After cramming in so many plot lines in last week’s season opener, the second episode of Downton Abbey Season 5 focuses on cleaning up and covering up physical and emotional messes.
In the case of Lady Edith’s room, the mess is both. Anna and Mrs. Hughes (Joanne Froggatt and Phyllis Logan) tackle the remains of the room, which was burned, then soaked from the fire Edith caused.
“I do feel such an idiot,” Edith (Laura Carmichael) says.
“Maybe that’s because you behaved like an idiot,” Mary (Michelle Dockery) replies, in perfect pitch with her attitude toward her sister.
Pushed under the symbolic rug — lush Persian of course – is the potential scandal of a servant from Downton Abbey sleeping with a member of the gentry.
The footman Jimmy (Ed Speleers) must leave. He was dismissed because during the fire Lord Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) burst into one of the bedrooms – he was trying to evacuate all – and found Jim servicing an older member of the nobility for whom he used to work.
The big cover-up concerns Lady Mary. She and Tony Gillingham (Tom Cullen) are planning a weeklong tryst in Liverpool. Mary doesn’t so much as flutter an eyelash when she tells her family she is going off to the countryside with a girlfriend so they can sketch.
The only person who knows, and is drafted into helping her, is her maid, Anna. Several instantly classic scenes are sprung from Mary’s preparing for a week of hot sex. Anna is helping Mary undress at night, and Mary says, “I have to be sure there aren’t any consequences.” Anna looks at her blankly. When it dawns on her that Mary is talking about preventing an unwanted pregnancy she all but dissolves with mortification.
“I can’t just go into a shop and buy something,” Mary explains. “What if I were recognized?” “Why won’t he take care of it?” Anna asks.
Ever practical, Mary says, “I don’t think one should rely on a man in that department, do you?”
Now if Anna were not embarrassed enough by the conversation, Mary gives her a book, in which a diaphragm is explained. She takes the book to the apothecary and this one scene alone explains why women need power over their bodies.
Anna, whose presence at the store embodies awkwardness, asks to speak with a female. This woman, who exhibits all the warmth of a hungry viper and the compassion of a bored executioner, surveys Anna’s ring hand. Satisfied to see a wedding band she asks if doesn’t want more children, then advises, “There is always abstinence.”
The woman finally fetches the diaphragm; Anna hands over too much money and flees the store without the instructions. Anna was so humiliated, then infuriated that this exchange politicized her. She and Mary later have an honest exchange about how women should be able to decide if they want children.
So Mary is off to discover if she should marry Tony; she’s leaning toward accepting his proposal, but wants to be sure as one can be before marrying. Mary understands the importance of sex in a marriage. She wants to be certain that they are compatible and that certainly seems to be the case.
While Mary is having a good romp in town, her heartbroken sister has worked out a scheme to spend more time with her daughter, Marigold. The Drewe family, workers on the estate, had taken in Marigold, but the mom is perturbed by Edith’s overbearing interest in the sweet toddler. The father, who never bought Edith’s story that the girl was a foundling, concocts an idea that perhaps Edith can take a special interest in Marigold and guide her.
In a nod to the time, it is 1924; cousin Rose (Lily James) has relentlessly been badgering her cousin, the Earl of Grantham, to get a wireless. Rose, a spoiled girl, is on the sort of a mission that consumes entitled girls and neither she nor anyone else will rest until she gets one. Lucky for her, it was announced that the king is going to speak on the radio, and Lord Grantham takes it as his duty to listen to his ruler.
With some messes being cleaned up, new ones arise. Simon Bricker (Richard E. Grant, pictured above), an art historian, attends a dinner party at the estate. There’s something a little slimy about this man, and he does not escape the lord’s notice.
Miss Bunting (Daisy Lewis), the firebrand teacher, has been hired to tutor Daisy (Sophie McShera) in math, and this can certainly lead to her turning Tom Branson’s (Allen Leech) head.
Lord Grantham certainly thinks so. As he and Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) are getting ready for bed, he says: “I am not having Sybil’s only child snatched from everyone she loves to be brought up by some harpy in an American sewer.”
As usual, Cora is ridiculously calm and practical, and tries soothing her husband, but he rants a bit more.
“And tell your friend Bricker to stop flirting with Isis,” the earl says. “There is nothing more ill-bred than to flirt with someone else’s dog.”
Really? That cannot be the worst this man is capable of, and perhaps deep down the earl knows this.
Foreshadowing a huge mess comes at the end of the episode when a police officer arrives to talk to Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) about the death of Alex Green, the man who raped Anna, and who was Gillingham’s valet.
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Downton Abbey Season 5, Episode 2 photo Courtesy of (C) Nick Briggs/Carnival Film & Television Limited 2014 for MASTERPIECE
