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.

True, though I don't think we know whether some smaller settlement was made for Cora and any potential daughters - I'm sure they got something, though obviously not enough to make one of them a catch for a duke looking for an heiress. Their potential reduced circumstances after Robert's death is all relative, too. If worse came to worst, they could have moved to America with Cora's still extremely comfortable and wealthy mother. Even the Dashwood women never had to work; they were poorer, and good marriages seemed less likely, but they were never poor. That's what makes a lot of this kind of tough to take seriously, at least for me: we're talking about very rich people who might possibly be reduced to living in a just slightly less rich manner. And if we're speaking in real terms, none of these people actually deserve Downton or the money or the title: not Robert, not Matthew, not Mary, not George. It's not like any of them did anything to actually earn it: they just happened to inherit from someone who inherited from someone else. The most you can say is they didn't piss it all down the drain, or that they acted as good stewards when they had control, but that's luck as much as anything.

To be fair, as I remember season one, it wasn't that Mary thought she was entitled to the title (heh) but that she was entitled to Cora's money. The issue was that all of the money keeping Downton afloat was money that Cora had brought to the marriage, and it was now legally tied, via deed of gift, to the estate - which was tied to the earldom. That would have been a decision that seemed reasonable when it was made, as Robert and Cora expected to have sons. When it was clear they probably wouldn't, cousin Patrick was treated like an heir and tacitly engaged to Mary, so the expectation was that Cora's fortune and the estate would at least stay in the immediate family. The very boring legal issue at the center of season one was to see if Cora's money (and estate) could be untangled from the earldom and kept for Cora's children (or child) after all. Matthew always had a legal right to the title; he might not have had a legal right to Downton and the money keeping it running. They finally figured out that the two couldn't be untangled. That's how I remember it, though I could be wrong. It's a good point that really, even if it's not fair that Mary has fewer rights to the property and title than a distant male cousin, her place as first born doesn't make her inherently more entitled to it all than Edith and Sybil. Still, I think it's in character for Mary to see it that way. She has the (common, I think) perspective of someone who has every single advantage but one, so that particular lack stands out sharply for her. She's first born, she has all the connections and pedigrees of wealth, she's intelligent, she's beautiful, she's a natural leader, she has all the ruthlessly pragmatic tendencies of a born CEO. Only she's a woman, so none of that really means anything. She's just close enough to power to know exactly what her life would be like if she were a man, and it angers her. I don't think it's a very sympathetic perspective, but I do get it.

I have to agree with this - if Mary is the heir, George is still first in line after her, and I can't see Matthew minding either way. In a way, Mary becoming the heir apparent to the title makes George's place in the line of succession more secure, not less. As it stands now he's still just the heir presumptive, not the heir apparent: as long as Robert is alive, there's the possibility that he could have a son. It's a very slim chance and nothing anybody would really plan around at this point, but there's nothing actually stopping Cora from dying unexpectedly and Robert marrying a twenty-five year old: older men than him have had late in life children that way. If Mary was the heir apparent over any future children Robert might have, then George's place is safe forever as Mary's first child.

If Tom had turned into the kind of run of the mill, fairly moderate progressive that, for instance, Isobel is, I think that would have been believable. Not every idealistic young socialist has that trajectory, but enough of them do. Especially as a lot of Tom's "radical" politics always rang kind of false and watered down to me: his big anti-war statement was going to be spilling something on a general at a dinner party. But that's Fellowes: he seems to have a fairly low opinion of progressives/liberals/the left, so his progressive characters tend to fall into a few predictable patterns. Well-intentioned but immature and naive, so bound to accept more conservative ideas as they grow up (Sybil, early Tom); pushy busybodies who are often well-intentioned but also like telling people what to do (Isobel); strident harridans who cause scenes for no reason (Miss Bunting, later Daisy); and resentful ingrates (O'Brien and Thomas, who weren't political exactly, but have been the servants most likely to question whether their position relative to the Crawleys is fair). There's a range, but it's narrow.

Yeah, I think it's important to remember that people of this time and social class just weren't hands on parents in the way we expect now. I think I remember Michelle Dockery talking about how difficult is was when she was directed to be much less affectionate with the babies/children playing George than she would normally be with kids. I think it's difficult to compare Mary and Edith's parenting styles because their experiences of new motherhood were so different. Edith breast fed her baby and bonded with her, and then had to give her away, then watched her be raised in another home for a year with Edith's access to her restricted (however much that messed up situation was pretty poorly and selfishly managed by Edith). So when Edith finally gets to take Marigold home with her, I think it makes sense that she would be more outwardly affectionate and emotional about her: she came close to losing her daughter completely. Mary on the other hand is probably less emotive by nature, and her son was born the day his father died. She probably has a lot of ambivalence about motherhood, and for perfectly understandable reasons - I wish the show had explored this a bit more. Now that Edith doesn't have to worry about losing Marigold anymore, I think she's less clingy with her and is more like Mary in mostly allowing her to be raised by servants. It is what it is; even apart from social class, both women have pretty busy lives.

