Spoiler alert!!!
Well now, last night's episode of Downton Abbey was wonderful. I was completely caught up in the lives of the Grantham family and their servants in the expensive soap opera. I'd say the episode was quite satisfying, if the end hadn't left poor Bates in the custody of the police just after marrying Anna, and Matthew poised to make a martyr of himself because Lavinia, his self-sacrificing fiancée, happened upon him dancing with and kissing Lady Mary, and finally with Lavinia dead of a broken heart and the Spanish flu. And the dignified Lord Grantham dallies with Jane, the maid! Shocking, just shocking!
And isn't Bates, sexy, despite the fact that he's a tad overweight (and it's not all muscle!)? And Anna, with her hair down, is lovely. Remember the old movies with plain and prudish women characters who come alive as beauties, simply by letting their hair down? Of course, Anna smolders even with her hair hidden away in her cap.
Dame Maggie Smith, as the Dowager Duchess, speaks a good many brief lines which, if spoken by another actor, might be throwaways, but with Maggie, no lines are throwaways. She commands every scene where she appears. There's none like her. I had the great privilege to see Dame Maggie in Peter Shaffer's Lettece and Lovage in London from the second row. She was magnificent, and I shall never forget her performance.
What a change from last week's episode, which was ruthlessly edited into brief scenes with little context in so choppy a manner that I could barely follow the story. Downton Abbey is soap opera certainly, but, at its best, soap of a very high order.
