DeccaMitford

I stopped being interested in Mary and Matthew's romance the second they got engaged; everything about the two of them was boring after that. None of their problems had stakes, and I don't think Michelle Dockery plays happiness very well. It tends to come across as a kind of bland smugness, which made Mary just as unpleasant as she is when she's miserable and catty, but less entertaining to watch. I was happy when Matthew died, since it was one of the few times since the end of season two where it seemed like something that mattered had actually happened, and that Mary's suffering would be something other than temporary. I didn't mind stories about Mary finding love again, although I can't say I was looking forward to them, precisely. Mary as a character is most interesting to me when she wants something and she can't have it; the last time I found her love life compelling was when she was engaged to Richard Carlyle and pining for Matthew, while still being (rather unexpectedly) perfectly nice to Lavinia. But when Matthew died, Mary was taken back to square one as a character that unexpected things could happen to, and I was looking forward to seeing that play out. And I was interested in the idea that Matthew inspired Mary to become a better version of herself, and she didn't know how to be that person without him. I looked forward to that struggle, to seeing if she could manage to be that better person on her own or if she even wanted to without Matthew there to reflect it back to her. The romance angle came secondary to that, at least for me. My real unpopular opinion is that I can't bring myself to care what happens to Tom; he's the most inconsistently written character on the show. Allen Leech does what he can, and is a pretty talented guy (I liked him a lot on Rome) but Tom is such a nothing of a character at this point; he seems to only exist so Mary has someone to talk to. Fellowes so transparently has no idea what to do with him. Also I hate Carson and I hope his wife poisons him.

See, this I get. It's not my taste, but I know there are people who feel this way. The problem is this isn't what happened on screen. If one of Mary's suitors was shown to see all of Mary's bad qualities and really relish them, and look forward to marriage to the unpleasant piece of work that she is BECAUSE she's that way and it's exciting to him, that would be one thing. People who love the drama of living with very difficult people exist, no question, and a guy like that could potentially be perfect for Mary (in a twisted way). But all of her suitors (really, including Matthew) either don't seem to notice Mary's hard edges, or they insist that that's not the real her, and that the real Mary Crawley is a lovely, soft, kind woman really. The relationship with Richard Carlyle was a bad one, but he was the only person who seemed to want Mary for all of her, including the bad parts. When she asked why he wanted to marry her, he replied that they were alike, both hard and sharp. Cold and careful. If he ever found out about what Mary did to Edith in this episode, he'd probably say "well done." I also think that Edith's mopiness gets really overstated. Why wouldn't she be worried about telling Bertie about Marigold? Illegitimacy and sex outside of marriage was a huge deal at the time. It seems like a pretty reasonable thing to worry about to me.

I think that may be part of it, but I think too he wanted Mary's next love interest to be very much not a clone of Matthew. Which I understand, but I think he lost sight of the fact that what made the two of them interesting was the distinction between them: Matthew's easygoing, genial good humor provided a balance to Mary's cool reserve. He brought her down closer to earth, and she classed him up a bit. Even looks-wise, they were attractive in different ways. Her icy patrician beauty made a nice visual contrast with his more unassuming, baby-faced handsomeness. Allen Leech brings a lot of similar qualities to the role of Branson, and he's handsome in a similar sort of way to Dan Stevens, so it doesn't surprise me that Mary had more (apparently accidental) chemistry with him than with her eventual second husband. I never expected Mary and Tom to get together, but Leech and Dockery had a very easy, natural rapport that I think it's impossible not to notice. All of the suitors were instead variations on a theme, and the theme seemed to be "male Mary" (apart from poor Evelyn Napier I guess, who was never really in the running, so I don't count him).Tony had the same sort of dark, pale beauty and aristocratic bearing. Blake was similarly clever, arrogant, and dryly funny, with a buried softer side. And Henry, from what we can tell of him, takes the cake. He's attractive in the same style as her, and is similarly reserved and regal in his bearing. For all that he's just a race car driver, Matthew Goode plays him like he was born to the manor. I can buy Mary being interested in a male version of herself, but it doesn't make for as interesting viewing.

Well, to be fair, I think at this point a lot of viewers would be genuinely surprised by Fellowes throwing any happiness Edith's way at all. I agree that too many things have come out showing it to be Edith's wedding for anything else to happen, but I think people are perfectly reasonable to be a little wary. It wouldn't be a surprise for Edith's happy ending to be suddenly ruined, because that's what has happened to Edith at every other point.

