By Sean T. Collins
January 27, 2013 10:05 PM ET
The thing about comfort food is that when someone serves you a piping hot plate of it week after week, you never suspect that one day they're going to grab it and smash it into your face.
Downton Abbey is just a soap opera, as both its admirers and detractors will tell you; what side of that divide they come down on depends on both how they feel about the genre itself and this show's impeccable version thereof. And while people die on soaps all the time, those deaths are typically tearjerkers, not gut-punchers. That's certainly been the case on Downton until this point, where the major deaths – Kemal Pamuk, Cora Bates, William, Lavinia, even the Crawley heirs whose deaths on the Titanic started it all – have meant more to us in terms of how they've affected the survivors than the dyers themselves.
So I'll admit it: Despite the ominous rumblings from across the pond, where this season aired months ago, I never saw this coming. Not when Dr. Clarkson mentioned his concerns about pre-eclampsia. Not when the family really started to fight about which doctor was in the right. Not when the childbirth seemingly went off without a hitch. Not when Sybil was issuing ominously final-sounding instructions about how her family should be treated. Not even when the panic-stricken family gathered in Sybil's room, watching her scream and pound her own head and seize and convulse and gasp for breath. Surely, surely, something could be done. That's the kind of show this is, right?
Wrong. And in proving it wrong, creator/writer/showrunner Julian Fellowes and actress Jessica Brown Findlay delivered more than just one of the most physically unbearable-to-watch death scenes this side of Breaking Bad or Deadwood – they served up the show's most powerful broadside against its own sexist system yet.
Every woman I know who's experienced pregnancy and childbirth has at least one jaw-dropping story of creepy or condescending or infuriating paternalism by some male medical professional or other. Well before you get into the well-documented War on Women territory of moving to convict rape victims who abort their pregnancies of felony evidence tampering, women's physical and psychological pain during this process is too often treated like an inconvenience to be brushed aside or powered through rather than treated with all due hippocratically mandated urgency. If those needs are not taken seriously, neither is the gender that generates them.
In tonight's episode, that paternalism becomes tragically literal. That tragedy is foreshadowed when an ebullient Lady Edith learns she's been offered a gig as a newspaper columnist, with a carte-blanche remit that would make a 21st-century freelancer of any gender flip the eff out. (Ahem.) Without even realizing how condescending he's being, Robert reacts as though the editor only made the offer to draught off the great Earl of Grantham's family name. When he looks at his daughter he sees neither her talent nor her need for support, only a weaker-sex reflection of himself. And among his peer group, he's a relatively open-minded guy! Downton Season Three's laser-precise exploitation of Lord Robert's weaknesses has been kind of remarkable to behold.
Enter the odiously arrogant doctor Sir Phillip, and the mistake that costs Sybil her life. Confronted with a difference in opinion among two male medical professionals – one of whom has known Sybil not just as a patient but as a person (and even a staff member, during the War) since birth and therefore reacts to her uncharacteristic appearance and behavior with alarm, the other who'd never even met her until the day before and therefore blows it off – Robert and Cora split on what should be done. Naturally, the default decision is to do what her father prefers: nothing. The delay costs them precious time, preventing them from taking the question to Sybil's husband Tom to make the final call; by this point Sybil herself is too incoherent to make the decision herself. Father knew best, until he didn't.
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