The best moments are the quiet ones: characters walking and talking, so here are Mr and Mrs Bates off to work (Brendan Coyle and Joanne Froggart)
Mr Moseley in the village square self-reflexively selling tickets to come see ….
Mr Carson: “Do other butlers have to contend with the police arriving every 10 minutes?”
Answer: No, but most are not part of moribund mini-series.
Friends and remarkably patient readers,
Despite outbreaks physiological and psychological of intense distress, surely you’ve noticed we are on our way to as happily ever after as human beings ever know:
I take out my crystal ball developed out of not-so attentive watching (I would open a book and take bets only that I don’t understand betting):
Our princess Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is going to marry the self-indulgent drone Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) and run Downton Abbey efficiently as a cross between a tourist attraction and generous farm rental site; Barrow will become head butler and spend his declining years indulging all Lady Mary’s children; our secondary heroine Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) will marry Bertie Pelham (Henry Haddon-Patton, a double-moniker there) despite Lady Mary’s final spiteful attempt to use her knowledge that Marigold is an illegimate child. Pelham is not a prince in disguise, but he is not the total shit Lady Mary had hoped. Mr and Mrs Bates (the one truly aggressive man in the series and his very long-suffering wife) will have that baby, which will be healthy and retire to their property to become prosperous landlords. Lord Grantham will not die young because Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) is just too soothing and complacent a presence to allow an early death once Violet Lady Grantham (Maggie Smith) despite her Methuselah-like great age settles down to supporting Miss Dencker (Sue Johnston)’s matching spite and Spratt’s stamp-collecting habits (Jeremy Swift).
A single housekeeper, skeletal staff, and “day help” will replace “downstairs”Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) will show yet more extraordinary patience as she endures married life with that self-indulged prig of the patriarchy, Mr Carson (Jim Carter) who is not capable of going to bed without looking to see if the sheet corners are expertly done nor eat if his dinner is not eternally hot and as exquisitely cooked as if he were a Shah of Saudi Arabia. Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) will marry Mr Mason (Paul Copley), bringing to his tenant farm her dowry of her property. Now married, a highly educated Daisy (Sophie McShea) and Andy (reading and writing too as the best of them, certainly no one knows pig theory better) will come to live with them.
Have I left anyone out? Tom Bransom (Allen Leech)’s fate is as yet obscure. Isabel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) and Lord Merton (Douglas Reith) have been granted an intermediary in the person of an astonishingly kind prospective daughter-in-law (what I can’t figure out is how she can marry that vicious son of his?).
While I just know in the longer run Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) will marry Mr Moseley (Kevin Doyle) who will become a teacher in a school (he takes a test next to Daisy in Episode 6), there is another bit of a twist and turn down the road as it seems after all she had some feelings for the crook who arranged his theft in such a way as she went to prison. Both such good souls, they will work it out.
How easy some of them have it now? Lady Edith’s interviews of prospective women employees are without tension? No rivalry whatsoever. How is it that this newspaper is so easy to run?
What a gentle time of it they all have
As to Talbot, are there no aggressive males left on the planet? When with Lady Mary, he behaves as if he were in school assembly.
In Downton Abbey only servants are harshly treated …
So why are we carrying on? in this excruciating slow motion? (For recaps see Anibundel: 5, Who would have thought the old man had so much blood?, 6: Downton Abbey as Antiques Roadshow lacks information). Because the ratings were so high and potential audience and money from advertisers were too tempting.
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On Episode 5: I admit to being a viewer whose emotions have at times been deeply engaged with these characters, so when the hospital debate came a crisis with Violet’s coercing Neville Chamberlain himself to come to luncheon in the hope he will not permit the local hospital to be amalgamated to a county-wide organization and yet another of these tension-filled meals became too much for Lord Grantham — and his ulcers burst. What a comment upon 6 years of these dinners and luncheons, not to omit the occasional strained breakfast. I found myself distractedly distressed, tears running out of my eyes, to see this man coughing up huge goblets of blood.