Or even just "I've got a life of my own, and am not too keen on moving in with her and her parents and her sister that she's constantly bickering with and her former brother in law who lives there too for some reason and who she treats more like a husband than she does me." To be fair, by the end Blake was at that point and had essentially moved on from Mary's nonsense. I think he had the most real potential of the suitors, initially at least. He was unimpressed and she had to prove herself to him as much as he did to her. But all it took was one roll in the mud and he was as uncritically smitten as anyone else, and then it just fizzled out. They didn't have much physical chemistry, either. At least they had serious conversations, which is more than you can really say for her and Henry.

I love the idea of Thomas going to Hollywood, but my secret-until-now-I-guess dream for him is that he runs into that scheming duke he hooked up with way back in the first episode. The Duke of Crowborough has been rendered just slightly nobler and wiser by his war experiences, but otherwise they're still a match made in evil heaven. They travel the world together, conning and fleecing everyone they meet. I really hope that if Edith does marry Bertie, she doesn't give up the magazine. I want her, Laura and Audrey (and Spratt AKA Miss Cassandra Jones) to get into goofy adventures together in the publishing world of 1920s London. Bertie can make the coffee and bring the sandwiches, he seemed good at that. In the end I want Edith to be the sort-of Nancy Mitford of the family, and write semi-nostalgic (but mostly comic) novels about the English upper crust. Mary's married to Talbot now, that happened, but I think it would be absolutely hysterical if the marriage is a failure and if Talbot is a terrible husband. Mary is most entertaining to me when things aren't going her way and she can't do anything about it, and Michelle Dockery's bitch face is a thing of beauty. For her to have been proven right about Talbot being wrong for her would go a long way towards making that plot make any sense at all. Mary is a lot of things, but she's not and never has been stupid, and she tends to know her own mind.

True and important to remember. And I will totally cop to the fact that I was a middle child, so I side with other middle child characters reflexively. I am biased in middle children's favor! I side with Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, even before he's redeemed! And Edith is SUCH a middle child, she ticks off every cliche about us on the list. Ultimately Downton Abbey is a poorly written soap opera about over-privileged, mostly self-involved people. Sybil was the only one of the three of them I'd actually want to be friends with, which is probably why she was also the most boring of the sisters to watch as far as I'm concerned.

I...don't see this. Like, even a little bit. Sometimes Edith snipes first (though I think just as often she's responding to Mary's silent glares or eyerolls, as she was in the breakfast scene in this episode). I remember more times when Edith said something completely innocuous and Mary responded with vitriol or contempt. Like the scene in Robert's bedroom after the open house, or when Edith mentioned that she liked the restaurant Mary was going to and Mary accused her of ruining everyone's good mood with her gloom. Or when Edith on her way to meet Bertie said, rather coyly, "it's not a date," and Mary laughed and said "of course not." Or when Edith dared to ask that Mary show some respect for the fact that her boyfriend's body was found, could Mary please not demand a smile from Edith over her new haircut, and was told "you always ruin everything." Or telling Edith she's an idiot when a fire accidentally starts in Edith's room and Edith could have died. And it isn't only the way Mary talks to Edith, it's the way she talks about her to other people. Calling Edith stupid, calling Edith pathetic, calling Edith ugly, calling Edith over-dramatic, calling Edith boring, saying how she can't stand Edith, responding to Edith's disappearance to London in season five with "who cares". It's constant. When has Edith talked about Mary like that? When she does talk about her, it's usually to say pretty simply that Mary isn't nice to her and they don't like each other.

If the death is Henry Talbot in a car crash I will howl with laughter and take back everything I ever said about Julian Fellowes being an awful writer. I want Mary to be a total black widow with six or seven husbands who die in increasingly outlandish scenarios. I hope she marries a twenty-five your old footman when she's seventy. If this show won't commit to actually being good, it should at least go all out on the soapiness. But seriously, I don't expect it to be anyone in the family, if someone does die. Fellowes is already talking about a movie and hoping that Maggie Smith will be involved (Maggie Smith herself seems...less enthused) so I don't think it'll be Violet. My money's on Carson. As for Edith's ending, I highly highly doubt that she and Bertie won't end up married. There was the misplaced program, there have been reports of a wedding scene set in the winter that we haven't seen yet, they apparently filmed at Alnwick Castle, which served as Brancaster last year, Bertie's mother has apparently been cast. It's happening. I suppose it's possible another wrench will be thrown. After all, there were reports of them filming Edith's wedding to Anthony Strallan and that didn't work out, but surely even Fellowes wouldn't have Edith left at the altar twice (though if any writer would, it's him). People worried about Edith can take comfort in what a terrible writer Fellowes is. Remember when everyone complained that the Mary/Henry love story was obvious and poorly developed, and Uncle Julian couldn't possibly be going where it looked like he was going? He always goes where it looks like he's going.

