Downton Abbey...Final Season Blues

So Downton fans, what are your thoughts?  We are 3 episodes into the final season and I have to say it's feeling a little....bland.  It just seems to be trudging dutifully along but it's lacking its usual luster.   We have only a few more episodes to bring us to a satisfying closure for all of our beloved characters and, as it's going now, it feels like it's just going to end with no real denouement.

What of our favorite villain that we love to hate & still have been rooting for his good side to prevail?  Even Barrow seems to have lost his teeth.  He's just sort of been moping about through these first three episodes convinced he's going to be sacked & halfheartedly searching for alternate employment.  Come on Barrow.  You are one character I always count on to infuse some menacing quality to the story line.  But, most of all, I'd love to see you have a character transformation.  There's a hero buried under that cranky, nefarious surface.  Let us see it!

Carson & Mrs. Hughes have finally tied the knot.  After all the hubub over where the reception should be held, and then the COAT incident (more about that next) you would have thought the wedding & reception scenes themselves would have received a little more time rather than being a bit of an afterthought crammed into the last few minutes of the episode.  And then Tom & Sybie totally stole any remaining thunder by showing up unexpectedly.

Don't get me wrong.  That was the first thing that happened this season that has really caught my attention.  First of all, I just love Tom.  I'm really hoping they give him a story line.  Actually, as much as Mary annoys me I think she just lights up when she sees Tom.  Maybe we can have a romance?  Or would it be weird for her to marry her dead sister's husband and for cousins George & Sybie to grow up as siblings?  Eh.  Weird shmeird.  This is Downton Abbey.  They can make anything happen.  After all, we hardly remember Tom as chauffeur.

Ok.  Back to the coat incident.  Cora!  I didn't realize you had that nastiness simmering under the surface.  Honestly, I could just feel the humiliation of poor Anna, Mrs. Patmore, & especially Mrs.  Hughes.  Even though Cora came downstairs and made it right I imagine that would still hang over Mrs. Hughes head like a cloud.  Poor Mrs. Hughes would never and had never in her 30 years of loyal employment presume to go into her ladyship's closet & try on her coats.  But, good ole' Mary insisted she do this and that it was all ok.  It was their wedding surprise to Mrs. Hughes.  But, oopsie, she didn't get around to talking to her mum.  She halfheartedly tried to get her attention as she was leaving the library.  Why not get up off your bottom & go tell her Mary????  Anyway, the explanation Cora offered for her show of anger toward her loyal servants when discovering them in her room was that she was tired, had a headache, & was still brewing over her earlier confrontation about the hospital.  Still, it was a painful scene to watch

Edith finally told her blowhard editor to take a walk.  Thank goodness!  And who was that secretary?  She could be an interesting character.  Why not have Edith become her own editor & have that plucky secretary as her sidekick?  The two of them can run the magazine themselves.  But, just when I thought they were going that direction, that guy shows up and comes in to help them and the secretary becomes a background figure again.  Boo.  It would have been so much more interesting to see the two women work together to beat the deadline and forge an unlikely friendship across class lines. Changing times and all. But, I suppose we have to come up with a quick love interest for Lady Edith if she's to have found love by the end of the series.  And so Mr. What's His Name.

 

The theme of the whole show seems to be the changing times....the struggle of estates to stay afloat, reality setting in that it's not going back to the way it was, those pesky servants demanding to be thought of as human beings with rights, dreams, & hopes of their own.  And, then, there's my favorite....Lady Grantham and her nemesis Mrs. Crawley.  I have to say.  I sympathize a bit with Lady Grantham.  I'm not a fan of change myself.  And, here she is desperately trying to hold on to one thing she still has some bit of control over...the hospital.  But, she's outnumbered & I don't think she's going to win this fight.

At any rate, this season so far has left me feeling a bit deflated.  Maybe it's just because I know it's coming to an end.  There's no more time for dilly dallying.  Each episode counts.  Perhaps the pace will pick up because I absolutely refuse to come away disappointed.