Lord Grantham’s ulcer bursts — he has clearly had enough (Hugh Bonneville enters fully into the role assigned every time, DA 6, Episode 5)
So the first time I watched, I was started into upset, and my emotions rose strongly; but if a movie has real depth in it and has earned belief, adherence, the second time through should be stronger as you notice more. Alas (almost), the second time through I felt indifference; the contrived nature of the scene once the shock wore off and especially since Fellowes had relied on this melodrama. I read somewhere that the genuine shock on Elizabeth McGovern’s face came from her gown, face and hands being spattered with the false blood from across the room. That was not supposed to happen and you can do only so many takes with such a scene. In the event, they did two takes only. I could see how it neatly ties up with the hospital debate in such a way as the Dowager must lose, but I felt that a sensitive fine actor (Bonneville) who let himself go into the part was exploited by this use of him.
Mr Moseley helps Miss Baxter put on her coat after she has learned her ex-lover has pled guilty thus sparing her a confession of her complicity on the stand
As to Miss Baxter’s continuing agon, with the ever compassionate sensible Mr Moseley (who can put things into perspective with the joke — do you want me to go back and see if he will plead “not guilty”). What saves this series is not the humor (which is often not funny) but that continually as an undercurrent and some times rising to the surface (in coughed up blood?) are tensions, strains, disappointment, conflicted desires beneath the tranquil surface of life for these privileged lucky characters.
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The people on line are beginning to think somehow one group waiting has been favored over another, and the staff is doing what they can to push out such thinking from their minds.
On Episode 6: One of my favorite PBS shows has long been the Antiques Road Show on PBS as done in Britain; there is an American version, but for me not as much fun as these visits to large country houses and estates. And I have come to expect as a matter of course, that detailed knowledge of the most obscure objects will be forthcoming.
Taken as a gentle satire on the usual display of conjectured (they are careful to say it’s conjectured) information with prices that make the sellers unexpectedly happy, Episode 6 was worth a watch. There was a mild pleasure to be had in seeing how people really don’t know the facts wanted (or bogusly invented). Lady Edith couldn’t say who was in the picture; Cora, Lady Grantham did not know why one set of imitation shields over a fireplace had not been carved with any letters but over there was a bona fide Reynolds.
She never thought to ask why the shields are not carved — the false importance such tours give to brick-a-bracks, making them numinous because “gazed at” in this ritual way is felt
Robert: “What on Earth can we show them to make it worth their money? Lady Grantham knitting? Lady Mary in the bath?”
The dialogue where a tourist boy stumbles into Lord Grantham’s room to ask why he doesn’t get somewhere much more comfortable to live a bit heavy-handed but not all that improbable — if you think children are not alive to class and how rich people live differently. Mine and I knew by kindergarten.
Lord Grantham will soon tell the boy he lives this way because that’s what he is used to
What was registered was Fellowes’s looking askance at those people who come to gawk; and his quiet sneer that to keep such places going you have to let people in who envy a style of life they have misapprehended as exciting but who are really endlessly thinking of whether their egos have been assuaged.
Miss Dencker comes near to be fired for too much loyalty. When Dr Clarkson (David Robb) defected, she accosted him. He writes a letter of complaint to the dowager. So we see whose feelings count. Whose life matters. The Dowager’s response is not gratitude. What? did Dencker think she had a right to be loyal. to have any feelings at all? On the spot, the Dowager will fire her. The way Dencker holds on is to threaten to tell the Dowaer that Spratt hid his crook-nephew, so Spratt must go upstairs and ask for her reinstatement. When Spratt succeeds (so quickly it’s probable the Dowager did not want to sack Dencker), far from promising never to threaten again, Dencker says she will use short blackmail whenever she has to.
