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Let that b*tch burn to the ground!
Drama, chaos, scandals, and shocks Filthy Rich Season 1 Episode 10 delivered a soapy sendoff that worked well enough considering the circumstances.
If the Monreauxs didn’t do anything else, they entertained.
The show maintained their theme of the Old South and showcasing countless examples of the deep-rooted sexism that afflicts everyone on this series.
We caught more glimpses of Margaret’s mother essentially pimping her underaged daughter out to a 23-year-old Eugene and his “saintly” mother pushing for it too.
We can guess that Paul probably did the same for his sister two-fold, but more on that in a bit.
Yopi worked her entire ass off and was often regarded as a conniving bitch the whole series, but SHE’S the one who got Antonio shares in a company, not Margaret or anyone else.
Rachel was the one who found Jesus, but that was a blip on the radar, and she never got her flowers in a grand enough manner onscreen.
After getting sober, Tina was the one who realized Eugene was an asshole, and she wanted every last bit of the child support he should’ve given her, and she fought for Ginger to get the proper stakes that she deserved.
Veronica is why Mark has stakes in a company he has no other ties to, not even blood. And he did absolutely nothing to deserve them; hell, he deceived the entire time and barely tried to be part of this family beyond his relationship with Rose.
Meanwhile, Ginger, who fought tooth and nail for her brothers from the second she stepped foot in NOLA and whose clashes with Margaret have mostly been because of her unwillingness to take scraps or go away, got nothing until Eugene gave it to her.
From her profession in sex work, to her knowledge, to her lack of acknowledgment and recognition nor a seat at the table (similar to how Mary wasn’t regonized as Jesus’ apostle), Ginger’s Mary Magdelene parallels have not been lost on me.
Mark: Can you imagine if we had took that first deal and went home? We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. Ginger: Let’s be honest, if it weren’t for the women in your lives Veronica, Yopi you two would still be broke, so here’s to the women who made it all possible. Cheers.
What we saw was many of the women put in the groundwork. However, the men continued to reap the benefits and pull all the strings.
And that’s how it remained even at the end.
I’ll get to why that failed in a moment. First, we have to talk about all the other little things the hour delivered.
Once again, it felt as if we missed crucial moments by fast-forwarding from Rose announcing that she was marrying Not Jason to this abrupt wedding getting planned and Margaret finding out that Mark isn’t Jason.
Nothing is going to ruin my daughter’s perfect wedding day. Not even her groom.
Margaret
Wouldn’t you have loved to see Margaret and everyone else’s reaction to Mark’s scamming? The show robbed us of good juicy moments. And that’s where you can’t have some of these shocks and thrills if you don’t let the revelations and fallout play out properly. It’s literally what we tune in for, dammit.
Instead, for some reason, we jumped to a disgruntled Margaret preparing for Rose’s wedding, which was happening super fast for no reason and at the Monreaux plantation. Plus, everyone dressed up as if it was a cocktail party, I don’t know.
The series handled Mark (and Jason) so poorly that it was hard to feel anything to the others reacting to him. He has barely shared any connection to anyone in the family outside of Rose.
He was a vagabond from the start, and it was no surprise that Margaret ruined the nuptials by giving Rose the file of Mark. Despite everything else going on, Rose couldn’t take finding out that Mark killed his brother twice. He was the reason Jason was in the coma in the first place; he was high and ran him over with a car.
Rose: I need to think about my life.
Mark: I can wait.
Rose: Don’t.
Mark’s lack of full-explanation the first time he confessed was enough to turn Rose off for good. She wanted to take some time for herself, and she told Mark not to wait for her.
And now it’s hard to say who and what Mark was in all of this? Are we meant to see him as a fraud and con-man? Are we supposed to view him as someone who genuinely loved Rose?
He did the least, had the most insignificant presence of them all, but he walked away with shares in Moreaux’s company and a position on the board, so he’ll still be there in some way.
They shuffled him off as if he was a non-factor, but it’s no different than how he was the whole time.
Meanwhile, Eric spent the entire hour the ultimate hot mess. He looked terrible, and he was hanging on by a thread.
His conscience was weighing on him, and it’s unfathomable that Margaret and Franklin both knew what he had done and how Eric felt about it, and they left him cast out in the cold to grapple with his feelings.
As people who should care about him, it was absurd, but as people who knew if Eric spilled the beans, their entire life would blow up, it was reckless on their part.
Eric confessing everything to the cops was inevitable but finding out that Luke was alive and an undercover agent was a heck of a surprise.
Eric is probably the ideal person Luke and Feds could use to get information on the 18:20 and more. He’s technically supposed to be part of it, and he’s someone with a conscience who wants to do right and make amends.
