Dan Stevens didn’t want to renew his contract. What else was Fellowes supposed to do? Have Matthew up and leave Mary (& the estate he owns half of)? Recast him? Contrive some reason for him the Flintshires to India?
[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
…Is Robert able to propose changes in the divorce laws, being in the House of Lords?
[/QUOTE]
Sure he can, but insanity didn’t become a ground for divorce in England until 1937. I don’t seem him doing a damned thing to help out Edith’s editor though.
Apparently it was the actor’s decision to leave the show. The writer had to make do.
In that case the actor’s a prick, and a stupid one at that. Pursue other acting opportunities? Like what? He’s never getting another regular TV show part after this shenanigan.
Loved both those scenes! Also enjoyed Anna & Bates being happy and playful on their picnic. They deserve it after the terrible prison storyline!!
Loved Carson and the baby! And I like how they ended the Thomas/Jimmy story. I hope the Thomas we saw this episode will stay, and that he won’t go back to being his old dickish self. We didn’t get to see how he interacted with Bates, but I’d like to see some type of friendship develop between them for season 4. They’ve been working together a whole year now since the events of the last episode.
Oh and Moseley at the dance! Ha! That was great!
Yeah, if I were Edith I would DEFINITELY never have any babies ever.
Shoud’ve gotten another actor to replcae him and gone with the old ‘attacked by a wampa’ excuse for the change in appearance.
Agreed. Utterly and completely. I don’t know if I want to watch the next season. I feel so jerked around right now.
Carson with Little Sybil was so cute. Anna and Bates were finally allowed to have some fun. I hope she gets pregnant. She’s not a Crawley so having a baby should be safe for her.
Moseley is the show’s punch line.
Yeah.
Cast another actor as Matthew. He’s been in a car crash so he can look different plausibly.
Just get the same guy who played the bandaged [del]Patrick Crawley[/del] Peter Gordon from season two!
Is it true that they are going to change the name of the show to: Die-ton Abbey?
Loved Carson with Baby Sybil.
Perhaps it’s Matthew, rather than Tom, who’s found himself on a bit of a learning curve.
He’s doing a Broadway play right now, and he’s said he doesn’t care if he’s never part of anything as big as Downton again. I don’t blame him for wanting to do other things. IMO the writing has been awful for quite a while.
Dan Stevens is also interested in writing. So the crappy writing of series 2 probably did more to convince him to leave than dreams of mega-stardom.
He fulfilled his three-year contract and let Fellowes know he wanted to go before series 3 began. The departure could have been written better–but I bet they were trying to convince Stevens to stay until the last minute.
That was massively fucked up.
Agreed!
It was such a wonderful episode. So much happy, good stuff happened. I said to Suburban Plankton as they were showing Matthew so happy driving home, “I bet he crashes,” but I didn’t really think he would die. I just thought he’d be all banged up. :mad:
At least have him die a hero or something. That was pointless.
It is very rare for a father to die in childbirth…
I didn’t like the episode, even before that point. It just seemed a bit messy and very ham handed. Some of that was due to the fact that he had to move pieces around for next season (Matthew and Rose), but some was just poor storytelling. Not to say that there weren’t nice moments, but it lacked something as a whole
Rumor is that next year Violet will reveal that Robert has a younger brother, Ruprecht, whom she swapped for her daughter because “two sons was just common in those days”, but now he’s back and wants to be Robert’s second in line. He will be played by either Sacha Baron Cohen, who’s already trying out wacky accents for the character, or Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson as Violet’s long lost heir.
Re: Shrimpie and his wife’s feuding–I realize that it was very difficult to get a divorce in those days, but as mentioned above, wouldn’t “upper-class morality” at least allow them both to have lots of affairs on the side? It seems that being married to someone you didn’t like would be a lot more tolerable if you had another significant other (or several significant others) to spend time with.
Also, Violet keeps talking about how divorce is just not done among the aristocracy, (“there are no unhappy marriages among our kind of people,” “when our people marry, it’s for life,” etc) but weren’t divorces rare everywhere? What’s so special about the aristocracy?
The scandal carries to the family name, some families pride themselves on that name more than others I’d imagine.