Thomas Barrow contemplates suicide as his utterly selfless teaching of Andrew Parker is sleazily misread (Rob James-Collier and Michael Fox, DA 6, Episode 6
Thomas is beginning to have had it. After all these years of faithful service and self-control on his part, he is still not trusted enough so that if he strikes up a friendship with a footman the first thought all have is he’s buggering him. And he is continually nagged to find a job where he might have something useful to do. Had this been imitative of life either he or Andy would have said he was teaching Andy to read.
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Lady Edith and her suitor stroll through St James Park — or is it Kensington Gardens we are to suppose we are entering into (Episode 5)
So what have we gained from Episodes 5 & 6: And they all headed to live happily ever after despite the occasional strong strains
I did remember this poem while watching some of the quietly strained moments amid the engineered systematic indifference of most to most between characters who pass through much splendor and have who at times have something to me:
Musee de Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
— W. H. Auden
Mrs Crawley facing Lord Merton’s persistence registers on her prudent face fear of what her marrying Lord Merton might cause them to experience
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Baisan Morel: “Poor Thomas, I used to dislike him, however, I now sympathize to his unfortunate that he tried so hard to find a job.”
Hi Ellen,
It does look like home tours will save the abbey. And I think this last episode might be called “The Redemption of Thomas” – when did he suddenly become so kind to the children? I also agree Lord Grantham coughing up blood was a shock – perhaps the biggest shock of the whole series to date.
Tyler
There have been quiet moments showing Thomas putting George on his back from the time the boy was old enough. It was Thomas who exposed the bad nurse for the children who was stigmatizing Tom’s child in the care she gave. But suddenly the sympathy is all for him. So you’re right.
Fellowes uses switches of sympathy repeatedly; he assumes the majority of his viewers have short memories.
A rare moment of real life intervenes when blood spurts — we never did see what killed Sybil. But it’s rarity and the over-the-top way it feels mars long-lasting effects. It’s hard to watch the episode twice and have the same sincere response.
Few are now reading these blogs on Downton Abbey and on popular sites the percentage has gone flat too. Even the sarky sneering type, the kind that makes trivializing sarcastic fun does not get much attention.
I’m not sure the house will be put on show by Lady Mary. This showing was supposedly for one day and for the specific purpose of raising money for the hospital. It now depends on how much they took in.
When I was twelve I was alone with my father when he hemorrhaged from his mouth from bleeding ulcers. He choked, “Get your mother!” just before he passed out. An experience that will haunt me the rest of my life.
Was this a realistic depiction, then?
Yes. I was young; I now think about my mother cleaning all the blood in the living room; we kids were sent down the street to a neighbor’s house. My mother ran home when the ambulance came; can you imagine how she felt when she saw it in our driveway?
I can. When Jim, and I were in our forties, he had an episode of heart failure of some sort. I called 911 and an ambulance came and the medics took him away. I went literarily crazy when the hospital would not let me in to wherever he was. I snuck in; I forget how. I lost all perspective but when I got in and saw he was still alive could calm down. I loathed every single person who wanted to exclude me and made that clear. He was sent home later that afternoon. It was after that he changed his diet and became the cook of the house. He wanted to eat delicious food but also had to invent recipes which were cholesterol free (relatively), salt-free (relatively).
I actually think Fellowes capable of far superior work to what he does. He is far too cynical. Gosford Park is thus far the closest he got. His narrow political vision leads him to throw his real talent away.
A friend: “I read your blog on DA and tend to agree that the show has gotten both slow and very predictable.”
My reply:
“I hoped that I conveyed that in the Antiques Road Show mild burlesque, Fellowes showed some of his intuitive intelligence. I may have been imposing what’s not there, but I felt because of his aristocratic background he saw the absurdity of what people will pay thousands to be bored by because their self-image as somehow attached to the elite by going to sites declared numinous is stroked.
A friend has said that when her father had a burst ulcers, it really did look like that.