I think part of the problem is that it's very difficult to credibly talk about the motivations of characters on a show that's as shoddily written as this one. As written, Mary is supposed to be acting out of deep pain in this episode, but her supposed turmoil over her relationship with Talbot (and that relationship itself) hadn't been conveyed to the audience, so I think a lot of the audience just...didn't pick up on the fact that Mary's feelings were hurt too. Because that hadn't been shown to us; she didn't seem hurt, she seemed pissed off. We saw one person who was inexplicably angry that a man who she (justifiably) told to leave finally took her at her word, and another person who was genuinely heart broken, when we were apparently supposed to see two hurt people hurting each other. Way back in season one, Edith would frequently needle Mary about Matthew, and Mary would bite back (usually with a barb about Edith's appearance). I always found Mary's behavior in these episodes to be understandable and sympathetic, even as it was obnoxious, because it was coming out of real pain: love for Matthew, fear that he didn't want her, worry that she wasn't worthy of him, etc. I didn't see any of that pain here. I get I was supposed to, but I never believed that Mary was actually in love with Talbot or that he was all that in love with her. What I saw was a coldly angry woman destroying her sister's happiness with surgical precision. The foundation of the story was broken, so the house fell apart. I'm imagining some alternate reality where a still alive Matthew left the house before breakfast never to return, leaving Mary alone and bereft, and Edith got ready to announce her marriage to a marquess that same morning. I expect that if that hypothetical scene happened in exactly the same way, it would have played very differently, and more people would have sympathy for Mary. Edith was being a pill in that scene, no question. But what I saw was someone reacting to Mary's very ostentatious glowering, and pre-defending herself from a blow she knew was coming. And...she wasn't wrong to expect that blow, as we found out. That's part of the problem too: Edith comes to every interaction with Mary expecting Mary to be nasty and acting accordingly, and Mary nearly always delivers. It would be as if Edith came to dinner every day wearing a helmet, and announced that it was to protect herself when Mary punched her in the face, and Mary, annoyed at the way Edith perpetually plays the victim before anybody even does anything to her, responds by punching her in the face. I see where Mary is coming from too. Everybody wishes they could say exactly what they think to the people who bug them, at least some of the time! But like...it's nothing to admire. Grownups don't act on that impulse. Mary's in her mid thirties with a child of her own for christ's sake. Appalling behavior having a reason doesn't make it not appalling.

Yeah, I get that that's what Mary said and how Mary saw it, but it's also really not what happened, as far as I remember it. What I saw was Bertie wanting to announce an engagement, Edith telling him it wasn't a good time, Mary pointedly glowering, Edith noticing and reacting to it with harsh words, and Mary responding by lowering the hammer. I get that Edith was annoying Mary. I still maintain that cruelty is a worse crime than being annoying. And when I talk about power, I'm talking about relative power between Edith and Mary, not absolute power that either of them holds inherently. And Mary has power, relative to Edith. Personality has a lot to do with it - Mary tends to be strong willed and dictatorial, while Edith tends to be passive (usually until she panics and lashes out inexpertly). Birth order has a TON to do with it - and birth order meant a lot to families like these. And I'm sorry, I'll just never accept the premise that Robert and Cora treated the two of them the same, until very very recently. I understand that when Cora said "Edith doesn't have your advantages" she was trying to get Mary to be nicer, but that's nothing but evidence that Cora was a pretty shitty mother, who had a huge hand in creating this tire fire of a relationship that Mary and Edith have. What she was appealing to wasn't Mary's better nature, it was her sense of noblesse-oblige, which is inherently tied to her sense of superiority. A decent mother, who was really trying to appeal to Mary's sense of decency (which I do believe she has) would have said something like "you should be kinder to Edith, because she is a human being, and your sister, and that's what decent people do." And what really makes it damning to me is that when Mary responds "Edith has no advantages at all," Cora fails to correct her. When Edith was touted by the general in season two for her work with the soldiers, the whole family was shocked. Not even pleased, just shocked. I don't think any of them even smiled. That's not the reaction of a family that treats their daughters with equal love and attention.

