TV Recaps and News

‘Downton Abbey’ Recap (Season 2, Episode 4): Dead and Wounded

January 29, 2012 Sonia Saraiya

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I’m not clear what is more stressful about this episode: the wanton destruction of two of our characters’ lives; the stoicism, heartache, and emotional fortitude of those closest to them; or the fact that the more upsetting calamity is not William’s death, but Matthew’s penis.

For my introductory masterpost to this season, click here.

Amiens, 1918. The episode starts with a bang. Matthew and William are preparing to lead a charge over the trenches and into no-man’s-land. It’s close to the end of the war and the Germans are desperate and they’re going to “chuck everything they’ve got” at Matthew’s company. Most of the war scenes haven’t been produced terribly well, but this one is an exception. The charge is chaotic and desperate. Mortars are exploding left and right, and the company’s men die in droves, screaming in agony. Just before they manage to make the Germans surrender, a mortar lands near Matthew and William. William pushes Matthew out of the way just as it explodes, but the force of the impact knocks them to the ground, and the camera leaves them there, fallen.

Back at Downton, both Daisy and Mary felt eerie premonitions of the attack. Daisy says someone “walked over me grave,” and Mary drops a sugar bowl, saying she “felt suddenly cold.” (Psychic feelings from the ether? Uhh, okay!) A few days later, Mr. Mosely wakes up the house in the middle of the night with an urgent telegram from the war office. Captain Crawley is seriously wounded and being transferred to the hospital in Downton. William, they discover the next day, is wounded at a hospital in Leeds, but can’t be transferred to Downton because he’s not an officer.

Admirably, everyone, from William’s nemesis Thomas to the Dowager Countess, simply cannot tolerate this bureaucratic nonsense. Violet snaps off several hilarious one-liners in her absolutely heroic attempt to get William transferred back to Downton. I can’t possibly recreate them, but when she called the Marquess of Fincher “Shrimpy” I absolutely lost it, even in the middle of what is otherwise an incredibly tense episode. Needless to say, “the old lady” succeeds, and William is moved into a guest bedroom at Downton Abbey. He says with perfect sincerity, “I’ve never slept in a room this big before.”

The news is not good for either of the men from Downton. William is dying. The force of the blast permanently damaged his lungs, and though he looks and seems fine, he has only days.

And Matthew’s spine is damaged. He can’t feel his legs and will never walk again. And, perhaps more relevantly, according to Dr. Clarkson, he’ll never have children. In fact, not much of anything will be going on down there. Lord Grantham chooses not to share this delicate piece of trivia with the ladies. And that screaming you hear? Those are the screams of a thousand fangirls mourning all the sex scenes we lost.

[I have to interject with a medical observation, for those of you who might not know this yet: Clarkson is not correct about men with spinal damage being unable to have children, as any of you who have seen Friday Night Lights know already. That may have been the general medical sense at the time, but if it makes you feel better, Matthew’s penis might still work.]

Daisy and Mary both are forced to reevaluate their relationships with these soldiers when they do come back to Downton. Daisy, who never liked William that way anyway, is both relieved to see him alive and girlishly reluctant to spend too much time with him, deeply ashamed that she “led him up the garden path” with her promises, especially now that he’s dying. William complicates matters by pressing her to agree to marry him now, rather than wait until after the war. Daisy is completely flustered. She doesn’t want to lie to a dying man, but at the same time, Mrs. Patmore insists, it would fulfill his dying wish.

And Mary, oh god. From the moment she hears the news to the moment she breaks it to Mathew that he may never walk again, she is absolutely stoic. She gives herself completely over to nursing him, refusing to leave when Clarkson tries to order her out. She seems simultaneously both absolutely shattered by the collapse of the man she loves and also impossibly strong: her mission, her duty, her goals are very clear. The only thing that matters is making Matthew better, and if that means calling Lavinia, letting them make plans together, cleaning up his vomit, and cutting the clothes off his body, she’ll do it. She makes no reference to her own heartbreak. The only time she cries is right after she’s told Matthew what’s wrong with his spine. You can see her forcing herself to stay cheerful and calm, but when a single tear seeps out of Matthew’s damaged eyes, as he thanks her for being honest, she turns away and without letting him see or hear, her face crumples.