In fact Fellowes is staying true to the deeply reactionary nature of his original first and second season. What happened is the unexpected success pushed him into developing thin material into something more complex especially when Dan Stevens became sickened by his role so by season 4 on mourning and grief, Fellowes was still delving deeply — the rape helped. But after that he had no more in him.
Pat: ” I’m going to miss Downton Abbey, looking forward to Poldark when it starts.”
Me: “I will be blogging about the new Poldark. I’m just now engrossed with writing a paper comparing the 1975 with the 2015 Poldark mini-series. I’ve gotten myself its Companion volume, The World of Poldark, and have read and eventually will blog about it.”
Tyler: “I had forgotten about Thomas revealing the bad nanny – thanks for the
reminder – I guess I’m one of the viewers with a short memory but it’s
hard to remember everything over a five or six year period with ten
months inbetween each season. Still, I’m hoping Thomas ends up happy –
not as the butler though over Mr. Carson – he should move to London, get
a boyfriend, and find a career.
I’m also wondering whether Shirley MacClaine will make one last
appearance before the season is over.”
My reply: this is one of those options Fellowes erases. Gay or homosexual male culture received a bad blow at the time of the Wilde trial, but recently there have been essays and books suggesting while it went underground, was more careful, in fact it continued to grow as understanding and a new secular outlook towards sexual experience itself gained ground. Someone else commented that servants could very easily find jobs in shops and factories and offices by the 1920s and if Thomas would just get on a train, he might do well at Selfridge’s. Much more money, much much more freedom.
It would be fun if we could see MacClaine come for Edith’s wedding and gloat but I doubt that. We may hear about her. Ethel has also been forgotten, as well as the teacher who loved Tom Bransom and whom he could have been happy with (again Fellowes is not having a socialist type part of his regulars).
Diane R: “Well, the disingenuousness about opening their house to the public–really a new low. But people probably love it. Who knows? I don’t have regular TV, and have never watched Antiques Roadshow, so that’s not a context for me.
I think I always hoped Fellowes would go somewhere he never did, though you are right, he did veer or gesture that way, at least slightly, at times. The rape seemed to me reactionary too–all the talk about feeling so ashamed–supposed to reflect the times, but in essence, by putting it into the mouth of the show’s “perfect” character, the show’s mouthpiece for morality and censoring of any real criticism of the masters , legitimizing that shame (and protest the husband!) response as what any “decent” women would feel and do. As for the death, I imagine we are to understand Mary as stoically stiff-upper lip in not expressing grief, but her lack of any seeming grief–or even memory of her marriage–is startling. Wouldn’t the stiff upper lip lead to physical symptoms–migraines, say, when certain sights or smells conjuring up the late husband? Is she completely without feeling?”
Me: “The woman who has written novellas out of Fellowes’s screenplays and films agrees — and so do I about this slide over depths, and lost opportunties. Her comments are on previous blogs.
That’s an interesting remark about disingenuousness — yes Fellowes refuses to contextualize it for real; to talk about the tax breaks they had been getting for centuries now halted; and maybe these aristocratic types would very well know what each of their objects was worth.”
Bob: “Is it true that homosexual culture went underground after the Wilde trial? I’m thinking of the Bloomsbury group not so many years afterward.
About Downton Abbey, I thought it very improbable that Tom Bransom would come back as pro-capitalist.
Bob”
Me: “Well, in reply to Bob, there’s was a TLS review-article a couple of weeks ago, which overtly argued that far from being crushed (which would be what the reactionary and religious might want to think), it simply got quieter or went underground — for fear of blackmail. We do see in the story of Alan Turing how susceptible a homosexual man could be to accusation and imprisonment from neighborhood gossip and rumor and by extension blackmail. Thomas is presented when we first meet him as planning on blackmailing the Duke of Crowborough (who easily outwits him by finding the letters without any difficulty).
But you’re right. What about Bloomsbury? do remember though they were upper class, not servants or lower middle office functionaries (as Turing would have been) or university people (very vulnerable).
The Tom Bransom story is very grating.”