‘The Gilded Age’: Luke’s Fate Explained by Julian Fellowes & Sonja Warfield
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Gilded Age Season 2 Episode 7, “Wonders Never Cease.”]
Tragedy befell the Van Rhijn and Forte households in The Gilded Age Season 2 Episode 7. The penultimate episode of the season saw a death in the family and the shocking loss of the family fortune. Here, executive producers Julian Fellowes and Sonja Warfield explain to TV Insider why these hardships were necessary.
It feels like Ada’s (Cynthia Nixon) happiness was taken away just as quickly as it came. After falling quickly in love with Reverend Luke Forte (the endlessly endearing Robert Sean Leonard), the newlyweds were dealt a heavy blow with his cancer diagnosis in Episode 6. In Episode 7, his health quickly declined, leading to his tragic death near the end of the episode. Agnes (Christine Baranski), Marian (Louisa Jacobson), and the household staff rallied around Ada and Luke in their time of need, providing shoulders to cry on when he was lost.
Blake Ritson‘s Oscar van Rhijn, on the other hand, was M.I.A. as the family tended to Luke in his final hours. The truth about Maud Beaton (Nicole Brydon Bloom) came to light: she was a grifter who had scammed him into investing his money into a fake corporation that was buying a railroad. In his ignorance, he invested nearly all of the Van Rhijn family fortune, assuming it would come back in droves. But it was lost.
The episode ended with Oscar breaking the stunning news to his mother, who has now found herself financially destitute because of a man in her family for the second time in her life. (In Season 1, we learned that Agnes married her awful, late husband to save their family from the financial ruin caused by Marian’s late father, Agnes and Ada’s brother.)
Seeing Ada’s happy ending ripped away so soon left us with one question for Fellowes and Warfield: Why?! Warfield says Ada “deserves love, so we give it to her, she experiences it.” “It may not last long,” she adds, but a simple, happy ending doesn’t always fit when you’re planning for a show to have multiple seasons. This, plus the loss of Agnes’ fortune, is the kind of twist on which future seasons are built.
Barbara Nitke/HBO
Fans on social media have felt a Luke plot twist coming all season long. Some wondered if he would be revealed to be a scammer whose love for Ada wasn’t real, but Fellowes and Warfield assure that it was always real between these two.
“We wanted to give her some genuine happiness,” Fellowes says. Of course, fans were right to suspect a Luke twist — he just wasn’t a villain like Maud. And thank goodness for that. Ada’s been through enough already! To make her feel unloveable would just be cruel.
“I’ve known people who have married and then been widowed very quickly. And what I think is very important is that although it’s tragic, it’s terrible and awful, it doesn’t take away what the marriage gave them,” Fellowes adds of Ada’s fate. “If they’ve never had anyone in love with them — and I always rather feel Ada hasn’t ever had anyone in love with her — and now she has, however old she lives as a widow, they can never change that. She has had a man in love with her ask her to marry him.”
Speaking of marriage, when Marian wasn’t focused on her aunt and uncle, she was questioning whether she made the right decision by accepting Dashiell’s (David Furr) proposal. She showed serious doubt in conversation with her beloved friend, Peggy (Denée Benton), but ultimately told herself this was a good choice for her future. But Marian’s relationship with Ada, who has become more of a mother figure to her this season, may have an impact on this in next week’s finale.
Marian also helped Peggy’s activist work in the episode, joining her and the group led by Sarah Garnet (Melanie Nicholls-King) fighting to keep the Black schools in Brooklyn open. In real life, Garnet was an educator and activist who fought for improvements in the New York City school system. She eventually became the first Black woman school principal in New York City, but we see her fight to keep the Black schools running in Episode 7.
Barbara Nitke/HBO
Marian, who’s been teaching art and reading classes all season, helped by speaking at an event to encourage more white families to enroll in the schools. The issue, as the activists saw it, was that the all-white board of education was shutting down the schools because they felt they weren’t important enough to keep open. Schools with white students, however, did not encounter the same threat of closure. The event was a success, bringing in Irish teachers and students, but they all fear that the discrimination Irish immigrants face during this time period will make the board view this new group of students and teachers as less than as well. Peggy and Thomas (Sullivan Jones) are reporting on the event to help spread the word about the unjust attempt to close the only schools for Black children in the city.
This plot line was based on a real story from 1884. It was an “attempt of the local authorities to shut these four schools, which effectively meant to stop educating Black children,” Fellowes says. “That was their goal, to mean that they would be condemned to a lifetime of manual labor or domestic service and that any other thing beyond that was going to be impossible.”
This is one of the several real historical events depicted in Season 2 (Episode 7 also featured the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, the construction of which was secretly managed by Emily Warren Roebling after her husband, fellow engineer Washington Roebling, fell ill). Fellowes says it was important to incorporate this education activism into Peggy’s plot because it shows the true story of how the Black community fought back “against these people in official positions collaborating in essentially undoing the work of the Reconstruction [Era].”
Elsewhere in the episode, Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) was offered her coveted box at the Academy of Music by Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), but she rejected the olive branch in favor of the Metropolitan Opera. Proving that she is the one person who could outdo Bertha, Mrs. Astor then brought the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) to the Brooklyn Bridge opening party, announcing that he would be her guest at the Academy’s opening night.
All questions about the opera war, the loss of the Van Rhijn fortune, Marian’s relationship with Dashiell, and the Brooklyn schools will be answered in The Gilded Age Season 2 finale. With the opening night of the Met on the horizon, it’s sure to be a glamorous, dramatic affair.
The Gilded Age, Season 2 Finale, Sunday, December 17, 9/8c, HBO
