HBO Max’s “The Gilded Age” answered its biggest lingering mystery this week: who tried to kill railroad baron George Russell, played by Morgan Spector, in Season 3. Episode 2 of Season 4, titled “You Won’t Hear Me Beg,” reveals the shooter as Will Morris, played by Will Pullen.
The episode picks up where the Season 4 premiere left off, with Pinkerton agents and George Russell storming a tenement building to track down his attacker. The trail leads to Will Morris, son of Patrick Morris (Michael Gill) and Anne Morris (Katie Finneran) — a couple whose feud with the Russells dates back to Season 1.
Back then, Anne Morris was a high-society snob who refused to let Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) use the Russell ballroom for a charity bazaar. George responded by buying out the entire event. Meanwhile, Anne’s husband Patrick, an alderman, conspired with other aldermen to short George’s railroad stock after promising to pass legislation benefiting a new train station George wanted to build. When the aldermen reneged, George quietly bought up the shares himself, driving the stock price up and wiping out the Morris family’s finances.
In Season 1 Episode 3, “Face the Music,” Patrick begged Bertha for mercy through his wife, then literally got on his knees in front of George. George refused to relent because of how Anne had treated Bertha. Patrick went home, told his wife and children he was proud of them, and died by suicide. Anne spent the rest of that season branding George a murderer before being pushed out of her own charitable society.
Now Anne Morris is back, and her son is the one who pulled the trigger on George Russell. “It was great to see Katie Finneran again,” Spector told Decider. “She came in and did like an amazing job. Just sort of watching her — you know, she has to live through this horrendous thing happening to her son.”
A Gun, a Decision, and Mercy
George holds Will Morris captive in secret through the entire episode, weighing whether to kill him outright or hand him to police, who would almost certainly hang him. Bertha tries to intervene and is turned away. The episode builds to George holding a gun to Will Morris’s head while Anne Morris kneels before him — echoing her husband’s plea years earlier.
George spares him.
“I think the reason he spares him is sort of because of the scene that we have together, where you’re talking about how, you know, what if it was Larry?” Spector said, referring to a conversation between George and Bertha comparing Will Morris to their own son, Larry Russell (Harry Richardson). “I think maybe out of that sort of sense of, ‘Hey, it could be me as well.’ You know, there’s some sense of mercy. But he is also, you know, I also think he is a thoughtful and merciful person. There’s a limit to George’s ruthlessness.”
Coon, speaking alongside Spector, pointed to an earlier moment in the show’s run as evidence of that same restraint: “He didn’t shoot the laborers,” she said, referencing a tense Season 2 labor-dispute storyline. Spector agreed — George didn’t shoot the striking union men, and now he hasn’t shot Will Morris either.
Episode 2 closes with George returning home to Bertha after settling the matter himself, outside the law and outside the courts.
