The wife is institutionalized right? Maybe that enters into it.
Regarding the coat and the ticket…I thought there’d a last minute reveal by Bates to Ana that she had actually donated the wrong coat. Either that the coat had been a recent hand-me-down gift from Lord Grantham or something. I like the idea of that being settled between them, but with Mary and Mrs. Hughes still thinking he’s probably a murderer.
When they were introduced Martha even said that she followed Mrs Dudley Ward in the American papers.
No, Gregson would have to leave his wife at least a life interest in 1/3rd of his estate (most likely in trust form since she’s insane); he could leave Edith the other 2/3rds. The child wouldn’t inherit anything, and if he does turn out to be dead I don’t think there’s any way for Edith to establish paternity either. And let’s now life out Gregson’s in-laws; they could cause a very nasty & very public court case over all of this.
Now that would have been interesting. If we learned whose coat it really was, then that person would become a suspect in the Pushing of Green.
But instead we have this inexplicable choice by Bates to hold on to the Incriminating Stub. sigh
And to alphaboi867: Thanks for that information; I didn’t know the specifics of “1/3 of the estate” but had heard something to that general effect somewhere. And as you point out, Edith would not really be able to prove paternity of her baby, so “baby as heir” doesn’t make sense, either.
I think Edith was talking more of a moral obligation to make sure the baby got some of daddy’s money. Oh and speaking of that, were we to understand that the pig man completely got it that the baby he was taking is Edith’s? It seemed evident by him emphasizing that the secret would be between the two of them alone — but I second-guess myself.
Mary seems to barely be aware she has a son. Seems like Edith is taking up the slack in the maternal feelings department.
That’s exactly how I took it. Enlightenment dawned.
I gotta have some sympathy for Edith, sad sack that she’s always been, but it’s difficult to sympathize with her taking the baby back from the Schroeders. Particularly since we’ve seen how women of her class handle being a mother.
So she’ll take the baby from the Schroeders, plop it down with the Drew family, chuck her under the chin occasionally, and fret about how she’s being raised. Is she going to allow the child to go to the same schools as the other Drew children?
second that. I originally thought she told him straight out but watched it again. His reaction to it was one of enlightenment and then he gets reinforcement by way of her reaction to it.
Regarding the ticket - Bates is cast as a shrewd player (expert forger and pickpocket among his skills). Why in the world would he still have potentially incriminating evidence in his coat pocket months later? No way, no how.
The ticket is hardly incriminating. He was in the same city as someone who had an accident. Big deal.
Yes, but he still should have tossed the thing. That whole plot was ridiculous.
I think it’s clear she was; though I doubt she’s bothered to consult with a solicitor about her it.
I think this is a just a stop gap measure until she figures out what happened to Gregson. She doesn’t have a solid long-term plan for him not coming back yet. Of course if her parents knew the baby would be packed off to Great-Grandmamma Martha in Newport.
Lady Rose is the Dowager Countess’s great niece, so I’m wondering why Cora’s mother and brother make the trip over for her coming out? Would they be that involved in that distant of a relative, or was it just too good of a party to be missed?
And I wasn’t clear about when the Attack of the Brownshirts was. I assumed it was just after Gregson arrived in Germany, but not sure why they would just not be hearing of it.
I am also wondering how Edith plans to be connected to her daughter, sngling her out from the other children on the farm. I suppose she could declare that she sees promise in the child and sponsor her in a special boarding school or something, but that will take years.
Uncle Harold apparently felt it would be best to get out of the US for a while after the whole Teapot Dome scandal. Rose’s coming out wasn’t of any particular importance to him or his mother, it just happened to be going on around that time. Uncle Harold apparently hadn’t come over for Mary, Edith, or Sybil’s coming out balls, as Edith said she’d never even met him before.
So Edith’s baby was adopted by a Swiss family. And now (months later) she’s going to take the baby away from them and give it to the farmer to whom Robert lent fifty pounds and who is taking care of the estate’s pigs. (He’s apparently the only farmer in the village, given how he’s the only one the family meets with.) It seems a bit cruel to do to the Swiss family.
And I was amused by how crass Cora’s brother was, to the extent that he extended his hand to the Prince of Wales.
Why would being harassed by brown shirts in 1923 be so unbelievable? That was the year of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. There were thousands of brown shirts there. They were essentially thugs and brawlers who went around intimidating and beating up people who were seen as opposing their philosophy and goals. In fact, when Gregson said he was going to Munich, I said to my wife, “He’d better steer clear of the beer halls.” When they reported him missing, I figured he was either arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or beaten to death or into severe injury after mouthing off in the wrong place.
