Monday, February 20, 2012

"Downton Abbey" Plot Turns Thicker Than Plum Pudding



Is it just me, and perhaps half the world, or did "Downton Abbey" descend in its last two installments to formulaic tragicomedy of a certain predictable soap-operaish sort that made the series--finally--unbearable to watch?  (Warning: spoilers ahead.  As David Itzkoff's interview with Julian Fellowes in today's New York Times says, if you want to know how World War I turned out, please read no further.)


Here's what's now going on with "Downton," it seems to me.  Over and over again, just about every character in the now thicker-than-plum-pudding plot repeatedly makes the very worst decisions possible for 1) herself, 2) himself, 3) every other person in the house and village, 4) all of England.  As we watch in helpless horror, like some participants in a badly run experiment designed to test the validity of Aristotle's theory of drama.  An experiment crafted to see if the wretched decisions whose wretched consequences we the horror-struck spectators can foresee a mile in the distance, but whom the perpetrators of the decisions simply cannot or will not see, will wring pity from us.

They don't.  Not in my hard-hearted case.

To start with, there's Daisy.  Who cannot and will not tell a little white lie if her life depends on it.  Who is obsessed with the idea that, in marrying poor William on his deathbed when she was merely fond of him, she has done grave evil, and that responding in any way to his lonely father's overtures will further damage her virtue.

And who finally--only now!--discovers that the poor old papa has a tender heart and is starved for company after clever Mrs. Patmore uses the Ouija board to trick Daisy into visiting William's father.  What reason and compassion cannot cause Daisy to do, a nifty trick with the planchette of a talking-spirit device does handily.

I have long wanted to shake Daisy until her teeth rattle.  But nowhere nearly so much as last night, when it took the planchette and a nice little chat with the always sympathetic Lady Violet to talk even a soupçon of sense into her callow but very hard little head.

And then there's Lady Rosamund.  Who has nary clue she is tangled up with a rounder, an unscrupulous but fair-of-face fortune hunter, until she has to be confronted with the shocking evidence right in front of her face, when Anna Bates and Lady Mary charitably escort her to her maid's bedroom and she finds Miss Shaw and Lord Hepworth nicely tangled in the bedsheets together.  

Though Miss Shaw is certainly not making the bed.

All this, after Mama--aka Lady Violet--has done tole and tole Rosamund she has Hepworth's number.  Since, as she nicely informs Lord Hepworth when she has a spider-and-fly tête-à-tête with the money-seeking gentleman, she does have her spies, after all (what lady doesn't?), and they've been talking to her.  And the tale they've been telling her about Hepworth is not a pretty one.

But nothing Mama says causes the intractable and seemingly somewhat stolid Lady Rosamund to turn a hair until she's forced--forced, I say!--to see Miss Shaw and Lord Haverford not making the bed together.  And how does one muster pity for someone unmoved by the pleas of the redoubtable Lady Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, who is well-informed by her gimlet-eyed spies?

Rosamund and her doltishness leave me singularly unmoved.

Then along come judge and jury in the York court and find the nice, the noble, the honorable, the eminently saintly and virtuous Mr. Bates guilty of the murder of his sociopathic wife Vera.  When every single one of us watching the drama and, what counts more, every single one of the folks of Downton itself, including even the shrewish and scruples-challenged Mrs. O'Brien, knows that that good man could never have done this dark deed.  How can they be so stupid, those court gentlemen?

And, by the bye, what on earth does Mr. Bates mean when he encourages the equally nice, noble, honorable, eminently saintly and virtuous Mrs. Bates to go and have fun while he's in the chokey?  Inquiring soap-opera minds want to know what that remark is setting up for next season's thicker-than-plum-pudding plot.

But finally and most supremely irritating of all, there's the doltish Matthew Crawley, who has not a scintilla of awareness in his wooden and upright-to-a-fault head that his cousin Lady Mary Crawley is head over heels in love with him, and who chooses, with a wrongheadedness that makes one want to take him back to France and drop a shell on the wooden head, to interpret the death of his mousy and inconsequential, but exceedingly sweet, fiancée Miss Lavinia Swire as an impediment to his relationship to Lady Mary.

When any fool can see that Miss Swire kindly arranged her whole life and the plot of the entire drama to step conveniently out of the way just in time to let Matthew realize he loves Mary and to permit the two to act, at last, on their smoldering cousinly passion for one another.  And lest we have missed all of this up to last evening,  all of this is confirmed quite nicely for us by Miss Swire's taking hold of the Ouija's planchette--from the other side, bien entendu--and delivering a very apt little fortune-cookieish message about how those who love one another ought to be able to find each other in life.

Or something of that sort.

I confess I was distracted at this point in the story last night after Cousin Matthew learned of (and reacted with typical misplaced nobility to) Lady Mary's eternal disgrace after the fetching Mr. Kermal Pamuk, the Turkish diplomat, died atop her in flagrante delicto, and she did not have the presence of mind to do what any self-respecting lady ought to have done to avoid lifelong shame in such a situation:

Which is to pretend that she had no idea in the world, not a clue, I tell you, how Mr. Pamuk had ended up in her bed and atop her.  As an ancestor of mine, Mrs. Mary Whyte Manning, did in 1649 when (or so court records of Lower Norfolk County, Virginia indicate) her husband John Manning came home one day and found her out of the house.  When he asked their children where their mother was, they told him she had gone to the herb garden to gather herbs to make a poultice for Mr. Davis's servant Bess.

On searching in the herb garden, Mr. Manning found Mrs. Manning nowhere in sight, so he thought to look in the tobacco shed in which herbs were hung to dry.  And there he found her on the floor with a servant, James Braby, atop her, one hand under her knees, her skirts and petticoats about her neck.

But since Mrs. Manning told Mr. Manning that she had no notion of how Braby had fallen atop her, and that she had been struggling to move him from her person, he believed her and went to court to defend her virtue when the story spread around in the community and neighbors questioned her virtue--she a well-bred Kentish woman who could not ever be guilty of such impropriety.

That's how we've long done it in the South, or, rather, how Southern ladies have long managed things, when men fall inconveniently atop them and husbands or other intruders discover them struggling to disentangle themselves from a loutish gentleman's arms: Law ha' massy, I declare, I don't know how on earth that big old man fell on top of me.

Why Lady Mary couldn't have managed something of the sort when found with the very dead Mr. Pamuk, I have never quite understood.

But I confess I'll probably be watching guiltily next season, irritating as I find all of these folks.  Because one must know how things turn out.  That's what drama is all about, after all, isn't it?

And I do so very much want to know what Mr. Bates means when he encourages Mrs. Bates to have fun while he's locked away.

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