[I cannot, I simply cannot, do these scenes justice. The framing of the shots, the colors, and the expressions on Mary and Matthew’s faces really need to be seen for yourself.]

Sybil and Branson are still entirely in their own world. Branson’s begun to take liberties, which depending on your point of view are either sexy or wildly inappropriate. He asks her boldly whether or not Mary’s still in love with Matthew, which Sybil refuses to answer. He says with half-irritating, half-charming swagger that her lot is very good at hiding their feelings — better than his lot, for sure. She responds that might be true, “but don’t make the mistake of thinking we don’t have them.”

O’Brien did the completely insane thing and wrote to Mrs. Bates, telling her that Bates was back in Downton with Anna. Vera completely loses it, and in her bitterness vows to sell Lady Mary’s story anyway. O’Brien regrets it almost instantly, because it would bring down ruin on her ladyship. Thomas points out what we’re all thinking all the time: “You started it.” O’Brien responds with an interesting angle, for both him and us: “Well, arent’t you very high and mighty.” In other words, don’t judge me. You don’t even know me. It’s hard to write O’Brien off completely when every few scenes a new and interesting facet of her character emerges. Bates and Anna are back to being screwed, so Anna tells Mary that the newspapers may have her secret soon. Mary decides, with this newfound almost impossible stoicism, that she’ll have to go down to London and tell Carlisle to put a stop to it. Of course, she’ll have to tell her fiancée the truth about her, and he might throw her over for being damaged goods. The frightening thing is that Mary seems to almost believe that she’s worth throwing over herself, but at this point, she is just fighting to survive.

And Mrs. Hughes has been shuttling food over to Ethel, who is living in a hovel somewhere with a surprisingly big baby. (It’s still 1918, so I don’t know how she managed to get pregnant and have a very large baby in at most six months, but maybe time is magical in Downton.) Ethel tries to communicate with the philandering major through her, but he’s not having it. Mrs. Hughes has also been interviewing for a new housemaid. Typically women in service are unmarried and, obviously, without fatherless children clinging to their skirts. But the war has forced Jane Morrison, a war widow, to look for work again. She says her son is in good hands with his mother, and she is a hard worker. She’s also desperate — she’s got to earn. Cora is so busy she doesn’t have time to hear the case. Mrs. Hughes and Lord Grantham decide that though this is irregular, they can hire her.

Mary goes to London to see Carlisle, who wastes no time lording over her. Who would have thought it, from the “cold and careful” Lady Crawley? With the scandal in his knowledge, he and Mary come to the marriage with slightly more equal footing — half-threatening, half-cajoling, he makes it clear that he’s going to use this to make her feel bad about herself, forever. Only the most minute details, like her hand tightening around her bag, give us any idea of what Mary is going through to put herself in front of Carlisle this way. Their conversation sounds more like a business negotiation than lover’s discourse. He agrees to it, and Mary leaves looking more unsettled than elated. Carlisle calls Vera to him in due time and binds her to a contract granting him exclusive rights to the story. He’s a perfect charlatan — grandiose, posturing, and lying through his teeth. If nothing else, Carlisle delivers on his word. And takes the opportunity to publicly announce his engagement to Mary in his own paper. (In case you were wondering, Mary Crawley’s middle name is Josephine.) Lord Grantham is beside himself, and appeals to Mary, telling her she can’t let him get away with this. But Mary knows better than anyone that she can’t really tell Richard to do anything he doesn’t want to.

Matthew and Lavinia get a moment alone in the hospital and he takes the opportunity to tell her that he cannot marry her. His life no longer has any promise and he can’t imprison her to the life of a childless nun. (It’s touching how concerned Matthew is for Lavinia’s sex life.) Lavinia is heartbroken, and insists that she doesn’t care about that, she just wants to be with him. Matthew refuses to argue with her. Instead he just asks her to leave — to go back to London and to forget him. Mary walks in on her weeping in her guest bedroom at Downton. In tears, Lavinia confesses everything to Mary — not just that Matthew has thrown her over, but why. Mary is understandably shocked — but again, the contrast between her reactions and Lavinia’s are stark. Lavinia, sobbing, says she’ll die if she can’t be with Matthew. Mary, who probably feels that way, is a stoic pillar of strength. She’s not unfeeling, but she seems to be intuitively aware — much like her grandmother — that there’s no use crying about it.

