The big news was that rapist Green is no more, him having gone the way of a used chip paper and ended up wrapped around the wheel arch of a Piccadilly bus. Did Green fall or did Bates push him is the question Downton wants us to spend between now and Christmas pondering. Moreover, do we blame Bates if he did? That last point's quite a challenging concept, which must be why Lady Mary's syntax struggled to cope with it. Her coded attempt to untangle the ethical implications of Bates having possibly murdered his wife's rapist was so impenetrable that if Bletchley Park start recruiting early, they could do worse than to snap her up. In her words, if a person did a thing that was very bad and then someone else did a thing that was also very bad but perhaps less bad because they did it (if they did, in fact, do it) to the person who was bad in the first place; is it still a bad thing? No wonder she's confused. Thank Heavens Mary didn't try that little poser on her mother, who'd already lost her beautifully bovine demeanour due to having more than the customary three items on her To Do list (1. Beam at things, 2. Be entirely oblivious, and 3. Beam at things whilst being entirely oblivious, sometimes wearing a tiara). The annual church bazaar (a sort of Woodstock with jam) was the cause of Lady Cora's distraction, and this year's answer to the cricket match and garden party of previous series finales. A church bazaar it may have been, but there was romance and not holiness in the air. Mr Molesley and Miss Baxter hit it off after his Thor-like display on the strength-o-meter ("It's all in the arms", as deadpan treat Kevin Doyle explained), Branson and new squeeze Sarah Bunting flirted over a tray of pansies, and Mary was languorously beating them off with a jewelled stick, her handsome cow-lick admirers finding any excuse (salmon fishing, fake conferences, dead servants) to return to Downton and throw their coats over metaphorical puddles for her. Line of the episode goes to Lady Rosamund, who approached Branson with the mentally scarring image, "I gather you've launched into pigs these days", though that was closely rivalled by Violet's evocative "like a sloth underwater" simile and Molesley's tender confession to having felt fragile his whole life, poor chap.
Review of The London Season
