Last night’s special eight-hour not-quite season finale double episode of Downton Abbey saw the culmination of several plotlines that have been simmering away in the background all season, while weddings were ruined, supple young beauties died, and Shirley MacLaine gnawed the living hell out of the scenery for five minutes.
But all that’s behinds us now: Bates is free, Mary and Matthew are (seemingly) happily wed, and dearest departed Sybil sleeps with the angels.
The time has come to delve into the meat and muck below stairs, for in the bowels of Castle Downton, evil O’Brien has been biding her time, weaving a web of lies and subtle-as-a-meat-cleaver manipulations against poor besotted Thomas.
Things aren’t going so well for our lovelorn Tommy Boy to begin with, actually: Mr. Bates has returned to Downton, where servant and master alike welcome the wife-not-murdering ex-con back with open arms. This means Thomas is out of a job. Lord Robert wants his Batesey back, bum leg, criminal record, tedious moral compass and all, and there’s just nothing to do but send Thomas packing.
There’s stuff going on with the gentlefolk upstairs, as well. Remember how sad, old jilted Lady Edith wrote that letter to the Daily Planet about wimmin’s suffrage, which she suddenly cares about? Now the editor wants her to write a regular column about all the modern lady’s things, like needlepoint and hairpins and parasols and husband-hunting. (She should call it Sex and the Abbey.)
His Lordship doesn’t approve, though—he just hates how everything is changing these days. This time, Edith has the Dame Dowager on her side: “Edith is so very old and plain, she’ll probably never marry,” Dowager Maggie surmises. With her spinsterhood looming, Lord Grantham agrees to let Edith do her little scribblings.
Hurrah! Lady Edith am a journalist now! And so she’s off to London to meet her editor, Lou Grant, who is charming and handsome, and they have lunch and…oh, grrrl! I see where this is going! Edith, girl, do not fuck your editor! Girl, trust me, I’ve been there and it’s a bad move! Pulitzer-prize winning feminist journalist Lois Lane never fucked her editor! You know who did? That bitch on Political Animals and that show got canceled after one season!
Also still displeasing Lord Robert this week is Matthew’s plan for Downton. See, His Blergship has been pissing away all of his money and all of Lady Elizabeth McHasselbeck’s American fortune for years, and not making any profit. (“Profit? How unseemly!”) And now along comes Matthew, his trusted doughy-faced son-in-law with this baffo idea that the estate would be much better off if it actually made some cashola. “Harumph!” (Harumph is Downton’s Estate Manager, who we’re meeting for the very first time and is apparently vital to the running of Abbeytown. He doesn’t like this change business one bit and up and quits!)
Downstairs, all the serfs are playing right into O’Brien’s plot to destroy Thomas and claim the crown of Queen Bitch for herself: Clodhopper Alfred takes his scone-faced love Ivey, the kitchen wench, out to the picture shows with two of the tittering kitchen mice as chaperones. With the slave quarters empty that night, O’Brien abandons her trademark sledgehammer subtlety and makes her penultimate move. “Oh, yes, Jimmy’s just gagging for your cock. Everyone knows it!” she tells Thomas.
“No! Lies!” We all want to scream! But Thomas is so very much in love with Jimmy that he believes it could be true. He’s confused, eaten alive with desire, and feeling even more alone now that he’s about to be canned.
So he creeps into Jimmy’s sleeping cell to gently tongue rape him as he slumbers. But no sooner has Thomas planted a chaste kiss upon Jimmy’s silken lips than gangly old Alfred galumphs in and catches him in the act. Gahhh! All three of them are yelling and freaking the fuck out, because, duh, Thomas was trying to rape Jimmy’s face! “But it was because of love!” Thomas cries! And Jimmy’s like, “Get out of my room!” And Alfred’s like, “Baaaaarrrrrffff!” in the washbasin because of how gross gayness is. And everyone—me, you, everyone everyone—goes to bed tonight rowdy pissed that we didn’t get to see any of the hot footman-on-footman Downton Action we’ve been anticipating all season long.
Go eat a bag of dicks, Julian Fellowes, you pasty Tory cock-tease!
Needless to say, things are pretty awkward the next morning at servant breakfast: Jimmy is suddenly sexually harassing the mouse-girls who dwell in the kitchens. Alfred, meanwhile, is outraged and disgusted and still vomiting in his mouth a little all the time. Naturally, he turns to the one person he can trust: Auntie Miss O’Brien. Surely Alfred must tattle to Mr. Carson about all the perverted sexin’ going on, she advises. And that’s just what he does. Now Thomas’ fate lies in the hands of the wise old butler.