I specifically figured that maybe he got caught in the commotion in the Marienplatz and was arrested by police who thought he was a conspirator and that they`d find him in a jail at some point.
Put a foreigner in Munich and have him run his mouth about them, and it’s not surprising at all that something bad might happen to him.
Bates the murderer: I don’t think Mary, Mrs. Hughes, or Anna care if Bates murdered that guy, other than their fear of his getting caught. Certainly Anna’s only fear was that if Bates murdered the guy he’d go back to prison and she’d lose him. In fact, she automatically assumed that Bates would murder him, and didn’t have a problem with that other than the fear of his getting caught doing so. She certainly didn`t seem to see it as a reflection of his character. I kind of got the impression that a woman would expect her husband to murder a rapist on her behalf.
Other than that, I agree that the story line is far fetched. Not only the ticket left behind, but the good fortune of Bates finding himself in a position to be able to kill Anna’s rapist in public without anyone suspecting him or even realizing that it was murder. All too convenient.
I still suspect that Bates might have killed his wife. Until recently, what we’d been told about Bates is that he was a good, honorable man who married a horrible woman and succumbed to the bottle under the stress until cleaning himself up. While being a drunk he did some bad things like thievery, presumably to pay for his alcohol. Okay, that’s consistent with his character.
But now we find out he’s a master forger, and a pickpocket (along with no doubt other criminal skills). That’s not something a drunk learns to do haphazardly to pay for his next bottle. Those are skills that take years of dedication and practice to master. Probably starting at a young age and as an apprentice to another criminal. There was no other way to learn those skills back then. So Bates has a long, dark past of criminal activity, probably dating back into his childhood. And then he goes to war and makes friends with the Earl, and suddenly appears shortly thereafter with the mannerisms, skills and habits of an elite servant?
I’m afraid the character has been written into incoherence. Bates was my favorite character in the first two seasons - now he’s just a cipher, and not a particularly interesting one any more.
Not that it takes anything away from your larger point but he was supposed to have learned those skills while in prison.
We are supposed to feel sorry for Edith the Suffering Madonna, but she is ping-ponging her baby around from family to family like changing hotels.
The Purloined Letter subplot was a little slapstick, but not objectionably so.
What I was disappointed by was that Lord Grantham did not deliver a major slap-down when Thomas tattled to him about the ex-chauffeur and his new girlfriend. So he’s dating now - big effing deal. I was hoping Lord Robert would give the upper class equivalent of “keep your yap shut about the doings of your betters if you want to keep your job”, for no other reason that a guilty conscience about Lord Robert and the chambermaid of a season or so ago, not to mention Mary and the narrowly-averted foreigner fornication.
I kind of liked the ambiguity of the did he/didn’t he with Bates and the dead rapist. And Mary’s attack of conscience about “I must not keep this dire secret no matter what the cost” was out of character - what does she care if one of the servant class gets his comeuppance? Anna belongs to her - therefore Bates gets to kill people who interfere such that the family would not get good service. I thought that was part of the point about nobody noticing if it was Daisy or someone else who goes to America to cook - “they all look the same” so any servant girl is as good as another.
And the suggestion of a romance between Mrs. Hughes and Carson was way off. They are partners, and Mrs. Hughes already turned down a chance to marry the rich farmer.
Not to say I didn’t like the episode - I did - but it was rather obviously a season finale and they had to move rather expeditiously from story arc to story arc and move each one forward, drop in the plot development or wrap up the arc altogether, and then move on to the next.
And now to pine until the start of next season.
Regards,
Shodan
I have to admit, I’m torn about the Edith situation - we’re shown her grief and her impossible situation, but yeah, it’s not fair to the baby or the adoptive family at all.
The worst thing is that I thought of several options other than the abortion/infamy dilemma she was in. First, she should tell Cora. Cora was extremely forgiving and practical when Mary killed that Turk with her vagina, going so far as to physically carry his carcass back to his bedroom. I think she probably would have figured out some way for Edith to have the baby without total social destruction. Maybe there would be a way to make it appear that she married Gregson abroad. If not, send her to America with a story about being widowed or something. I even thought they might enlist Tom, who’s something of a loose end in the family, to marry her and pose as the father. Rosamund’s plan was better than nothing, but it lacked imagination.
The silliest part was all the maneuvering about who was going to be where and when.
What would have been cool was if they’d speeded up the action, putting the players in their places, accompanied by appropriate music. Where’s Charlie Chaplin when you need him?
It seems to me that it would have been so easy to send Edith to Newport, with a story about her secret marriage to Mr. Gregson who was currently in Germany. Then he either died in Germany or came back and was quickly brought into the loop. It’s difficult to believe that this family couldn’t have found a willing parson to provide a marriage license.