ZoloftBlob, I agree with this - and to clarify, when I said that Mary's happy ending plays like something out of a horror film, I totally think it was by accident and that we're meant to think it's just a happy scene. It just...didn't work as a happy scene, because of everything that had come before, and instead played like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the kid keeps sending people into the cornfield, and the adults who are left pretend to be happy because they're afraid they're next. It's like we watched Mary learn, once and for all, that she can get away with literally anything, and we were asked to be happy about it, instead of having what I think is the natural reaction of being kind of sad and disgusted. There are two anecdotes about Julian Fellowes that I think are illustrative, at least for me when I try to examine his writing decisions. One is from the commentary for Gosford Park, wherein he makes an approving reference to Ayn Rand, and her view of all interpersonal and political relationships as primarily hierarchical, between stronger and weaker people - and he tended to side, as Rand did, with the stronger ones. The other anecdote is from a press tour for the show, when he was asked whether Downton Abbey would ever continue into the 1930s. His response was "I’m not sure I could bear to see Robert Crawley go through a financial crisis." http://www.avclub.com/article/downton-abbey-might-beat-community-sixseasonsandam-223216 It's like the show has this deep affinity for powerful people, and for hierarchies, that's fairly unsentimental and cynical - but then it's mixed with an overlay of cloying nostalgia and sentimental escapism, and a childlike protectiveness of its characters. It makes for a pretty bizarre viewing experience. The show treats itself like escapist wish fulfillment, but I personally go to my wish fulfillment fiction to see bullies get defeated, not to watch them win.

A comparison to Austen's Emma is so apt; I was thinking something along these lines too! In fact I think the plot development of Emma, and the character development of Emma Woodhouse, provide a pretty good model for how the plot of this episode could have gone, if it were written competently. Tom's take-down of Mary in this episode is superficially similar to Mr. Knightley's admonishment of Emma after she insults Miss Bates, and the point for Emma is that if Miss Bates is as far beneath her as Emma believes, it should make Emma more compassionate, not less. The subtext too is that Mr. Knightley is so upset because he loves Emma, and knows how much better she is than that. This seems to be where Tom is coming from too, albeit in a platonic sense. The difference is that Knightley doesn't dilute the criticism (and by so doing, kind of let Emma off the hook) by tying it to her angst over a guy. Emma's own love story is resolved in a separate part of the plot; her epiphany is purely about her own behavior and how she failed to be the best person she could. She doesn't end by deciding that she should just be polite and keep her unkind thoughts to herself; she interrogates the source of those unkind thoughts in her own vanity. She realizes that many of her prior, kind actions had been motivated as much by the gratification of her ego as by a real desire to do good. This doesn't make Emma irredeemable, and she gets her marriage and happy ending, but Austen very crucially lets Emma's moral redemption take place first. She has to work to regain Miss Bates' friendship, and it has to be completely unconnected to Emma's own romantic fate, or it wouldn't count. What's damning of Mary, and of the...let's say, unique moral perspective of the show, especially in comparison to Austen's Emma, is that the insult to Miss Bates is treated as the climax of the novel, and the worst thing that Emma does - while it's no worse than the way Mary speaks to Edith every damn day. Emma would never have gotten to the point that Mary does in this episode, towards anyone, because Knightley would have read her the riot act the first time she publicly insulted that person. I was really expecting an Emma-like epiphany for Mary, especially after the earlier episode where she reflected that she wasn't as good a person as Sybil. That epiphany might still be coming, but even if it does come, it'll be too late to make any kind of narrative sense. Which just shows I guess that Jane Austen was a better writer than Julian Fellowes, which (heh) is surely not a shock to anyone.

Right - I don't think it's happiness or sadness, or even the appearance of it, that bothers Mary about Edith. Frequently Mary accuses Edith of being mopey or dramatic when Edith just...expresses a thought or opinion. That's why I think a lot of people say Mary is annoyed with Edith for breathing: she reacts in exactly the same way when Edith is upset, when Edith is glowing with pride over her magazine, when Edith says "I used to go to the Criterion with Michael, I have a lot of happy memories there," when Edith tells her family that her boyfriend is dead, when Edith tells her family that her new boyfriend is a marquess. There's something tying all of these situations together, and it's not Edith's behavior or Edith's feelings. It's just Edith. I think if you asked Mary why she hates Edith so much, she probably couldn't give you an answer, besides something vague about how Edith is pathetic. I don't think anybody is calling people who sympathize with Mary bad people - and if I did, I'd have to include myself since I sympathize with her quite a bit. I just don't admire her. That's the frustrating thing about this show and this character, which starts with the blueprints for so many interesting, complex things. Mary is a very well drawn portrayal of a sad, bitter bully, who has learned from her own suffering only how to be less kind and more closed off, rather than the opposite. I do find this sympathetic, and sort of tragic - but then the episode ends with Mary getting married, and the people she's wronged smiling wistfully. When I watched it the first time, I was reminded of nothing so much as the end of Rosemary's Baby, or the original Wicker Man, and the weirdly dissonant happiness was all the more chilling because it clearly wasn't meant to be.

I really, really hope that Mary doesn't have a hand in getting Edith and Bertie back together. It would leave such a bad taste in my mouth if the relationship lived or died based only on Mary's beneficence. Which means it'll probably work out that way. Mary may giveth and Mary may taketh away. She probably has an obligation to try to make things right with Edith at this point, but with so little time left, I think a more emotionally honest, bittersweet ending would be if Mary just realized that her chance for a good relationship with her sister was lost.

Oh my god that picture. It's amazing. It looks like Henry is photo-bombing somebody's already awkward vacation pic.