Downton Abbey - "Series Two, Part IV"

“They're going to chuck everything they've got at us.” 

For the past few weeks, as I've been going through the second series of Downton Abbey (legally, I might add), I've been more or less waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the show to reach the point where I would finally understand just why this season received such a tepid response from viewers and critics across the pond. I've been able to pick up on a few annoying things, sure – like Mrs. Bates, Ethel, Daisy's unsettling engagement to William – but none of it felt so overpowering as to ruin my perception of the show, or to declare a noticeable drop in quality. Unfortunately, "Part IV" seems to be the place in which the show's beginning to lose me, and I'm not sure how many events in this hour the show can easily recover from.

I knew it from the minute the show started, as quickly got not one, but two instances of a Downton resident experiencing a weird case of Jedi-like , as both Daisy and Mary sense a disturbance in the force that William and Matthew are gravely injured in battle. It's a ridiculous way to start off a plotline that the show wishes for us to take seriously, especially considering how often we are told that Daisy feels for William in a much different way than Mary feels for Matthew.

I don't necessarily have a problem with what followed this, with the two men kept in their respective hospital beds, with William going towards his doom, and Matthew “healing” towards a life as a cripple, but the story already started off in a fairly ridiculous place, and nothing that happened afterwards was spectacularly original, even if it was fairly well done. In fact, it was mostly just an hour of these men feeling down about their states of health (not that they didn't have any right to), and without a whole lot of variation to this, it actually ended up being somewhat boring. Sure Matthew broke up with Lavinia, but did anybody really think that she was going to stay around for very long anyways?

The one bright spot to this was the ending to the Daisy/William courtship, and not just because it finally ended, thank god. Now, I think one of the largest problems with this storyline (beyond just the moral queasiness of watching William pressure her, and her just going along with it), is that the show always seemed to waffle on how Daisy felt, hinting that she could or possibly even was starting to actually fall in love with him, even as she said otherwise. We'll never know now, but either way, her marriage to William was sweet, regardless if it was a selfless act done as a friend, or the only act of love Daisy will ever do for him – though I kind of like the latter interpretation better. (Also, kudos to the show for not corrupting Daisy's morals along with her fortitude. That could have gone really ugly once William mentioned the widow's pension.)

Elsewhere in the People and Things the Annoy Me Department, we got to spend some more time with Ethel and her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, which was just super fun. Actually, my worries last week that this plotline would evolve into something unbelievably soapy tuned out to be for naught, as Downton Abbey's knack for time-skipping finally came in handy as we jumped right on into Ethel with the baby, and got to avoid too much drama. Even Ms. Hughes confrontation of the Major who knocked up Ethel was played relatively low key. I'm not going to pretend that this bit of story was any good – the show hasn't really earned any connecting with Ethel, so I was also bored during this – but it was at least less annoying.

That just leaves the things that I did like, and they surprisingly all revolve around Mary. Or maybe it isn't surprising; I go back and forth a lot on just how I feel about her character. Mary is by all accounts a terrible person, but Michelle Dockery is such a fantastic actress that she finds the likability within the character, and then it becomes easy to form a connection with her, even as the storylines almost try to push you away with her selfish and self-destructive tendencies. Anyways, Dockery's ability to make Mary likable was put to good use here, and she was actually the bright spot in the otherwise middling plot about Matthew's injuries. The scene where she realized that Matthew dumped Lavinia, and then the full reason as to why, required such skill from her, and she pulled it off in a very effective performance. Even more inciting is the tension that this sets up in the continued romance between her and Matthew; the whole endtail business is going to look like a fucking cakewalk in comparison.

The more interesting aspect (and this goes along with what I said in Saturday's post about how I think the show works better when it doesn't focus on the war) was Mary's continued attempts to keep Mrs. Bates from releasing the story of her and the Turk to the press. What made this one work, especially in light of the fact that it featured the still-very-grating Mrs. Bates, was that there were multiple parts to this story, and watching all of it fall into place was very exciting in it's efficiently. (The backstabbing and embarrassment of Mrs. Bates also helped.) Sure, it also resulted in a bit of Bates/Anna cheese, and I'm surprised that the show keeps dragging this plotline out for as long as it has, but it was a nice bit of character-driven drama that I think has been missing from this season.

Oh, and thanks for just sort of dropping in the fact that Bates and Anna got married, show. It's not like we would have wanted to see that or anything.

Other Thoughts:

So Isobel's back, after what I can only now presume was a cost cutting measure on part of the show to write out Penelope Wilton. (Alternate, and probably more realistic theory they just couldn't find anything to with the character for the duration of her leave.)

So, dollars to donuts that the housemaid that was hired to replace Ethel is also lying about her husband being killed in the war, right? (And why did it take them so damn long to find a replacement?)

In news that will make you wonder why we can't just skip to the third season already, gah, Shirley MacLaine will be brought in to play Cora's mother, and will also sqaure off against the Dowager Violet. Ah, I can just smell the bon mots and the tete-a-tetes already.

In news that will blow your freaking mind, it turns out Siobhan Finneran, the actress who plays O’Brien, is actually far more attractive than the costume lets on.

And because this is the interenet, some pretty smart people figured out that the themes to Downton Abbey and The X-Files are pretty damn similar, and made a very pretty mashup.