The Downton Abbey finale definitely had too many happy endings.
(Obviously, spoilers follow.)
In some cases the happy endings were hard won. Who could begrudge Anna and Bates a little bit of good luck at last, albeit in the utterly life-ruining form of a baby? And what could possibly be wrong with Molesley climbing another rung up the ladder in his new career as an educator? And if Daisy wants to hang out at Mr Mason’s farmhouse with Andy and Mrs Patmore then I have no objections personally.
Other happy endings were less convincing. For instance, how is Carson going to be an elder statesman to Thomas when Carson himself declared this arrangement to be unworkable and is a noted bigot who has hated Thomas for years? And how the hell did hapless old Lord Merton manage to go from definitely dying in the opinion of two reputable doctors to not dying after all?
Personally I’d have preferred him to die, even though he seemed like a nice guy. It would have added an emotional dimension, allowing us to feel at once glad that he got away from his horrible children and into the arms of Isobel Grey, but sad that he’s definitely going to die quite soon. It’s fine for characters to gain something, but it’s more dramatically satisfying when they pay for it by losing something else.
Lady Mary’s happy ending sabotaged the dramatic logic of the storyline preceding it. To recap, her beloved first husband Matthew died in a car crash, leaving her a vulnerable young widow. Having considered various suitors, she settles on the only man who matches her in terms of intellect and temperament. But there’s a problem – he races motor cars for a living. His unfortunate profession makes sense dramatically, crystallising Lady Mary’s general reluctance to open up into a specific phobia. “Love is about taking risks,” Tom tells her. He might have gone on to say, “For example, there’s a relatively high probability that the second great love of your life will die in a car crash, just like your first one!”
By choosing to marry Henry Talbot, Lady Mary accepts the risks entailed by falling in love. But then Henry decides not to be a racing car driver any more, rendering her difficult and highly symbolic choice completely meaningless. At least poor old Lord Merton loses all his dough.
But one happy ending – the happiest, the showpiece ending – was not merely unconvincing, nor only dramatically illogical, though it was both of these things in its own way. No. The wedding of Lady Edith to Lord Pelham was nothing short of a full category-A travesty, because – stay with me – Lady Edith is an evil supervillain, and she deserved to be punished.
Here are some of the people that Lady Edith screwed over.
1) Lady Mary, when she writes a letter to the Turkish Embassy to inform them of Lady Mary’s fling with Kemal Pamuk, inviting great scandal upon the Crawley dynasty. Tellingly, this act destroys a potential justification for her prevarications over her own scandal later on: one might argue that her child-related vacillations reflected her desire to protect the reputations of her blameless relatives, but her spiteful letter to the Turkish Embassy proves that she doesn’t actually give much of a shit about that sort of thing.
2) Ethel the housemaid, who has an illegitimate child by a soldier during the great war and is summarily dismissed and ostracised, as was the fashion at the time. In the end, Ethel is forced to give her child up. Despite the fact that this incident foreshadows Lady Edith’s own predicament several years later, Lady Edith exhibits no sympathy, turning the other cheek SIMPLY BECAUSE ETHEL IS POOR (mitigating factors include: Lady Edith not knowing that she would later have an illegitimate child; Lady Edith possibly not knowing about the whole pregnancy thing anyway – who remembers these things?)
3) Michael Gregson, who was warned away from Lady Edith by the unimpeachable Matthew Crawley but who nevertheless chose to proceed with his long term plan to marry Lady Edith, even though this meant moving to Germany and ultimately being murdered by proto-Nazis. If only Lady Edith had allowed him to get on with his life.
4) The Hitlers. This is the name I’m giving to the couple in Switzerland who Aunt Rosamund lined up to adopt Lady Edith’s baby, because, remember, Adolf Hitler had not yet risen to power and – quite rightly – brought the name “Hitler” into disrepute in the 1920s, when Lady Edith’s abortive adoption caper took place. Let’s call them Hans and Astrid, a tragically sterile couple who finally thought their longed-for child was coming home, only to have it cruelly snatched away by the capricious Lady Edith, whose name is mud in the Hitler household.
5) The Drews. Oh god. The poor, poor Drews. We’ll need to go through this mess step by step.
Step 1. Incapable of going through with the adoption she had previously committed to for the benefit of herself, her family, and presumably in some small way her child, she decides instead to secretly conceal the infant with a tenant farmer who owes his livelihood to the Crawleys, so that she can keep her offspring close. She does not provide child support payments.
Step 2. Because Lady Edith lacks character, she finds herself unable to resist visiting the Drews with tedious frequency, despite the distress this causes Mrs Farmer Drew, who by this point naturally loves Lady Edith’s mystery child as much as she loves her own.
Step 3. Lady Edith has had enough, and so she marches into Mrs Farmer Drew’s house and takes the child while Mrs Farmer Drew literally has a mental breakdown in front of her. Lady Edith expresses no remorse at this or any other time, simply marching out the door with her bemused child while Aunt Rosamund shrugs sheepishly.
Step 4: A little while later, Mrs Farmer Drew, now totally insane with grief, abducts the child and takes her home. “They’ll have to go,” Lady Edith remarks, in effect condemning a poor farmer and his family to penury. Incredibly, Farmer Drew actually volunteers to leave before he can be evicted, and while Lord Grantham practically prostrates himself with gratitude Lady Edith is nowhere to be seen, suggesting that she has approximately the same attitude towards the impotent poor as a first world war general, exploiting and discarding them like animals. Her treatment of the Drews is the pinnacle of her career as an evil supervillain.
For a moment it looked like she might have paid the price. At the end of the last season she was single again, having been discovered in her deception of Bertie Pelham. She was sad, and it was right that she was sad, because she deserves to be sad. She had the child, she had the support of her relatives and friends, she had a scandal-free existence, and she even had a plum job and a swanky London flat (both inherited, naturally). And all this despite destroying one family and at the very least discombobulating another one in Switzerland. Surely it was only right that she forfeited SOMETHING. But no.
When I think of Lady Edith’s wedding, I like to imagine Mrs Farmer Drew looking on in her rags, peering from behind a hedge (aka her bed) and reflecting on what an incredibly unsatisfactory place the universe can be.
Master Heywood 