DeccaMitford

I was not liking this leak but willing to go along with it being possible until this bit: Bronn is on the ruling council? If Dany is killing all of Cersei's people in King's Landing, why wouldn't Bronn die too? And what happened to him being paid to kill Jaimie and Tyrion? Dumber things have happened on this show, but this smacks of the poster realizing he forgot to give Bronn a fate and so just stuck him in there at the end.

I don't usually comment here, but this is not quite correct. "Trustworthy," in Spanish, is "confiable." A "trustworthy person" would be translated "persona confiable." "Confiar" means "to trust." "Persona de confiar" literally means "person that trusts." I have no strong opinions on Sansa or what she'll end up doing this season (my expectation is she'll be marginal to the main action entirely) but reading some kind of hint of untrustworthiness into this quote is a real stretch IMO, based purely on the words used.

I don't know, I think Megan's discontent had been building, and was really triggered (ironically) by having a big success with Heinz. There was a moment when the office is celebrating the win, and Peggy tells Megan that "this is as good as this job gets," clearly expecting her to be as excited as Peggy would have been, and Megan's face falls a little bit. It's like she realized then that the biggest moments of triumph in advertising didn't feel the way they were supposed to, because advertising wasn't what she wanted to be doing. And I think that while Don and Megan's marriage would have fallen apart differently if she stayed in advertising, I don't see it lasting forever either way. I think she would have become increasingly miserable until something snapped.

Yeah, like I said, I buy that they would care about each other enough and be attracted enough to go for it. Making each other happy over the long term is more of a roll of the dice. I noticed in your list of terrible Peggy boyfriends, you left off dopey Mark! Everyone always forgets about Mark, and no wonder - I don't know what she was doing there. Even with Duck I can find out (dysfunctional) reasons why Peggy would get and stay involved with him, but what did she even see in Mark? What need was he serving beyond being present and available and willing? Maybe I answered my own question. My read on Mark's surprise family birthday dinner in The Suitcase has always been that he was intending to propose that night, and Peggy was unconsciously sabotaging it, though I admit that's more of a head-canon.

Oh, same. And I don't think anything she said to him was as needlessly nasty as some of what he said to her in season 4 when he was first introduced. I get that he was supposed to have changed (probably with her influence, or something). Yeah, eventually with him I have to go back to the Author is Dead rule. Sometimes even great writers are wrong about the full implications of what they write. Though, like sistermagpie says, I think he was always careful to talk about the characters as they were in the moment. Though that still doesn't explain everything: I don't think either Don or Megan would describe what happened in Far Away Places as evidence of how crazy they were about each other, even at the time. If anything it would be another low point they would pretend wasn't there.

I go back and forth on Peggy and Stan a lot. I was against it for most of the show's run, and felt happily won over by the end, but when I re-watch the series, I'm against it again. I still buy that they would care enough about each other to date, but I'm not sure it would last for exactly the reasons you give. I get the sense when listening to commentary tracks that Matthew Weiner has the view that real intimacy necessarily includes baring all of your ugliest feelings to another person, and being accepted anyway. I think that's true in a sense, but the portrayals of that on Mad Men didn't always work 100%. I'm thinking of a moment when Betty shouts at Henry, and Weiner (on the commentary track) spoke of it as an example of how much stronger Betty's marriage to Henry was, as she never got that angry around Don until the very end of their relationship. At another point he spoke of Don chasing Megan around the apartment in Far Away Places, calling it a demonstration of "the passion of a new relationship," while to me it just seemed a demonstration of a relationship that was doomed. So Peggy and Stan - I think we're meant to see that Peggy feels close enough to Stan that she can truly be herself with him, and the true Peggy is someone with a lot of hard edges, and Stan is someone who is mellower in general but happy to respond in-kind, and even escalate. They fight and then they're ok again. It's just that in practice it can sometimes look less like two very close people speaking their minds, confident that their least attractive thoughts will be forgiven, and more like people who just don't like each other all the time. At its worst it looks like straight up verbal abuse. I honestly thought the relationship with Ted had potential, though of course the circumstances made it a much stupider idea. At least that relationship seemed based on a simple enjoyment of each other's company, which tends to be at least as important for lasting relationships as "really" knowing someone in a high romantic fashion.

This is what Offred says after Janine gives birth: That's all we know, I think. Handmaids who give birth to healthy babies never have to worry about going to the Colonies, but whether there's a nice home for retired handmaids or something, we never find out.