And it's really a shame, because for the last several seasons I honestly thought this is where it was going. It seemed like the real story was Mary coming to terms with the kind of person she wanted to be, after the one person who she could be vulnerable with was taken from her. In season four she expressed so much fascinating ambivalence about her own nature, saying how she wished she could be as hard and cold as she was before she met Matthew, since it would make her more resilient - but also missing the softer, less cold but also less strong woman he saw in her. There was so much push/pull between those two sides of her, and it was never clear (least of all to Mary!) which side would or even should win out. Think about how interesting it would have been to watch Mary honestly confront the fact that her whole family colluded together, without even really having to discuss it, to keep something huge from her; and all because they were all convinced that she would be terrible about it. Even Anna, who was never told not to tell Mary and has in the past been the character most loyal to her, knew instinctively that this was damaging information for Mary to have, and it had to be kept from her. How much fun would it have been to see Mary actually deal with the fact that the whole house thinks of her as a bully, even the ones like Tom and Anna that she's closest to? How interesting would it have been to watch her wrestle with that, and decide whether to either prove them wrong or embrace the Ice Queen persona they've saddled her with (that she partly enjoys)? That's the story I was looking forward to when it looked like Mary was about to find out about Marigold. Instead we got...what we got, where she proved to everyone that they were right not to tell her, and the whole mess turned into a plot device to justify her marriage to some rando.

And I think this is why a lot of Edith fans are upset right now. Certainly there's still the Christmas special and anything can happen, and on the whole I think Edith's in a pretty good place as far as it goes: she's shown a lot of strength of character in bouncing back from disappointment, she's got her awesome career, she's got her burgeoning girl squad of Laura and Audrey at the office. She'll be fine even if Bertie never comes back. But compared to Talbot, Bertie was very effectively written and played. He felt like a real person, and his relationship with Edith felt like a real one with real feelings at stake. I had a much stronger sense of what that relationship was about and what they both saw in each other. And that relationship was (maybe temporarily) destroyed and reduced to basically a plot device to bolster up a relationship that no one likes, with a guy that we still don't know anything about. And it wasn't about Matthew Goode coming to the show too late, because again: Bertie came at the same time, and I at least feel like I have a pretty strong sense of who he is and why Edith would like him so much. So that relationship is lost, in order to gain something nobody wanted. This was really so bungled on pretty much every level.

Is this really so odd? I personally change how I judge people's behavior based on their relative power all the time. It's why when my four year old niece has a tantrum and tells her dad "you're stupid and I hate you," he doesn't let it hurt his feelings, but he'd be an abusive monster if he said the same thing to her. Edith annoys Mary, and she often does it deliberately, but Mary's general attitude towards it is only that: annoyance. Mary is cruel to Edith, both to her face and behind her back. She has more power in the relationship and always has, and I think it does make a difference. Edith's barbs always seem to come out of insecurity or resentment, while Mary's come out of contempt, or boredom, or habit, and I think a lot of people can more readily empathize with insecurity over contempt. I think a lot of people instinctively side with the underdog in any story. At least I do. And Edith is pretty unambiguously the underdog in her relationship with Mary. In season two, Matthew half-heartedly asked Mary to be nicer to Edith, and Mary replied, with a smile, that "that's like asking the fox to spare the chicken." She's mean to Edith for fun. She herself thinks of Edith as the victim here. She thinks of Edith as her inherently weaker prey that she has no choice but to pounce on. That's why I can't help but ask, if Mary is so bothered by Edith, and Edith's behavior, why would she want to keep Edith around? Because that's all she's managed to do. Don't get me wrong, I think Mary is the more interesting character of the two, and part of the reason she interests me is that she's a rare female character who doesn't really care all that much about being nice, and partly relishes the fact that a lot people are afraid of her. But I'd have more respect for the show if it would, for once, follow through with Mary's complexity and show how it would ultimately operate in the real world. Because in the real world, I think most of us try to avoid people like Mary.

