SPOILERS for last night’s episode of The Gilded Age.

Last week, HBO finally announced that The Gilded Age would get a fourth season. Honestly, given how AMAZING the third season is, HBO should have given the order for ten more seasons. Julian Fellowes and TGA’s team are firing on all cylinders after two seasons of world-building and methodically building an audience. I can’t believe we only have one more episode left of this season…sob. During Season 2, I said on our podcast that I loved TGA because it was so low-stakes and it was so pleasant to watch a show where the biggest dramas were “what kind of soup is being served at lunch” and “will so-and-so go to the ball?” Now we’ve got people being outed and shot!

So, last night’s episode was called “Ex-Communicated.” It might have been one of the busiest episodes ever, there was soooo much happening at every turn. Here’s an incomplete rundown of what happened just in last night’s episode: Oscar mourning his lover and friend; Oscar receiving a country home; Oscar sort of coming out to his family; Marian being a gay ally; Larry being heartbroken; Larian confrontation; Jack looking for real estate with Marian and telling her nothing happened at the brothel with Larry; George Russell’s business is back on track after Larry found all of that copper; Ward McAllister is a Gilded-Age Truman Capote who wrote a book about all of New York society; Bertha’s son and husband hate her and they’re not even living at home anymore; Peggy is still being courted by Dr. Kirkland; Dr. Kirkland’s awful mother finding out about Peggy’s first marriage; Bertha attended a meeting at the Van Rhijn-Forte house; Ada Forte hosting a multiracial suffrage meeting with a Black speaker; Peggy’s Black friends thinking Marian is a wet blanket; the Duke of Buckingham falling in love with Gladys and finally kicking his sister out of the castle; and finally, George Russell got shot! And I’m forgetting like a dozen other things.

Christine Baranski was asked about the big scene with Oscar where she/Agnes realizes that he’s gay. She told Deadline:

“That was a marvelous scene to film because it went so deep into the heart of something, the love that dares not speak its name. That was a tribute to Blake’s incredible acting and the pain he was going through. You saw the level of anger and pain in him, and regret and loss. When he lashes out, it’s almost frightening. It speaks to the depth of his feelings for this person that he lost. And so it becomes clear as he goes up that staircase that there’s been so much unacknowledged. There are so many feelings going through Agnes: the horror of [what has been unacknowledged] and the sadness of not knowing who her son really is. Imagine my child, and that’s what my child is going through. You don’t think about those things verbally, as when you’re acting it. You allow yourself as an actor to just react. But in retrospect, I can say, thinking about it, how many different levels there were going on. And what I loved most was when he left, and then there was just this beat of the three women left.”

[From Deadline]

It was an absolutely devastating scene, brilliantly written and acted by everyone involved. The way Oscar really almost came out and said it, but instinctually, Marian and Ada immediately moved to cut him off from saying it out loud and comfort him, yet he said enough to ensure that all three women knew exactly what John Adams was to Oscar. Meanwhile, Morgan Spector was asked about George Russell getting shot:

Variety: How worried should we be for George?
MS: You should be very worried. In the 19th century, gunshot wounds from up close were extremely dangerous. Many people didn’t survive them. I don’t have a contract for next season yet, so who knows?

Variety: How did you find out about George’s shooting?
MS: Those final scripts were a little delayed, so it took some time before I got them. But when I read the ending for that episode, I was just thrilled, because it’s such a left turn for our show. It’s totally historically accurate. This kind of thing happened during that era, but it doesn’t feel like ‘The Gilded Age.” When I read the script, it wasn’t that long after Luigi Mangione shot the United Healthcare CEO. I was like, [“The Gilded Age” creator] Julian Fellowes is clairvoyant. It redoubled my sense that there’s a way that this show, however subtly, however quietly, is really in dialog with our current moment, simply by virtue of there being structural similarities between the two eras. Both of these time periods have massive wealth and massive inequality. Both of them are characterized by industrial titans who are kind of swinging the state around by its tail. The consequences of that can be violence.

[From Variety]

I wonder if we’re going to hear the motivation for the shooting – my first thought was that it involved Clay, George’s fired/ex-communicated right-hand man. Clay said he was a cockroach. It would be a very cockroach thing to pay someone to shoot George Russell. It also speaks to how little personal security there was back in those days. You could be a Gilded Age billionaire and move around the world with ease and very little in the way of bodyguards or personal protection. Also: my prediction is that Dr. Kirkland saves George’s life, with Peggy and Marian’s help.

Photos courtesy of HBO/The Gilded Age and Avalon Red.