Downton Abbey - Recap: Nightmare Downstairs
This is a review of the American airing of Downton Abbey – Season 4, Episode 2. There will be slight differences from the original UK airing, necessitating a different approach. However, reviews for the original episodes can be found by clicking the “Downton Abbey” tag. Episodes from UK airings are tagged as “Series 4,” while American airings will be listed as “Season 4.”
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I had the good fortune of making it through most of 2013 without being truly disgusted by anything I watched on TV, save for The Following (one of the worst major network dramas to make it to the airwaves in years). But when tonight's Downton Abbey aired in the UK, I went a bit beyond disgust and became...well, angry. If you haven't seen the episode yet, now would be a good place to stop reading until you do, because there's really nothing else to talk about that's more important than the nightmarish act this episode depicts.
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I'll just say this first: the episode does a fairly good job in setting up what's about to happen without making it seem like an inevitability. When Anna (Joanne Froggatt) first meets Mr. Green (Nigel Harman), the valet of the visiting Lord Anthony Gillingham (Tom Cullen), they strike up a charming friendship that seems innocent enough. Sure, it makes Bates (Brendan Coyle) uncomfortable, but it would be easy to simply read this as Bates being overprotective. He's always seemed like a bit of a territorial guy. So it actually ends up being fairly shocking when Green follows Anna downstairs during a concert in the sitting room to which all the help has been invited, as it becomes apparent just what's coming, yet we still hope against hope that it won't actually happen. And then it does. It's harrowing drama that's fairly well-plotted in strictly structural terms, especially now that Mary's love life is tied directly into Anna's personal tragedy: our desire to root for Mary (Michelle Dockery) and Gillingham to get together is contrasted by our worry for Anna, since Gillingham coming to Downton means that Green will be coming with him. It's simply a solid way of escalating a conflict and pitting a horrific event against something viewers want.
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But let's not confuse things here. I feel the same way now as I did when this episode first aired: Anna getting raped is a cheap, exploitative plot development that isn't really of a piece with the rest of the show. This is not to say that such horrific things didn't happen back then, or that they don't still happen today, but rather that I object to the direction of the storyline, as this is clearly less about Anna than it is about how Bates will react: after getting attacked, Anna is discovered in the downstairs office by Hughes (Phyllis Logan), who tries to fetch the doctor only to have Anna plead with her to keep the entire thing under wraps. And her rationale does make sense: you don't need to have watched this show for the past three seasons to know that Bates WILL murder Green if he ever finds out. And as a once-convicted felon, he isn't likely to get a light sentence for his trouble, even if that one conviction was eventually overturned. Hughes has reservations about keeping the secret and allowing Green to go free, but she agrees to it. And the decision just...I don't know, it just bugged me.
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My problem isn't with Anna's decision to keep it a secret, but with the storyline necessity for her to do so. Julian Fellowes has chosen to put Anna in a scenario that can only go one of several ways: 1) Anna keeps the secret, and the principals involved never discover the truth (like O'Brien and the bar of soap), 2) Bates discovers the truth and kills Green, 3) Anna becomes pregnant and isn't sure if it's Green's or Bates', 4) Anna comes clean, they deal with it as husband and wife, but their marriage is never the same again (maybe it's weaker, maybe it's stronger, but they're never again the Anna and Bates we knew and loved). So basically, there's no direction for this story to take that will have justified having done it in the first place, in my opinion.
Credit: Carnival/Masterpiece
That's my issue here: it's rape for rape's sake, and generally, there needs to be more behind a story like this than shock value. If you get an audience to care about a character, you have a responsibility as a writer not to screw with them needlessly. And that's what this felt like to me. A senseless plot intended to anchor a season that doesn't really have one. And I'm not sure any of it was necessary. Downton Abbey often works best as a plotless series -- one that simply allows us to spend time in this world, with these characters, for an hour each week, while giving us rough sketches of a narrative about their intertwined lives. Which is why I don't get the need for the melodrama, for the crazy plot turns, for the rape or the lately-discovered secret letters from dead people. I can understand "rape as a plot device" when it's a procedural like Law & Order: SVU, where the purpose of the story is the pursuit of justice, and the resolve of the victim. But that's not really what this storyline is. It's Anna tiptoeing around what happened to prevent Bates from finding out, because clearly, he's the real victim in all this. (Ugh.) It's like the world's biggest game of Don't Wake Daddy.
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As for the rest of the episode, I'm usually not one to get on Downton Abbey's case for its quotidian, slice-of-life narratives, since it's so frequently a part of the show's charm. But this episode didn't really do it for me. I suppose we were due for an episode like this though, in the sense that we've been a bit removed from the workings of the show's contemporary society. It's one thing to depict Mary continually working through the grieving process and refusing to see people, but it's something else entirely to actually see her struggle set within the context of a big social event. And so it is with the weekend of festivities, in which Lord Gillingham -- an old childhood friend -- comes to visit along with the Duchess of Yeovil (Joanna David), and Nellie Melba (Kiri Te Kanawa), a world-class opera singer once honored by the King. This mostly works to further illustrate the differences in class between someone like Tom (Allen Leech) -- who remains blue collar, at heart -- and someone like Robert (Hugh Bonneville), who has no trouble fitting right in to high society.
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Tom's sense of physical, emotional, and psychological displacement sort of explains why he probably ends up sleeping with Edna Braithwaite (MyAnna Buring), assuming that this is what happens when Edna sneaks into his bedroom at the end of the episode, after getting him a drink of whiskey. I wish Fellowes had found a better story for Tom, because this just feels like more of the same old hemming and hawing about "I don't fit here! I'm not like you! But I refuse to leave!" The rest of the episode is similarly hit-or-miss, with Carson (Jim Carter) attempting to hire Molesley (Kevin Doyle) as a temporary footman, which offends the former butler, who is too destitute to say no. There's also the plot of Gregson (Charles Edwards) winning back Robert's poker bets from a card sharp, which I suppose is as good a way to get to know Gregson as any. But it just feels painfully inessential, particularly in contrast to what happens to Anna. But hey, maybe that's the point. Everything in life seems pointless in comparison to a tragedy of that magnitude.
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This really isn't the worst episode of Downton Abbey ever, but it feels like the most pointlessly incendiary, and I'm not sure if that's any better.