Yes. Edith should have told him, but when Mary said she assumed Edith already had, she was lying. And it's not like Mary was doing it for Bertie's benefit: she didn't give a shit about him, and spent a not insignificant portion of the episode making fun of him. If she had any actual noble motives here, she would have done something like corner Edith, tell her that she knew the truth, and urge her to tell Bertie. Some kind of "if you don't tell him I will, he has the right to know" threat would have still been officious and out of line, and I doubt Edith would have taken it well, but it wouldn't have been the nuclear option that Mary chose (and she could have at least pretended to be the good guy with a straight face.) If, after the reveal, Bertie had replied that he did know, and he still wanted to marry Edith, you know Mary would have been livid. She did it to hurt Edith, she was jealous of Edith's happiness and impending rank, and she wanted to hurt her in as humiliating a manner as possible. And for all that the audience knows that Bertie's a pretty decent guy who probably won't tell anybody what he learned, Mary didn't know that: she never spent any time with him or took any interest in him in order to know it. And for all the talk of Edith snarking at Mary, you'd think that if Mary found it that unbearable she'd love for Edith to be married and gone and out of her hair.

I'm not sure this is really comparable with the Marigold situation. Mary's sexual history before she met Talbot wouldn't really affect their marriage (and honestly, I don't think Mary was under any obligation to tell Matthew about Pamuk either, except she was so worried and guilty about it). It might make their relationship a little less honest and communicative, but it's not like Mary's history would have a physical embodiment in the house. Edith did have an obligation to tell Bertie the deal with Marigold because she was asking him to accept Marigold into his family while pretending that Marigold was a foundling: the situation was ongoing. (As an aside, this is also why Mr. Drewe should have told his wife the deal with Marigold from the beginning. That arrangement was always bound to be a clusterfuck, but a lot of angst could have been avoided if poor Mrs. Drewe had been given the truth about who the kid was and why they were taking her in.) It absolutely wasn't Mary's place to tell Bertie about Marigold, and any attempt to give her honorable motives in doing so is pretty much bullshit, but I don't think she's hypocritical for not telling Talbot about her past. In some ways I think it's a sign of Mary's development - she's a stronger, more in control person than she was when she married Matthew.

You know, it's a funny thing. I think Fellowes has a very...retrograde idea of what's romantic. I suppose we're meant to see it is as indicative of Talbot's passion, that he won't let go of the woman he loves and keeps fighting for her, etc., but in effect it comes off as pushy and creepy. And there was the implication that Mary can't be trusted to know her own mind and what she really needs is a man who will stand up to her, which is pretty sexist. I was watching some of the second season recently, and there are elements of this weird pushiness in Tom's courtship of Sybil, what with him insisting to her that she's really in love with him when she wasn't sure, only for him to be proven right. Right up until the "don't disappoint me, Sybil" line in season three, which I've always found mildly unsettling. The way that love story was written bugged me at the time, but I think Fellowes got away with the problems there because 1) Alan Leech is a pretty warm, appealing actor (Matthew Goode can be quite good, but he was sleepwalking here, and I've never seen anything where he didn't seem like a cold fish); 2) Alan Leech and Jessica Brown-Findlay had a believably nice chemistry that covered up the gaps in the writing; and 3) nobody was colluding in pushing Sybil into Tom's arms while she figured out what she wanted to do, so when she finally agreed with him that she loved him, it did seem like a choice on her part rather than her just catching up to the script everybody else had already written for her.

I don't remember Edith doing any "gloating", unless daring to be happy in front of Mary counts as gloating. A lot of what I see in defenses of Mary boils down to "she wouldn't have to be mean if Edith didn't make herself such a good target by breathing/being so annoying/having emotions where people can see her" which might be true, but it's also how literally every bully in the world justifies what they do. Picking your targets well might be a skill, but it's a skill that makes me like Mary less, not more (and I do like her). As for the Pamuk thing keeping Mary and Matthew apart, Edith had nothing to do with that. She spread the story around, which she shouldn't have done, but Mary was reluctant to take Matthew partly because he might not be heir anymore, and partly because she was ashamed of the Pamuk incident and didn't want to marry Matthew without telling him. That would have been the case even if Edith didn't exist. Honestly, I think discussing the Mary/Edith dynamic is fruitless in a lot of ways, since all of our interpretations of it are likely strongly influenced by our own family histories and dynamics, and where we ourselves fall in them, and no one will ever convince anyone else.

