The fatal twist was so unforeseen that it took the breath away. In Downton Abbey, after two hours of premonitions that Lord Grantham’s oldest daughter, Mary, would suffer the fate of her sister Sybil and die in childbirth, an entirely different tragedy occurred.
It happened off-screen: an open-topped roadster on a country lane, a looming lorry, and then a cut to Maggie Smith in the Abbey drawing room, reflecting that ‘we don’t always get our just deserts’.
That was, for her, an uncharacteristic understatement. Mary’s husband, cousin Matthew, was bowling home from the maternity hospital, where he had just kissed hello to his baby son, born a few weeks premature.
He told his wife that he felt as if he’d swallowed a box of fireworks. She told him to remember the feeling, so that he’d forgive her more easily next time she did something silly... like crashing his precious car.
Downton Abbey has never been Matthew’s story: it’s a family saga. And yet he has been the pivot, the axle for the free-wheeling plot.
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