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“Shall
I tell you how I look at it? Every man or woman who marries into this house,
every child born into it, has to put their gifts at the family’s disposal. I’m
a hard worker and I have some knowledge of the land. Matthew knows the law and
the nature of business… You understand the responsibilities we owe to the
people round here, those who work for the estate and those that don’t. It seems
to me, if we could manage to pool all of that, if we each do what we can do,
then Downton has a real chance.”
Was I the
only one who heard lovely Branson saying that and immediately pictured him,
Matthew and Robert as some sort of superhero team? Really, you didn’t? Just me?
Oh, ok then.
And so the
third series of Downton Abbey ended,
not with a hugely dramatic event, but with a cricket match. A cricket match
that symbolised unity and coming together and stuff (what? It’s a perfectly
legitimate word to use – Lady Mary used
it, so it must be). It felt like something that would have happened in the
first series of Downton Abbey; in
fact, this whole episode had the feeling of a first series episode, with its
random character introduced to cause drama and the trivial event being treated
like it’s the most important thing in the world while something horrible happens
to someone else. Oh, and Bates saves the day through his saintliness.
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The major
drama this week continued on from last week, with Carson deciding what to do
with Thomas. When he told poor Mr Barrow that he would be asked to leave with a
full reference, you knew it wasn’t going to end there; after all, it was only two
minutes into the episode. And indeed, O’Brien schemed and connived to convince
James that if he didn’t protest further, people would think that he hadn’t
objected to Thomas’s advances as much as he’d claimed. But then, pretty
amazingly, Mrs Hughes revealed herself to be not really that bothered by what Thomas
had done (“Do you think that Thomas is the first man of… that sort that I’ve
ever come across?”) and protested James’s actions to Carson, while Bates also
decided that he didn’t want Thomas to leave under such circumstances (no, I don’t
know why, either) and pleaded his case to Robert. At which point we found out that
Thomas’s secret wasn’t so much of a secret at all, and everyone decided to be
surprisingly liberal about the whole thing in the way that only Downton Abbey characters can. Even more unfortunately for O’Brien,
she forgot one crucial piece of information: Thomas knows about Her Ladyship’s
soap, and allowed Bates to use that piece of information to blackmail O’Brien.
It all got a bit wonky towards the end, with the Cricket Match of Unity being
interrupted by a police visit, but the upshot is that, after all that drama,
Thomas is staying at Downton and receiving a promotion. When Robert explained
his decision, he basically should have just said, “I know, but now that I think
about it, Rob James-Collier is totally totty and we don’t want to get rid of
him.”
The other
big event amongst the servants this week (apart from Bates and Anna getting a
house and being all soppy in it, which is something it’s probably best we all
try and forget) was Violet and her efforts to find Ethel a new job. And she got a new
job, which will be near Charlie who she can see, and that’s all grand and
lovely, and I’m sure she’ll be much happier there. But really, the best thing
about the twist in this storyline was that it brought to the fore one of my
favourite elements of early Downton, which has been a little neglected in recent times: Isobel vs. Violet.
Julian Fellowes is never better than he is when he’s writing for these two
strong women going up against each other, and Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton
always play it to perfection: my favourite was Isobel chiding Lady Rose for
saying that her father worked as hard as a slave, and Violet dryly saying, “Cousin
Isobel is very literal” like she honestly couldn’t think of a worse insult.
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Up amongst
the toffs, Mary and Cora kept sharing significant looks and whispered
conversations about doctors, which could only mean one thing: Mary was
pregnant. Or so I thought; as it turned out, it could only mean one of two
things, that Mary was pregnant or that she’d been to a doctor and had a wee
operation so she could become pregnant. That’s right, it turns out the lack of
Crawley baby isn’t Matthew’s fault at all, but Mary’s! Who’d have thought it,
eh? Still, nobody plays “reserved exterior with tenderness underneath” like
Michelle Dockery, and this episode allowed her to do a lot of that. Not that I’m complaining, and it's nice to see those crazy kids be happy for a change.
We were also
introduced to Lady Rose, a great-niece of Violet, who didn’t really serve much
purpose beyond going back to London, then running away to be with her married boyfriend
in a smoky nightclub, thus forcing Edith, Matthew and Rosamund to go there to
find her. It seemed like a strange decision to introduce a new character in the
last episode and have her dominate proceedings so much, but I’m guessing we’ll
see more of her in the Christmas special, and Lily James did bring a great
energy to the role.
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The other
big London news was Edith and her newspaper column. I guess the main thing I
should be talking about is the fact that her editor flirted with her, so she
called up the Daily Telegraph office to find out what she could about him (the
Google of its day) and discovered that, oops, he’s married. But, in a totally
original set of events that does not seem at all familiar (*cough* Jane Eyre *cough*) his wife is crazy and
he can’t divorce her. But what I really want to talk about is Edith’s AMAZING
Journalist Girl clothing and how happy it made me. First she wore a sort of
peach blouse thing that had a grey stripe on it that looked like a tie, and I
thought I couldn’t love her more. But THEN she brought out a sexy little TEAL BERET
and it was so delicious I actually could have died, and I realised that what I had felt for her peach and grey shirt was but puppy love compared to my feelings for her TEAL BERET. Well played, Lady Edith, well played.
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