All I could think of through this episode was this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProtagonistCenteredMoralityand just had to laugh by the end. What a mess. And you know what, I don't hate Mary as a character. I think she's incredibly complicated, and Michelle Dockery did a great job when she was given the opportunity to stretch herself (which was increasingly little). To my mind, she's in the same line of anti-heroes as Don Draper. I don't mind a lead character going dark and being terrible, and I wish more shows had the courage to let their female leads go there along with their male ones. The issue is, Don Draper actually faced consequences for the terrible way he treated people, and sometimes lost his chance with people even though he felt bad about it, and Mary faces no consequences whatsoever. Or, she gets yelled at for a little while, confesses that she was acting out of her own misery, and then everyone forgives her (while pushing her towards marrying a man she doesn't want to marry). I can understand Mary's unhappiness as a cause for her nastiness, and I don't think it necessarily has to make her irredeemable to an audience, but why should Edith forgive her? Why should Edith care if Mary is happy at this point, except that Mary is the main character? Why on earth did every tirade at Mary turn into a chance for the other character to tell her how great Talbot was for her? Why would that be their priority at that moment, except for the fact that they apparently all read a memo telling them that they are fictional characters in a show about Mary Crawley's love life, and they'd better prioritize accordingly? I don't mind the show itself prioritizing that way, but a good writer should be able to come up with motivations for his characters beyond "everyone's making Mary the center of their own lives because...whatever."

I think this is true - and it's one of the (few) elements of the show that I find actually pretty realistically done. There are a couple of lines that, to me at least, point to Fellowes attempting to show how this way of life sort of stunts people's maturity. Way back in season one, Mary tells Matthew that women like her don't really have lives, they're just in waiting rooms until they get married. I remember a comment from Fellowes in the commentary track for Gosford Park, where he said he wanted to highlight how women of that class faced an incredible amount of pressure to live in the manner they'd been taught to live, but weren't given the resources to do so in the way of education or money or encouragement to forge their own lives. So they tended to make immature decisions. Mary and Edith are both in their 30s, and they are both just in the last few years starting to imagine purposes for their lives other than "get married." Living at home, constantly in each others company and with their parents and the same servants who have known them since they were children, probably led them to reproduce childish dynamics well into adulthood. Full disclosure: I'm a middle child, and have an older sibling who's very much a Mary. When we were teenagers our mother sometimes thought we would never be able to get along; my brother would bully me mostly out of boredom, I became oversensitive and bristled at everything he said, whether it was meant to be cruel or not. But we both went to college, and saw more of the world, and made other friends, and got jobs, and we have a great relationship now. We do have to work at it though, and it can be an effort not to fall into old patterns when we see each other for an extended visit. I expect that if Mary and Edith had each gone to university and gotten a job and her own place, regardless of whether that came with a husband, they'd get along fine. I really think this is the story Fellowes is trying to tell, and that he is trying to critique this way of life to a real extent, but he's just not a very organized writer, and he gets distracted by his own nostalgia. So the critique doesn't come through. It came through fine in Gosford Park, probably because there were several other people at the helm. I think when either Mary or Edith lose their concentration, usually because something has shocked them, they can be loving towards each other: witness Edith running after Mary and apparently holding her hand in the car crash scene. And I think Mary has gotten a bit better, though I can't really fault Edith for not seeing it. I suspect that there's a huge, unacknowledged part of Mary that would be devastated if Edith got married and left the Abbey forever, if only because it would be a change to the way things have always been. If Mary's story this season is about letting go of the past, I think her relationship with her sister has to be a part of it. I think we'll have to see if she can let go of the old way of relating to Edith, before we see her move on romantically, either with Talbot or Tom or anyone else. The one ending for Mary that would actually surprise and impress me at this point would be if she ended up alone - if she realized that after Matthew, Downton was her great love and taking care of it was enough to keep her happy, even if everyone else moved on. But Fellowes is ultimately a very sentimental writer, so who knows.

This is big, but another huge barrier is the fact that a felony conviction can bar you from access to a number of state benefits, including housing. If you were poor enough to rely on those before you went to prison, you'll be in an even worse situation when you get out. People can also lose certain benefits (like public housing) if somebody with a felony lives with them, which is often taken to mean as little as letting the person crash on the couch for a single night. So even if you leave prison with friends or relatives willing to help you get back on your feet, there can be a limit to what help they're able to give without becoming homeless themselves.