Another thing going on upstairs is that Branson is getting ready to christen Baby Sybil as a Catholic, which is also another thing pissing off Lord Robert. (Remember how he hates Catholics? Which is odd because he hates progress as much as the Pope does) Also, Branson’s brother, who was raised by savages, comes to visit. Kieran Branson, former Bel Ami model, runs a chop shop in Liverpool where newly upper-crust Branson is planning to move with the baby at some point. Wait a minute, says Dame Maggie, Branson knows about farming too! So now he’ll stay and run the farms for Matthew and Lord Robert. That way baby Sybil gets to grow up at Downton instead of in a gutter somewhere playing with matches and dead cockroaches. What a good idea, everyone agrees! And they even convince his lordship to come to the Catholic baby ceremony, where he and the Dowbadger end up taking a picture with the Pope, a culture clash surely meant to foreshadow the sweeping changes that the 20th century will eventually bring to Downtown Julie Brown Abbey.
NEXT: Sticky wickets, O’Brien’s grand moment and a new kid in town
It’s now Hour Two of Downton Aubrey O’day and suddenly Mr. Mosley is in a field with his old dad for the annual Downton Downs crickets match that happens every year but we’re hearing about for the very first time ever.
It’s a bit of a thorn in Lord Roberthamshire’s side—his team of Crawley toffs and houseboys always looses to the strapping young lads of the village, and this year’s match doesn’t look any different: Bates is a hopeless gimp, Cousin Matthew is always prone to spells of paralysis and impotence when confronted with sportsballs, and Branson—like the rest of us—is all, “Cricket? How the fuck do you play cricket?”
Mr. Mosley though? Oh, there’s not much Mr. Mosley doesn’t know about cricket. Downstairs, he’s all “Cricket this, and cricket that.” Blimey, that Mr. Mosley sure does talk a lot about cricket!
Meanwhile, Carson has finally decided not to have Thomas sent off to ex-gay therapy. He’ll still have to leave, though. Can’t have a foul homosexual fouling up Downton with his gay foulness! How foul! That’s right gang: Mr. Carson, loveable old conservative crumdgeon, hates gays and thinks they—we!—are foul! Somebody start a Change.org petition!
On the plus side, Mr. Bates is back and ready to resume his life lacing Lord Grantham into his corset, giving a convenient excuse to pack Thomas off quietly with a decent reference. Oh the Wicked Witch of O’Brien won’t be having any of that! She doesn’t just want Thomas banished, she wants his head on her plate by teatime! “Won’t it look bad if you don’t gay-bash him immediately?” she asks Jiminy Cricket. “Folks might think you asked to be tongue-raped in your sleep if you don’t!”
Pretty Jimbo is too vain to bruise his porcelain knuckles with fisticuffs, so he tells Mr. Carson he’ll call the police if Thomas doesn’t get a bad reference. Poor Thomas will Of course, Thomas is impotent with rage! He’ll be ruined now and will probably end up on the streets, diddling the chaps like Ethel. (For a place full of decent folk, Downton sure does send a lot of servants off to be pockmarked whores.0
And that’s when the old reliable Downton rumor mill starts to churn: A distraught Thomas turns to Mrs. Hughes for comfort, telling her his whole sordid tale. She’s sympathetic because she’s a fag hag from way back. Then Bates gets all concerned for some reason after he catches a super sad Thomas skulking around the hovel he and Anna are going to live in. And even though Thomas has basically acted like a twat to everyone for three seasons, Bates decides to try to help him. Even His Lord Robertship wants to help, perhaps because of all the gay sex he had with Evelyn Waugh and E.M. Forster in college. “Everyone knows these inverts are just harmless faerie folk!”
The battle lines are drawn, with O’Brien summoning all the forces to darkness to her aid, as Downton’s purer-of-heart rally around Thomas in his hour of peril. But more on that later.
Meanwhile, a beautiful and headstrong 18-year-old has suddenly turned up. She’s some sort of distant relative named Cousin Oliver, come to stay with the Dowager Humpress Grantham!
Just kidding—her name’s Rose, and she’s a wild and crazy teenager. Whatever shall the Dowager do with her? Send her to London with Edith and Matthew, of course. What sort of trouble could a golden-haired vixen like Rose possibly get into in the big city? Lots, apparently, because straight away, she’s on the telephone machine arranging a mysterious rendezvous. Then off she goes in a taxi, all tarted up.
While Cousin Rose is off painting the town red in the middle of the day, Lady Edith, girl reporter, is at the newspaper, flirting with her editor. Oh, Edith! Another older man! Another man you work with! Will you never learn?
Lou Grant thinks Edith is very pretty and likes the stories she’s writing about serious things, like how hard it is to find a man when you’re the plain middle sister. He’s just about to ravish her on his desk when she uses her new journalistic sleuthing skills and figures out he’s married!
Edith thinks that’s repugnant, forgetting all about how she didn’t mind that that farmer she was snogging during the war was also married. “Character development!” Julian Fellowes reminds us all, so we let that one go.
