Gentleman Jack season finale review: The whole is more than the sum of its parts

Gentleman Jack wraps up its first season with an episode that gives the LGBTQIA+ romance at its center the same swoony ending all couples in period dramas get.

Gentleman Jack wraps up its first season with an episode that ticks all the necessary period drama boxes, including a teary romantic reunion on top of a beautiful hill.

Does the reunion between Anne Lister and Ann Walker feel a little rushed? Perhaps. Does Walker’s character development get a little short-changed in the process? Yes. And do we still have to sit through yet more of that subplot about the tenant who fed his dad to the family pigs? Sadly.

All these things are true, yet “Are you still talking?” still manages to put a satisfying bow on Gentleman Jack’s first season by doing the same things the show has excelled at all along. Telling a traditional period drama story from a very untraditional perspective.

Interestingly, it’s also the last installment in season 1 that gives us the clearest look at what Anne Lister must have been like before the series started. Her adventures around Europe continue, as she treks from Paris to Copenhagen, where she flirts with a pretty young heiress, gets introduced at the royal court, and generally serves as the life of her social group, entertaining them all with her commentary and behavior.

This feels like the Anne Lister everyone told us about when the show started: Something of a womanizer, a standout in any crowd, and someone who seems to be busy being as loud and witty and odd as often and publicly as possible, so that no one around her can point out how different she is, or how terribly lonely she so obviously often feels as a result of it. (The scene in which she relates her mishaps meeting the queen carries such a sense of over-performance to the entire thing that it hurts. Does Anne really believe that people will only seek out her company if she is the token “outrageous” figure in their group?)

Gentleman Jack – Episode 2: Albane Courtois, Suranne Jones. Photo: Matt Squire/HBO

Elsewhere, Ann Walker looks fairly okay for someone who kind of tried to kill herself last week, and generally seems to be more in control of herself and her own fate than she has in some time. Thanks to a handy tip from her sister, she learns that her brother-in-law Captain Sutherland is as shady as we all expected, and planning to marry her off to a penniless cousin to help settle his debts.

Katherine Kelly deserves applause for her small, quiet turn as Elizabeth Sunderland, managing to convey affection, concern and a sort of quiet regret as she counsels her sister to reject not only an offer of marriage from a man looking to profit from her fortune but to return home to Halifax and sort out her own life.

(Since Elizabeth has spent most of her time on this show to date looking various degrees of cowed or anxious, one can only imagine how much it must pain her to send Ann away.)

We even get to see Ann stand up to her awful brother-in-law, which is nice and a moment that’s long overdue. However, the fact that Gentleman Jack spends so little time on her swift and somewhat miraculous recovery that it feels unearned.

Sure, after everything, it’s great to see Ann declare that from now on, she’s the only person making decisions about her own life. But the moment can’t help but feel hollow when we’ve not seen any indication of how she got from self-harming to self-actualization. We watched every minute of Ann’s emotional collapse, it would have been worthwhile to see how she clawed her way out of that particular darkness, rather than just having her wake up one morning and be…apparently fine?

Sophie Rundle. Photo: Aimee Spinks/HBO

Lister rushes back England when word of her aunt’s ill health reaches her in Copenhagen. (Her aunt, it turns out, is actually fine and maybe wasn’t ever even in that much danger to begin with?) As this is happening, Ann is in a carriage returning from Inverness and after a near-miss at Shibden, the two finally reunite on a cliff near Lister’s new mine pit.

(Which is currently failing and in need of money, but that’s the least interesting part of this story.)

The lighting is beautiful; the scenery is lovely. The reversal between the two women at this point is rather remarkable. Lister is a mess, both physically and emotionally, upset over the financial difficulties surrounding her mining venture with messy hair and generally unkempt dress. Ann looks calm and strong, with perfectly put together hair and one of those ridiculous dresses with the giant sleeves that she favors for reasons that may be well past our ability to understand.

They catch up and laugh and hold hands and are largely sweet and charming together, and the moment in which Ann finally finds her courage to tell Lister that if she proposed again she’d say yes is the sort of swoony romantic stuff of dreams. It feels all happy and triumphant – and a bit like the show was hedging its bets in case it didn’t get a second season, just to make sure everyone got a happy ending.

And it’s honestly difficult to be angry about that, simply because the sight of Ann and Anne getting the same sort of ending that the Elizabeths and Darcys of the world enjoy is important, and perhaps worth a bit of narrative gymnastics to get there in a designated eight-episode block.

Gentleman Jack will return for a second season in 2020.