Downton Abbey: S06E08

Well, that was ... that.

I'll admit it, over the last two weeks I fell into something of a Mary/Branson vortex. Deep down I knew it was never going to happen, and I could understand the logic of it not happening, and I will continue to appreciate their platonic (and now explicit) love for each other, but I enjoyed their rapport so much this season that I let myself get caught up in the hope that Fellowes would pull a last minute switcheroo and surprise us all.

Nope.

In the lead-up to this episode the various ship manifestos strewn across the internet calmed me down a little (off-the-wall theorizing usually has the opposite effect on my expectations that such echo chambers usually create) and I've come to the conclusion that when it comes to plot, writers will throw all sorts of red herrings into the mix. But when it comes to shipping, what you see is what you get.

Which of course, is exactly why viewers often take the path less travelled (or the ship less sign-posted) when it comes to the relationships on their screen – they prefer the slow burn to the obvious route.

But I can live with that disappointment. What I'm really galled at is the way the long-simmering Edith/Mary feud was handled. Because I was confident it would play out far better than it was.

As it happens, I've been watching the show from its beginning these past few weeks, and I've noticed a definite pattern in the way Mary and Edith interact with each other:

1. Mary says something, does something, or has something happen to her that Edith interprets as a direct affront. (Quite often it isn’t).

2. Edith makes a snippy, petty or nasty comment in response to this (real or imagined) slight, often taking the form of telling Mary or others how horrible she is.

3. Mary shuts Edith down by saying something even crueller – either in retaliation, or due to the "if you think I'm horrid, then I'll act accordingly" mentality.

This happens again and again in their interactions with each other, with Edith lashing out in bitterness and envy while Mary uses venomous comments and a façade of cold indifference as a shield to Edith's nastiness (because let's not sugar-coat things here, Edith was just as nasty as Mary in the early years).

But since then, Edith has grown as a character. On the advice of Sybil and Violet she stopped obsessing over Mary and starting getting a life: meeting new people, finding an occupation, enjoying herself. She stopped responding to point #1.

Unfortunately, because of Mary's aforementioned indifference, she didn't notice. As such, the sisters are still caught in the holding pattern of points 2 and 3. Edith makes a comment, and Mary is so used to it being something spiteful or passive-aggressive (and sees no reason why it shouldn't be) that that's what she hears even when it isn't.

And so the old pattern played out again here. Mary is already in a state when she walks into the breakfast room (let's say she's 50% upset over Henry and 50% resentful toward Edith). She responds only with silence on hearing news of Bertie and Edith's engagement. This is point 1. In witnessing this, Edith falls into old habits and rushes to point 2, insisting to everyone at the table that Mary is so nasty and selfish that she can't even be happy for her sister. And so Mary hits her with point 3: proving her sister's accusation by bringing up Marigold.  

All this could have gone down so differently. Edith could have matched Mary's silence with her own and let Mary's behaviour speak for itself. Mary could have tried to be gracious right off the bat. The two of them could have hashed things out years ago.

But most of the blame lies with Mary, as this is a pretty extreme case of Disproportionate Retribution. And I was disappointed in her. I really don't understand Fellowes's reasoning here, in which the closest thing the show has to a protagonist suddenly chucks away all the careful character development she's had over the course of the season to do the most heinous thing imaginable to her sister.

Mary looks at her life, looks at her choices.

Mary has always been perceptive and self-aware, and I like that across the course of the show she's often voiced her concern that she's not a very nice person. In the very first episode she tells Sybil (concerning Patrick's death): "I'm not as sad as I should be, and that's what makes me sad." On the day George was born she tells Matthew: "I don't want to be Edith's Mary," recognizing that she's a different person to many people. After Matthew's death she tells her grandmother she's afraid she'll lose all the warmth and kindness that he brought out in her.

And this season we've seen her humbled by Gwen's story about Sybil's kindness, take care of Carson and Anna in their wedding/pregnancy challenges (even if she was a tad misguided) and even extend a couple of olive branches to Edith.

And yet in the second-to-last episode, Fellowes has her do this?

And the strangest thing was that after it happened, and notwithstanding the (well deserved) verbal smack-downs that Edith and Tom gave Mary, nobody treats it as that big a deal. Mary gives a few sincere but low-key apologies. Edith goes back to work where she cracks "banana" jokes with her new editor. The rest of the family just goes about its business.

I'm sorry, but if you're going to write a scene in which Mary exposes her sister's illegitimate child to her fiancé at least partly because she's appalled at the idea she could end up outranking her, then you have to have a bigger fallout than this. Because I'm not sure either one of Edith or Tom's outbursts hit home with Mary. I never saw any sickening guilt of the My God What Have I Done? variety in her eyes. This should have shook her to the core, brought up her long-standing fear that she truly is an awful person.