Eric: Mama’s only going along with this charade to keep Veronica’s shares in the family. She taught us right from wrong, but only when it’s convenient.
Rose: Wait where are you going? Don’t be a little bitch, Eric.
It was eating him up alive, believing that he killed someone, and his admission that his parents raised him a specific way as a Christian but were selective in the lessons they taught him and how confusing that was — it was a compelling scene.
For Eric, God is supposed to matter; his faith meant something to him despite his indiscretions and sins. Family loyalty prevented him from accepting at first, but he recognized how disastrous they all were.
Eric’s drinking was awful, but it meant he spazzed out at finding out things like how Rachel and Antonio are dating now, and he realized Ginger was the one sleeping with Becky.
Somehow, despite his infidelity and other things, you couldn’t help but feel terrible for Eric in all of this. It comes with realizing that he has some semblance of a moral center on this show. Given how immoral he has been, that is saying something.
Ginger: I’m so sorry, Eric.
Eric: My wife is sleeping with my sister and my brother is hitting on my girlfriend. I think the sorry one.
Eric is a man with nothing left now, but he’s also someone who eventually saw that Eugene is the person who is responsible for so much of this.
Eugene is a monster. His spiritual journey has felt like bullcrap this whole time, so it’s not that any of us bought into his path toward righteousness.
No way could Eugene profess to make amends and right his sins if he spent all of this time letting his family fall apart because of his past actions.
Somehow, he convinced himself that he’s not only clean of his sins but above all the other people in his life, and never once did it consist of apologizing to any of them.
He spent all that time hiding at Ginger’s house with Tina, but he didn’t have much to say regarding an apology. After Ginger specifically told him to stay there and not go to the house to take away from Rose’s day, he did it anyway.
And Eugene beelined to the house and didn’t bother to present himself properly. He waltzed in as if nothing happened, and he didn’t even spend time introducing himself to the kids or giving any of them much of a moment.
Margaret: Where the hell have you been?
Eugene: God sent me on a specific quest, a crooked path that led me home.
Margaret: And there were no phones on this crooked path?
Antonio never met his father, and his first scene with Eugene is him tearing Antonio off of a drunken Eric, rattling on something about his other son, and disappearing again.
Ironically, the promotion stills gave us the impression we would see the grand reveal with Rose, but we only saw its aftermath, so boo again!
Eugene knew Ginger would catch hell for knowing about his status, but he didn’t care; he never really did.
You should just be grateful that you have a seat at our dinner table, Ginger because you’ll never have a seat at our board.
Margaret
Hell, even Eugene “doing right” by his daughters by giving Ginger his shares in the company came with slights. He made it out to seem as though Ginger was some money-hungry lost cause, the spitting image of Margaret instead of his daughter who grew up poor and didn’t have him around.
Eugene thought that he somehow paid for his sins, so the past and the effects he had on everyone else stopped mattering, and it was their problem now.
He destroyed all of their lives, broke them beyond repair, and he still didn’t give a damn about any of them. It was such a slap in the face.
Eugene is a ruinous disease. He’s made people’s lives a living hell for decades, across generations, and all under the guise of being a holy man and devout Christian.
It’s laughable and also painfully accurate.
It sucks that Margaret barely got a moment to ream him out, and when she did, he didn’t even care.
But nothing prepared for the revelation that it wasn’t five children Eugene had; it was six. Ironically, Becky carrying Eugene’s baby was a fan-theory in the early days of the season, but it tapered out when we got wrapped up in Becky and Ginger.
Eugene, you came back for us.
Becky
But of all the women Eugene knocked up and had affairs with, he likes them young. Ginger pointed out how disturbing it was that Eugene and Margaret got married so young, but Margaret quickly dismissed it as the times being different then.
But the second she saw Becky and the unnamed little girl at that descending the stairs, it hit Margaret that she was a child and Eugene was nothing more than a glorified pedophile.
Maybe if we got a new season of this series, they would’ve explored the nature of Eugene and Becky’s relationship and how far back it went. Eugene met Paul and Becky when they were teens.
They were both in the Monreaux’s youth choir. Did their relationship start then?
And given Paul’s greed and opportunistic streak, was he somehow who gave his sister over to Eugene? Was he working both angles to get her higher and deeper into the Monreax family and their wealth, first with Eric and then with Eugene?
Anne: Margaret what are you doing here?
Young Margaret: I guess I’m kinda sad. I’m the cook’s daughter. I’ll never have what those rich girls have.
Anne: Come with me… this was my dress when I first came out. Why should rich girls have all the fun?
