. Fish advises Mrs. Astor not to treat Aurora this way because society might soon move on from treating a divorced woman as taboo. Go (Mamie) Fish!
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