Downton Abbey recap: series five, episode three: 'Like Great British Bake Off filmed by Steven Berkoff'
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Version 0 of 1. SPOILER ALERT: This blog is for people watching Downton Abbey series five. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen series five, episode three. Read Viv Groskop’s episode two blog here. “Can we be sure that there won’t be an unwanted epilogue?” Ah, Cousin Violet, there is always an unwanted epilogue in Downton. It is the hallmark of this show. It is all just one long unwanted epilogue to the first series. There was an episode about some people being spotted in places where they weren’t supposed to be (Lady Mary outside a hotel in Liverpool; Bates near a dead valet in central London), others doing things they weren’t supposed to do (Cora behaving like a Cincinatti high-school cheerleader around Richard E Grant; Daisy doing her uppity maths homework) and others wishing they were somewhere else (Thomas’s mysterious phone call about “choosing your own path”; Anna wanting to run away to escape the memory of Mini-Den). Baxter introduced the prospect of the creepy Mr Coyle returning. (Let’s see him, please. Otherwise why mention him?) The net of the dense-but-rather-sweet policeman is closing in on Bates. Edith has been banned from seeing the Impostor Baby. The plot is still all over the place with yet still more breadcrumbs being laid in the forest to be picked up later. Actually, more like opening a bakery in the forest, such is the level of subtlety. We get it! We aren’t hungry anymore! No more narrative breadcrumbs! Burn down the forest! In theory, we are narrowing down to two main avenues of inquiry for this series. First, the whole story is really about who Lady Mary marries. Because she is to inherit the estate (or at least her son is) and so whoever she marries is the next Earl of Grantham, right? Second, Bates has probably committed a crime and is going to be held accountable for it. The other suspects include Lady Mary, Mrs Hughes and Lord Gillingham, although I admit these are outside bets. Anna is also a suspect in theory (and, really, she would have been totally within her rights to push Mini-Den under a bus). But she looks too guileless to have done it. I have a feeling all this is not going to be solved by the jaunty Christmas episode. In other news, someone wants to build 50 houses on a field and give the family loads of money, in a situation where they have previously complained for many episodes that they are strapped for cash. But, no! The Earl of Grantham is having none of it! My favourite bit? The Russians sniffing the Fabergé eggs as they pined for the homeland in an ostentatiously visceral Freudian manner. It was like an episode of the Great British Bake Off as filmed by Steven Berkoff. I would so much rather watch that than this. Random subplot alert “I travel to London in order to give my wife a treat. Only to find that she is with another man.” And it’s not just any man, it’s Richard E Grant! I love the idea that one minute we are discovering that Cora hasn’t appeared at breakfast for years (lazy American!) and then suddenly she has loads of extraordinary intellectual insights into the avian metaphors in the work of Pierro della Francesca. “You have an instinct for the key elements of any picture!” No wonder she was always late for breakfast. She was reading about Renaissance art. This is all a ridiculous setup for Cora to either have an affair or come very close to having an affair, which, I’m sure, will mean in turn that the Earl of Grantham ends up meeting a temptress of some kind, maybe next week. Call me crazy – and, having watched every episode thus far, I basically am – but I’d love to see the earl have an emotional 180-degree flip and go potty for the Radical Lady Teacher. Fisticuffs with Branson before the brandies! Isis the Voyeuristic Labrador can watch. Elsewhere Mary’s Ill-Defined Contraceptive Device has become a subplot all of its own. Is it a condom? Is it a diaphragm? Who can say? Perhaps we should give it a name. Spratt? Surprise character development It’s starting to look as if Mrs Hughes could be a lynchpin for this series. Should she be running the house instead of Carson? It would fit with the suffragette-y theme that is emerging alongside the emancipation of Lady Mary (“Why shouldn’t I have loads of sex?” I paraphrase) and Daisy (“Why shouldn’t I run Microsoft?” Similarly.) Here we see the tension rising between her and Carson. Mrs Hughes is Carson’s Achilles heel. He wants to do his duty but he also wants Mrs Hughes to think of him as a Good Person. This is complicated because the two wants are interchangeable and it’s messing with his mind. Also, Mrs Hughes could well be the key to the Anna-Bates-Mini-Den resolution. We must watch her like a hawk. As a side issue, I would like to complain that there was not enough Molesley in this episode. Golden eyebrow award of the week As usual a close-run thing, with eyebrows all over the recently opened York shoe shop. Lady Mary’s furrowed brow when Gillingham got up to leave the not-marital bed and go and get his breakfast was a picture. Maybe even reminiscent of a della Francesca. (Ah, you see how much we are LEARNING from this television programme?) I’m also a fan of the Hugh-Bonneville-style apoplexy of Edith’s Ginger Doppelganger who is going to have a cardiac arrest rather than give up Marigold, the Impostor Baby. However, there can be but one winner and this week it has to be Spratt, Cousin Violet’s butler. “What were you imagining? Nothing vulgar, I hope. Nothing beneath the dignity of a butler of this household.” Written all over his wonderful face was the expression of a man who was imagining Fifty Shades of Lady Mary and then some. Richly deserved golden eyebrow, Spratt. There’s no botox on you. Excuse me, could you just repeat that awkward line of dialogue? • “Ah, your displaced Tsarist aristos ...” I am now waiting for the Radical Lady Teacher to describe Tom as a trustafarian. • “In my day a lady was incapable of feeling physical attraction before she was instructed to do so by her mama.” Someone tell this to the girls on Towie. • “I want to acclimate myself with the routines and rituals that will govern the rest of my life.” Wow. The creepiest marriage proposal ever heard. Next week Daisy is studying the Glorious Revolution. There is some sort of fashion show featuring a Cleopatra-type lady. And Dame Maggie is back with the crazy Russian. Carson, my Tolstoy-era fan, please. It’s getting hot in here. |