Instead of writing to Henry Talbot, Mary should have foregone her own love life and vowed to make things right with her sister by flying to Tangier and bringing back Bertie for Edith's sake (and it's not like commercial air travel wasn't mentioned in this episode!) 

If this is the big reconciliation, I'll be pissed.

And Edith should NOT be the one turning up at the wedding to deliver the olive branch. She had every right to stay away. We can credit Edith for being the bigger person, but her line: "you were unhappy so you wanted me to be unhappy too – now you're happy again, you'll be nicer... for a while," has got to be one of the saddest things ever said on this show, and it really felt as though it was up to Mary to seek out Edith's forgiveness and make amends.

And perhaps the worst thing was that the sisterly feud (which has been simmering for six whole seasons) was inextricably tied up with this Henry Talbot business (which has been around for about six episodes).

There is such a thing as Character Shilling, and Fellowes took it to ludicrous degrees in this episode. In separate scenes we had the trifecta of Robert, Cora and Rosamund discussing how great Henry is for Mary, Anna telling Bates how her opinion of him was wrong, Violet coming all the way back from France to advocate the match, and of course Tom, this pairing's biggest cheerleader right from the start. But perhaps my favourite (that is, least favourite) example of this would be when heartbroken Edith slows down on her way out the door in order to tell Mary: "Henry is perfect for you, only you're too stupid and stuck-up to see it!"

HAHAHAHAHA. Why the hell would Edith care??? She may as well have endorsed a completely random breakfast cereal for all the sense it makes.

Which brings me to every character's bizarre level of investment in whether or not Mary hooks up with a car mechanic she's known for less than a year. Disregarding the terrible writing (because seriously, no one cares this much about other people's love lives) and the fact that Mary is a grown woman who can make up her own mind about who she dates, and the creepy amount of hectoring she's received from everyone and their grandmother (literally!) about how Henry is perfect for her, Mary brings up the blatantly obvious reason she decided to break things off with him:

"I stood there, staring at a car in flames, wondering if it were him. I can't be a crash widow again, I can't! I'd live in terror, dreading every race, every practice, every trial, I cannot do it. He'd feel he should give it up, but I don't want that! He'd resent me."

And it makes complete sense. Henry won't give up racing. Mary can't be with a man who races. That the end of it. As she said to Tom at the start of the episode, their lives are incompatible regardless of how they feel about each other, so it's best to break it off, let time do its work, and move on.

Seriously, what the heck is wrong with that course of action? Violet would tell me "love", but even if I did buy this sudden Henry/Mary romance, what about Mary's fears about how she would have to live her life in terror? Between her tearful declaration and the happy wedding day there is no explanation given as to how they'll resolve this problem. Is Henry giving up racing? Did Mary just magically get over her anxiety? The entire thing is dropped without another word, to the point where Mary tells Henry: "I don't know why I fought it."

Mary, it's because this guy drives fast cars, and your last husband died in a car accident. YOU JUST SAID IT.

And so we end on Mary's wedding to Henry while Edith stands and watches the children playing in the cemetery. I've no doubt that she and Bertie will find each other again in the Christmas Special, but if Mary doesn't play a pivotal role in bringing them back together then I'm not sure what the point of this episode was, and I'll feel cheated for having ever invested in her character.

Urgh. Here's a puppy:

***

Time for a round of How I Would Have Done It (hey, haven't done one of these in a while!)

First of all, Tom comes back from America with a new wife: Laura Edmunds. She gets the job as editor of Edith's magazine, not only giving Edith a new friend, but shutting down all the confusing Mary/Branson shipping that went on this season.

Mary deduces that Marigold is Edith's child, and is privately disgruntled (and a little troubled) that no one – not Tom, not Anna, not her parents or grandmother or aunt – told her about it. Why not? Is she not considered trustworthy?

Bertie proposes to Edith and she dithers about whether to come clean about Marigold. He finds out by other means – now that he's the future marquess, his family have hired private investigators to look into the suitability of his wife-to-be.

Except when he confronts Edith about it, he doesn't tell her how he found out, and after he puts a halt to their engagement, she immediately believes that Mary has sabotaged her. After all, that's what Mary does (and she's been acting strangely since her break-up with Talbot). The rest of the family think the same.

On some level Mary deserves the subsequent tongue-lashings she gets from Tom and Edith, but in this particular instance, she's innocent of any wrong doing. But that's not what truly upsets her: it's the fact her entire family actually believes she would do such a thing.

This harrows her very soul; it's her deepest fear come true: that she really is an awful person without Matthew to temper her. So she calls in Henry to help her track down Bertie and set things right – even though she knows none of this is her fault, she needs to reassure herself that she can't be the person they all think she is.

Perhaps it involves a high-speed chase to catch up with him, during which she realizes Henry is a competent and careful driver. Maybe it involves them hopping on an airplane, after which Henry discovers a love of flying that exceeds his love of racing. Finally they find Bertie and Mary states her sister's case: that she's a good woman, that she doesn't deserve to be snubbed, and that he's making the great mistake of his life if he doesn't win her back.