But wait! Sure Mr. Editor Chief is married, but it’s to a lunatic who’s locked in his attic! It’s so tragic, and now Lady Edith is Carrie Bradshaw and Jane Eyre and her editor’s crazy wife will probably eventually try to burn her down. (Unless maybe she commits suicide with a poison pie.)
In the meantime, Rose misses dinner with Lady Rosamund, but nobody seems all that concerned about a precocious teen off frolicking in London’s seedy underbelly. Except then a filthy taxi driver shows up and tells them all how he drove Rosebud to a dance club. And that’s just where Matthew and Edith find her, snorting angel dust and dry-humping a married man while—gasp—a negro band plays American jazz music!
After pumping the bright young thing’s tum-tum, Matthew ships her off back to Dame Maggietron, who in returns sends her packing to Scotland or something as punishment. Could this be the last we’ve seen of our wild young Rose? (Don’t count on it.)
Also going on in London: Matthew has an appointment with a scientist to figure out if his baby batter is potent enough to make a baby. He’s worried because Lady Mary isn’t pregnant yet. (And remember, his nutsack basically got blown off during the war.)
But then shock of ironic shockeries: There’s the beauteous ice princess herself at the very same fertility lab. See it turns out that Not-so-virgin-Mary’s glacial womb was the problem all along, and she had to get it defrosted. It’s all fine now and there should be new baby any day now.
Back at Downton, Dowager Maggie wants Ethel to move away and start a new life. See, Ethel is very unhappy—everyone in the village is always throwing rotten vegetables and cow patties at her because she used to be a prostitute. So the Downton Dowager has Edith place a Craigslist ad to find a new job, and she does! It’s near where she sold her baby, so Methel gets to see him now, and she won’t be scandalous anymore. Hopefully that’s a series wrap for Ethel, because, good God, I’m sick of her sad stupid ginger face!
Back at Downton, the battle of the People who Live Under the Stairs rages on. Thomas has lost all hope: Miss O’Brien’s schemes have robbed him of his love and his future, and he’s ready to admit defeat. But doesn’t Thomas know that O’Brien killed Her Ladyshark’s fetus with a bar of soap?
Why doesn’t he just use that to ruin her? Why? Like, seriously, why? (Julian Fellows is eerily silent, vanquished by working-class American logic.)
You know who will use her dark secret against Miss O’Brien to save Thomas? Bates! Hurrah! for Bates, and for clumsy irony! So O’Brien is threatened into calling off Jimmy and Thomas is saved from certain doom, redeemed by the grace and friendship of his unexpected allies.
Except then the cricket match is stormed by police, because Alfred just couldn’t live with the carnal horrors he’s seen! But really in the end, that’s no problem because Lord Grantham is a lord and owns all these little people. He tells that policemens that he’s just made up a new law about how gay kissing is just fine by him. As a reward for being evil for three seasons, trying to mouth rape another man, and for just generally being a bad boy gay-sex god, His Lordship makes Thomas Downton Abbey’s junior butler.
In the end, O’Brien’s quest for revenge (does anyone remember what for?) has blown up in her shrewish face. Thomas gets to stick around and her nephew Alfred will never be lord of the footmen. Also, weirdly, it blew up in Bates’ face too—Thomas is now kind of the boss of him.
We leave all these white folks, wearing white and playing cricket. (Winning cricket, actually! ) And thanks to Cousin-Husband Matthew and Little Lord Branson, Dunston Checks In Abbey will be safe for fancy footmen and wicked ladies’ maids, gimpy man servants and housemaids both saintly and slutty, spinster journalists and silver spooned babes forever more!
Joel J
These recaps are more fun than the originals.
Caleb in SC
Downton Abbey is getting a little tired. If Matthew, Branson and Thomas do not have a threesome, while Jimmy looks on behind a partially closed door and rubs one out, then I am no longer tuning in.
blkluvla
Hunky bad-boy Thomas getting it on with Jimmy would have been hot as hell. But I found it strange that steely-eyed Thomas wasn’t more defiant about being sent off. I suppose the dear chap didst feel so very defeated by Jimmy’s terrible rejection.
blkluvla
@Caleb in SC: @Caleb in SC: Yeah, no kidding !
john russell
@blkluvla: Right? The fact that he’s all belly-up defeated doesn’t feel authentic at all. And not to be a total nit-picking Downtong fanboy, but I’m pretty sure there’s no instance of O’Brien actually confiding her terrible soap abortion secret with anyone except Elizabeth McGrantham on her Spaniard Gonorrhea deathbed.
blkluvla
@john russell: That abortion thing blew by me so fast I almost didn’t get it. It seemed very contrived, but since I never saw the first season, I thought maybe I’d missed something from a prior episode.