Pure fanservice, from start to finish. But I enjoyed being serviced.
Happy endings all round, pretty much. Except for Carson having the palsy.
Nice to see Rose again.
Still, the palsy he has seems very minor. Just enough to make Carson retire and enjoy a long retirement with his new wife in his bucolic cottage despite himself. Certainly not the beginning of a long and painful decline.
Hell, the way Dickie’s issue got resolved, I suspect that it was just a coincidental series of extremely localized earthquakes, cured quickly by moving just a little farther away from the Downton fault line.
I’d say Mrs. Hughes got the worst ending. 
I missed a line: when Lord G. came back to Cora after the phone call from Edith, what were the two things she guessed about it? That Edith was pregnant again and ???
I guess it is a tad late to comment on the execrable writing… :rolleyes:
I thought it was “on trial for treason” or something like that.
Meh, unfortunately. The whole episode was just “and they all lived happily ever after”.
And that’s false to the spirit of the series. They can’t live happily ever after - the great houses of England are ending, and the Great Depression is coming.
The whole reconciliation between Edith and the Marquis was forced. The idea was that Edith wasn’t honest, and the Marquis couldn’t live with that. Then he changes his mind because Mary sets up lunch. And the whole “I can’t be a racer but used car salesman is close enough” was just ludicrous. And the the Daisy-Andy pair off was too compressed - it should have taken at least three episodes to carry off. And then all of a sudden the old guy, Daisy’s father-in-law, decides he wants Mrs. Patmore. Where did that come from?
Anna giving birth in Mary’s bedroom was a nice touch.
I guess my objection is mostly that the resolutions didn’t arise out of the situations as they were set up. Fellowes apparently simply decided he had run out of ideas, it was the last season, so he married off everybody. The End.
The series is a tragedy. Maybe the individual characters can have lives afterwards, but Downton Abbey itself is doomed, as is the way of life it embodies. They sort of hinted at that, with Carson’s palsy, and then Thomas coming back to run a greatly reduced staff, but that is continuity, not resolution.
Oh well. It was a good series, and overall I loved it. Hoping it would be an all-time classic is too much to expect.
Regards,
Shodan
You’ve missed complaints going back to Season 2. In which Lord Fellowes (the only writer) made a hash of the Great War…
If you want that, you can always re-watch Upstairs, Downstairs.
I agree with everyone that it was too happy and too tidy and not well-written, but I enjoyed being played like a poorly-played fiddle, and am content.
A cook’s assistant is allowed to go rummaging through Her Ladyship’s drawers looking for a hair dryer? :dubious:
I wish Denker had died of the plague. Yeesh. What a useless bitch.
I’m glad Edith learned her lesson and owned up quickly to Lady Hexam about Marigold.
So how does the inheritance work, now that George is going to have a little half brother or sister? Is s/he in line?
Mr. Mason was making eyes at Mrs. Patmore for quite a few episodes, and Daisy was being her usual git-self about it.
I missed what happened with Mosely…he’s going to be headmaster of the school now?
Loved the role-change when Anna’s water broke. It just goes to show deep down, they are good friends. Mary didn’t think twice about getting her undressed and into her bed (although I wonder how Henry felt about that. I do hope there’s a mattress shop in the village.)
I’m still sorry Isobel didn’t wind up with Dr. Clarkson, although it would have been nice to see Larry’s face when he realized his father isn’t THAT close to death’s door.
And it does look like Tom and Edith’s editor were making goo-goo eyes at each other.
Still, they all lived Happily Ever After…at least in Julian Fellowes’ world.
No. None of Robert’s daughters are in line in the first place. The whole premise of the series is based on that. Robert has no sons so the next Earl was a cousin of his who Mary was to marry. That guy died on the Titanic so the next in line was Matthew, a more distant cousin.
Young George will be the next Earl should he survive because he is Matthew’s son. It has nothing to do with Mary.
I think he went from long-term sub teacher to tenure-track teacher, which comes with a cottage.
So we had weddings for Edith-Bertie and Violet-Larry; and nascent relationships budding with Dawes-Patmore, Andrew-Daisy, Tom-Edmonds (does she have a first name?), Molesley-Baxter…I think the only ones not paired off are Barrow and The Dowager.