You can’t put anything past Paul, who still could’ve been a much better antagonist if they did more with him. You would’ve almost forgotten he died if Becky wasn’t so melancholy. And everyone else glossed over it beyond Margaret’s mention of his death on the network as confetti floated down celebrating the launch of her line.
The reveal that Eugene had knocked up an impressionable Becky and they were off to live a happy life together was the final straw for everyone.
Eugene boldly doesn’t give a damn about anyone when he can drop news like that a half-hour after revealing that he’s still alive. He then left a room filled with angry, hurt children and spouses with a cavalier statement about how Margaret can have everything else but the house.
He was practically begging for someone to burn that mother-frakker to the ground.
Everyone out, NOW!!!
Franklin. Get out of this house.
Margaret
But here’s what I mean about the inherent sexism not paying off with a gratifying moment in the end.
Margaret screamed at everyone to get out of that damn house, and even though Margaret, too, has been quite awful, it was her moment to shine.
She’s a middle-aged woman who just realized the extent of how she was a victim. She is looking at everything that Eugene has done to ruin her life and those of her loved ones.
Everyone around her is damaged, hurt, and struggling. She recognizes that the life of wealth and success didn’t make up for any of the awful things.
She’s more unhappy now than she was when she was poor. She just watched another young woman not unlike herself, from being born poor, to marrying into wealth with a man who cheats on her, and men who control her (carrying a baby girl) walk out the door with this monster of a man.
The cycle is about to continue all over again. Margaret has decades of her life coming to mind, and it was her moment to finally be her own person, stand on her own two feet, fully snap.
But she doesn’t. In those final scenes, with Maxwell’s perfect crooning, as he sings “This Woman’s Work” in the background, it’s NOT the woman’s work. It’s Franklin’s.
Margaret: How am I going to explain this?
Rose: You let the Old South burn.
Ginger: So something new can rise.
Franklin, who I guess still got away with the whole being the real orchestrator of Eugene’s “death” thing, is the one to gather all of Eugene’s mother’s furs.
He’s the one who tosses the painting of a woman who flat out said her son wasn’t going to jail for assaulting him, but she’ll arrange for him not to work there anymore instead.
Franklin is the one who throws that stupid painting of Eugene in the pile as he thinks about Eugene beating him to a pulp and how he’s waited for this moment or decades.
He’s the one who pours the alcohol all over the Monreaux pile of wealth and privilege. And he’s the one who holds the candle over it as he makes eye contact with Margaret, and they both think about their lives spent in that house as the help.
And then, he’s the one who sets it aflame. Yup, Franklin, Margaret’s devoted second, her confidant and friend, her keeper and protector, set the Monreaux house on fire too.
Man, Margaret really can’t do anything without Franklin, huh? Sure, she got to walk out of the house and utter an icon line of “rot in hell” while wearing a red sequined gown and a fur shawl, but Angela Bassett walking away from an inflamed car in Waiting to Exhale, this is not.
And worst yet, Franklin is on the other side of the house as it goes up in flames. He’s alone, in the shadows, the ghost of his mother walking past him, vindicated, but he’s still an outcast despite Rose’s words and Eric’s errant comment about how they can’t do anything without Franklin.
And for good measure, Eric’s motivation for wearing a wire and taking down the 18:20? Well, it’s to protect Margaret, of course.
Margaret still ends the season not getting to step into her own. She still lacks agency. She has the men of her life who are protecting and acting on her behalf.
And maybe it’s something that would’ve been explored more in a second season. But unfortunately, we aren’t getting one.
The sins of the father will not be the sins of the son. My father has returned, and I need to protect my mother at all costs. I’m your guy. Wire me up.
Eric
It’s too bad as a second season would’ve been interesting. The Old South is dead, as Rose uttered, but the Old Monreaux are, too.
It would’ve been cool if we saw what the new Monreaux family looks like after all of this. How does Eric go about taking down the 18:20? Does he forgive his new siblings and accept them for who and what they are?
What does Monreaux Industries look like with Antonio, Mark, and Ginger with shares in the company? And does this mean Ginger has more shares than the boys?
Will anyone ever save Becky from Eugene’s clutches? How about her nameless baby? Where do the new Monreauxs go from here?
We’ll never know, but the hour still worked as a series finale. And Filthy Rich was a fun ride.
For the last time, over to you, Filthy Rich Fanatics. What are your thoughts on this finale? Are you surprised about Eugene and Becky? Did Mark get shafted all season?
Hit the comments below. If you want to relive this series again, you can watch Filthy Rich online here via TV Fanatic.
Jasmine Blu is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on Twitter.