That perhaps, could have served as the end of this season. There's still plenty of time for the wrap-up in the Christmas Special.

***

The other big thing that happened this episode was that Thomas attempted suicide. It's been brewing for a while, but thankfully (in a manner of speaking) he went for slashed wrists in the bathtub rather than a noose slung over the rafters, giving the others time to save his life.

I give credit to Baxter for realizing something was seriously wrong, and I find myself wondering how this story would have played out if Mrs O'Brien was still around. It would have been a nice bit of full-circle redemption for her to save Thomas, especially given her history with people in bathtubs, though it worked well enough with Baxter and Andy – possibly the only two people Thomas is close to.

And yet after it happened, nothing much came of it. I liked the scene where Mary and George visit him downstairs, and I get the feeling it's leading to her offering him a job in the capacity of a nanny... but seriously, you'd think a suicide attempt would garner a bit more narrative attention.

We got closure on at least two subplots: after a shaky start Moseley finds his feet in the teaching sector by promising his students that they can escape the class system with a decent education. That he goes from complete chaos to spellbound success across the length of two scenes is probably the result of this being the final episode.

Likewise, Mrs Patmore's bed and breakfast is heralded as a house of ill-repute after an affair takes place there, and it's so up to the Crawley family to finally make the barest possible effort in assisting the woman who's been cooking their meals in the basement for the past thirty years by having lunch in the establishment to restore its respectability. Screw family values, I'm so glad we don't live in this ridiculous world anymore.

I did however like the entire household stifling their giggles over the whole debacle.

And Mrs Patmore's first name is Beryl! Did we know that?

The mysterious magazine columnist turns out to be Spratt. I was caught off-guard, despite the subtle hints to the audience that it would end up being someone we knew, but perhaps this is his way of escaping Lady Crawley's household and Denker's blackmail.

Bates so irrelevant now. It's hilarious.

Despite the fact that the Mary/Branson ship sank like a stone, I still appreciate the strength of the bond they've forged over this season. Even at this late hour there was plenty of loaded material between them, and a connection that ran deeper than any of the love interests they've had post-Matthew/Sybil. Tom flat-out tells her: "I love you and I want you to be happy", and later (during their confrontation), says: "don't lie, not to me" as though it's a personal affront that she would hide something of herself from him.

That said, it would be karma indeed if Mary spent the Christmas Special trying to foist him onto the magazine editor with as much fanaticism as he pushed her towards Henry.

***

I feel that Fellowes got the marriages around the wrong way, at least in the sense that Mary/Henry happened before Edith/Bertie. It's clear (judging from this episode's final scene lingering on Edith) that the Christmas Special will largely belong to her, and I even appreciate the Hourglass Plot qualities that Fellowes has constructed for the two sisters: that high-and-mighty Mary will marry a mechanic, and poor lowly Edith will become a marquise.

But it feels wrong that Mary should get her happy ending before Edith, especially after what she did in this episode. If it were up to me, the reveal of Marigold's identity and the massive Edith/Mary fight should have happened much earlier this season (maybe cut some of the absurd hospital drama) and the fallout been explored in more detail. Mary's arc could have been one of redemption in fighting for Edith's happiness, and Edith's in coming to grips with her life as an unwed mother and modern woman.  

Finish this episode with a grand Edith/Bertie wedding after a period of tribulation, and let Henry/Mary tie the knot quietly in the Christmas Special (especially since a time-skip could have worked wonders in helping the audience believe they had actually spent time together off-screen).

***

I like both Edith and Mary, as characters and as people. Deep down they're good women; they just bring out the absolute worst in each other whenever they're together – and I can appreciate this complexity in their make-up. Fandom frustrates me by largely taking the side of one and raising her to the level of a long-suffering saint while vilifying the other as the devil's spawn. 

That does a disservice to them both, and it would be interesting to present these opposing sides with case studies of anonymous people having arguments, with Figure #1 starting a fight and Figure #2 finishing it by being twice as brutal and nasty. I suspect that Mary fans would hold the person who started the fight more responsible for the ongoing animosity, while Edith fans would condemn the person who escalated it to new heights of unpleasantness.

Whatever happens, I want the Christmas Special to finally bury the hatchet between them.

But I won't be holding my breath. After a strong string of episodes that I was genuinely enjoying, this episode came as a dead rat at the bottom of my soufflé. There was a nastiness to a lot of the material that didn't feel appropriate for the show's second-to-last episode ever (if not simply because it probably won't be given the attention it deserves at Christmas) and though I've always considered myself a casual viewer rather than a bonafide fan, I'll admit to having invested myself into Mary's gradual thawing over the years. I really don't want to walk away from this show thinking I wasted myself on the character I saw tonight.