Sybil and Branson have another exchange in the garage. Branson seems pretty unconcerned with William and Matthew, but he is pretty bummed out about something. It turns out those communists in Russia that he was championing did an awful thing and shot the Tsar. Branson thinks it was wrong, but allows that sometimes drastic acts are necessary for revolution. And then he immediately spins this to sexytimes with Sybil, gently but firmly putting a hand on her hip as she turns to leave. She turns back, listening to him plead his case, and thinks pretty hard about kissing him, but then doesn’t. Oof.

Daisy meanwhile has been in a fog of self-loathing and confusion. Daisy’s character is not particularly bright — or Sophie McShera doesn’t add a lot of texture to the character. Either way, it seems like Daisy is struggling to have thoughts at all, and her moral compass doesn’t take well to any arguments presented by those around her. Daisy has never been the most beloved character on the show. Six years have gone by and yet she seems to have hardly grown a day; she’s still very much a little girl. Most of the time she’s cute but frustrating, and then every now and again she’s monumentally annoying. I wish this character would grow a little more, but right now she seems stuck in a very narrow frame of mind.

But when Mrs. Hughes comes down to say that William has been asking after her, Daisy does a surprising thing — she steels her resolve. She goes to see him, and sits with him as he asks again if she will marry him. For the first time, William admits that he is dying. He wants her to have the war widow’s pension she deserves, so she’ll always have that to fall back on. And Daisy is still conflicted, but being the good-hearted soul she is, she accepts him. William’s health is failing so rapidly they have to start planning the wedding immediately. Apparently, vicars don’t like it when young couples get married on the fly in places that aren’t the church (I’m sorry, I’m so out of touch with this Anglican traditional stuff, maybe this is really obvious) so at first the vicar says no. Then Violet has a gentle conversation with him in which she reminds him that his living, house, and even the flowers in his church come from her son’s charity. “I hope it is not vulgar in me to suggest that somehow your scruples could be overlooked.”

Violet is wonderful in this episode, but her machinations remind me of one of the most problematic elements of this show — the enormous, outsize power that nobles wielded, even in wartime. We know the dowager countess and Lord Grantham are good people, and so their patronizing interference in the lives of others is appropriate, even laudable, given their privilege. But the hidden underbelly to these plotlines is that less scrupulous lords and ladies might use these connections to bad ends. The writing in this episode almost outright mocks the scruples of the bureaucracy in treating everyone fairly, but hang on, that’s actually kind of important! We’re not all former servants of the landed gentry. The issue is more complex than the show lets on.

This issue plays itself out again with Carlisle and Mrs. Bates. Even though Carlisle is a far less savory individual, he’s a) not “really” a noble and b) wields his influence against the least sympathetic character in the show. Vera discovers Carlisle’s played her and storms into his office, furious. Carlisle warns her that she risks prison if she attempts to move against him. He’s going to win — he’s far more powerful. Vera is deterred from ruining Lady Mary, but she swears to avenge herself on Bates.

And Matthew finally breaks down and sobs when Isobel finally returns from France, bravely smiling at him from the doorway. As she passes Mary, she praises her for her nursing. Mary responds that it’s nothing; “Sybil’s the nurse in this family.” Isobel responds, with feeling, “It’s not nothing at all.”

Daisy and William do marry, in his bedroom, with him still lying prone. The room is entirely bedecked with vines and roses, and Anna dresses Daisy’s hair. Daisy looks more like she’s going to her execution than her wedding, but when the time comes, she holds William’s hand and smiles. Everyone else in the room sobs openly, including the dowager countess, who insists she has a cold. A few scant hours later, William dies. Daisy doesn’t leave his side until he’s drawn his last breath.

Are you sobbing uncontrollably yet? If not, feel free to start.