I think it's significant, too, that so far all of the racial diversity seems to be among the Handmaids, the Marthas, and lower level soldiers. All of the Commanders and wives we've seen at this point have been white. The ruling class of Gilead is apparently not integrated at all, though they're fine with using people of color as servants or reproductive slaves. That seems perfectly plausible to me: there have been plenty of white supremacists throughout American history who have happily impregnated black women, while publicly calling them inferior. Like this guy. Or this one. Basically I don't think racism and making use of the bodies of women of color are contradictory at all - they often go together. So does contempt for a culture and a desire to "save" children of that culture by taking them away from their families and destroying the ties those children have to their heritage, as Slovenly Muse points out. I wish, if that's the point the show is making, they'd be more explicit about it, but we'll see.

Not to nitpick, but you have this backwards. Strallan was touted as an option for Mary in season one, long before Richard entered on the scene. Strallan instead hit it off with Edith, planned to propose to her, was lied to by Mary out of revenge for Edith sending the Pamuk story to the Turkish ambassador, and left for all of season two. Richard first arrived in season two having met Mary sometime between the seasons. Strallan appeared briefly in the Christmas special after season two, only with Edith. When he was back in season three, Mary and Matthew were already engaged and then married. He was never an option for Mary apart from the brief window in season one when there were rumors circulating under the surface about the Pamuk story, but nothing definite had come out or was on the verge of coming out. It was at that point that Cora was starting to worry that Mary couldn't do better. ETA, or what ZoloftBlob said. Strallan was also not a Peer. He was a sir, which made him either a knight or baronet.

I think it's certainly true that Mary is ambitious, and that her "career," so to speak, for much of the show has been to get the best position possible for herself through marriage. However, I see it as sort of a sad aspect of Mary that this is the case: she's a woman who's very real talents are being squandered on fairly petty and shallow concerns. It's not that she's necessarily shallow, it's that she spent so much time wasting herself and her intellect on a life that even she used to admit she found stifling and unfulfilling. It's only in the last few seasons of the show/years of Mary's life that she found her calling managing the estate, and she was only able to do that because the opportunity was given to her as a result of Matthew's death. A Mary born just a generation later could have ended up in Parliament, or become a high powered executive, or a hundred other things that centered her ambition on herself rather than on a man. Mary's ambition, to me, is the saddest thing about her: all she has to show for it now is an estate in Yorkshire that's rapidly turning into a museum around her. If she had been given an education and the support a man would have been, imagine how much richer her life would be. Or even if when confronted with the prospect of marriage to Matthew with no title to come, she set her mind to it that he would end up Lord Chancellor if it was the last thing she did. Mary would have made a hell of a political wife.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. The Gregson affair was probably just as traumatic, in the end, but Edith got a career and a child out of Michael; she probably sees Strallan as a complete waste of her time. Michael never hurt Edith the way Anthony did. I don't think there's any reason to think that Edith wouldn't have been happy enough with Strallan, but I also think that all things considered she's better off, and she probably wouldn't go for someone like that now. I was never really sure how I was supposed to take that relationship - it didn't help that the actor playing Strallan always had an expression on his face like an anxious possum. I could honestly never tell whether he was in love with Edith because he looked either vacant or terrified whenever she was around.

Oh, see that I completely understand - I don't think it was ever satisfactorily explained how Matthew could become "co-owner" of an entailed estate, and I don't think it's actually possible in real life. However, in the fictional world of the show, we were explicitly told that Matthew left his share in the estate to Mary in his will and that Mary became co-owner after his death, not George. If Matthew was able to do this, that means this property (Matthew's share of the estate) was not entailed. If you could leave entailed property to whoever you wanted, there would be no point to an entail at all. If you could leave entailed property to anyone you wanted, there was never anything preventing Robert from leaving the whole lot to Mary in his will way back in season one. Ultimately we have to work with what the show is telling us. I suppose the case could be that a new, unknown heir could argue successfully that Matthew lost legal rights to that money when he invested it in the estate, and that his will should never have been declared valid. That I can see happening. I get the argument that the show should come full circle and tie up the inheritance plot, but I suspect Fellowes believes he's done that. Downton is secure through the next generation, and will be kept in the Crawley family as far as anyone knows. And any scenario possible would just be as far as anyone knows. That's life, and though it might be realistic for a young widow like Mary to be preparing for the worst at every moment, it would make me sad for her if she lived like that. George might die in WWII, or he might join the British Union of Fascists and refuse to enlist, or he might become a conscientious objector, or he might survive the war (as most British people who fought in it did), or he might catch a fever and die at age 10, or he might be gay and never produce a son of his own to inherit, or he might marry someone who can't stand Mary and who banishes her to the dower house. He might decide that he can't stand country life and wants to sell Downton and do something else. We don't know any more than the characters do.

I agree with Llywela. And this is crucial: Mary is in a much better and more secure position, as of Matthew's death, than most women even of her social class. She is not just an estate agent drawing no salary; she is co-owner of the estate, with a share of it equal to Robert's and she is currently entitled to the income from half of it. And I just don't see how it's possible for Mary's share to be tied to the entail and thus liable to be taken from her. If it were tied to the entail, it would have been tied to the entail when Matthew died, and his letter leaving it to her would have been a meaningless piece of paper. There's nothing about George's potential death that would make property which Mary currently owns suddenly not be her property anymore. If there's any evidence that this would happen, I'd love to see it, but everything I know about property law tells me it couldn't happen. That was the story after Matthew's death: Mary has every thing she ever wanted, apart from love and a title. And we're not dealing entirely with hypotheticals here. We know what happened to nobility who lost their ancestral estates at this time. It was a process that started with industrialization as more and more working people moved off the land and into cities, and the process was sped up by two world wars. The nobility mostly survived the change: there was never a huge contingent of earls' daughters in the breadline. They managed. They, like Tony Gillingham's family, would sell or rent out the family mansion and move into a smaller house with fewer servants (the Crawleys were also on the verge of doing this at the beginning of season 3). The moved in with relatives (Rosamund owns her own house in London, and there's always the rich relatives in the US). They wrote their memoirs, which often sold like hotcakes. They sold their extensive art, jewelry or couture collections and lived off the proceeds. The ones who had to worry were the Thomases and Baxters of the world, who had few marketable skills outside of service, no savings or property of their own, and no wealthy relatives to help them out. ETA: and the cynical side of me thinks that the real reason we'll never see any reference to WWII on this show is that Fellowes doesn't want to confront the fact that a huge number of the Crawleys' social class were vocally pro-fascist. They themselves likely wouldn't be, but Lord Merton's sons have "Oswald Mosley supporter" written aaaaaaallllll over them.

Right, MissLucas. And, ok. I'm a feminist, and proud to be one. Of course I think it's unfair that women were usually prevented from inheriting. But if we want to talk about fairness, I think it's valid to say that of course Mary has more inherent rights to her parents' wealth than Matthew (if anybody has a right to wealth they didn't earn), but why does she have more rights than Edith or Sybil? Why couldn't the wealth be split three ways (that was the custom in English common law, if a male heir couldn't be found: to split the estate equally between all daughters). They're also only in this position because it was determined that Robert, a man, had more right to the property than his sister; why is that ok? I can see where Mary is coming from in feeling that she was arbitrarily cheated out of her birthright, I really can, and it was arbitrary, absolutely. But there is just nothing to support the idea that losing Downton would leave her with nothing, as I understand having nothing. She's an intelligent woman, she's a survivor, and she has wealthy relatives. Everyone might have to move in with Rosamund; they'd all fight like cats and dogs but they'd be fine. I just can't see a possible scenario where Mary is not fine. The ones who would have to worry if the estate was lost, the ones who would actually be out on the street, would be the servants who suddenly found themselves out of work. I'm 100% in favor of showing solidarity with other women, but mine is reserved for, you know, real live women, not fictional ones who don't even dress themselves. If we're bringing our politics to the story, what I'd really like is for Tom to have burned the whole sorry edifice to the ground when he was still a firebrand and had the chance.

I think then the estate reverts to the crown: it's a relic of feudalism, and the idea that they're really only holding the property at the king's pleasure. I'm pretty sure that for this to be true, Matthew wouldn't have been able to leave his half of the estate to Mary. If his property was tied to the entail, it would go to the heir to the earldom automatically. It would be a mess if an entailed heir was some stranger, but he'd have to buy Mary out of her share of the estate if he wanted to get rid of her, he couldn't just take it from her. If Matthew had made a deed of gift, like Cora did, to give Lavinia's father's money to Downton, then it would be tied to the entail, but he didn't: Robert made him co-owner, and Matthew was still free to leave that property to whomever he wanted. And yeah, Martha will probably be dead by WWII, but Cora's brother could be alive. I doubt he'd let them starve, and for all we know if he dies without heirs his money will go to Cora. And any children Mary has will be grown up; if she hasn't raised them to take care of themselves by then she will have failed them. Any children she has by Talbot will already grow up knowing that they won't have George's wealth coming to them; if they have a lick of sense they would have prepared themselves for a Downton-less life anyway. They might have to get jobs, like nearly every other person in the world, but it's hard for me to see that as exactly a tragedy.