We should have had Spratt & Denker finally acknowledge the sexual tension between them. 
Yeah, but in the first half hour there were a couple of real clinkers. I believe the 2d was Danker saying, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” I forget the first. Shit plot and character aside, dialogue like that suggested that he wasn’t even trying…
So, who gets Downton if little George dies?
I agree about Henry’s convenient (to Mary and Tom) turn from racing; what, he saw no track deaths before this one, or never contemplated the possibility of dying in a crash? :dubious: But the rest rang true to me:
*The Mr. Mason/Mrs. Patmore thing has been building up all season – remember his thank-you note that Daisy suppressed but Mrs. P plucked from the garbage – and IIRC in previous seasons Mrs. P. has visited Mason’s farm and Mrs. P and Mason have previously spoken of each other in admiring tones.
*Mrs. P. not only explained to Daisy and the audience 
Daisy’s contrarian attitude towards men wooing her but cited examples so she wasn’t just pulling it out of her [del]hat[/del] cap. Her little intervention worked, so there’s an explanation for Daisy’s (yes, rather sudden) turn-around on Andy. Or, to parallel upstairs and downstairs, Daisy was suppressing her feelings for Andy as Mary was suppressing her feelings for Henry, and both needed someone to metaphorically kick their butts into action.
*Edith lampshaded your reaction, asking Bertie what’s changed. But he explained that he can’t live without her. He looked pained and regretful when he [del]dumped her[/del] parted from her, and only worse when he met her at the Ritz. It seemed to me that this episode was at least a few weeks (not just a few days) since the end of last episode, so he’s had a long-ish time to stew on being without her. Bertie also needed someone to figuratively kick his ass harder than he feared his mother would (maybe figuratively, maybe not).
I was a bit bored by the “happily ever after” ending. That’s just simply not Downton after all ;). Oh well…
I liked that everything got wrapped up with a bow on top, to me it seemed like this was clearly the direction the show was heading in. Fan satisfaction, I’m fine with that. I am fine with ambiguous endings in TV series, but this didn’t feel like that kind of a story to me. It was supposed to feel like a gift.
The whole Denker/Spratt plot this season was tiresome, it felt so wedged in this season and I don’t feel particularly invested in either of them, but I liked that they used it to give the Dowager a scene where she just lost it (reading the column and laughing).
Would Rose have really walked in the door and almost immediately rushed down to see the servants? Was she that attached to them?
I loved how you could see how concerned Mary was about Carson. Michelle Dockery is so fantastic.
In as much as I get why the “right” thing is for Baxter is not to visit or respond to the guy in prison in any way, I personally really wanted to know what he wanted to tell her! Was it a real apology? A fake apology meant to con her into something? This felt to me like the writers never figured out what he wanted either.
Some even more distant cousin whom we haven’t met (and likely neither has any of the characters). Patrick (the Titanic guy) was already a cousin, Matthew was a more distant cousin, and this guy would be basically a stranger.
Matthew was a stranger as well when we started down this path. It could also be that there are no more heirs and the title would go vacant. The first Earl’s male line could die out.
Of course I was rooting for everyone to be happy, but the last episode felt forced to me, especially with Edith. Hexham seems like a decent guy, but I was really hoping that somehow Gregson would come back. He and Edith seemed totally right for each other, Marigold is his daughter so no issues with that, and he was keen on her working at the magazine. I wonder if Hexham will be so OK with her as a career woman, or whether he’ll expect her to leave the magazine and be a traditional aristocratic wife and mother.
I was really hoping Barrow would make a complete break and go to London, where he would’ve at least had more chance of finding a circle of friends who’d accept him as a gay man.
And it would’ve been refreshing, to say the least, to have Mary’s fiance give her a reality check about her rude and snotty behavior.
But I’m happy that Branson seems to be getting a new love interest, that Anna and Bates have a kid, and that Mrs. Patmore may have a fulfilling life running the B&B.
Heh. I actually turned to my girlfriend during the wedding scene when the priest does the whole if anyone has any objections, etc., and said “Watch, Gregson walks in the door right now and yells ‘WAIT!’”. 
I found that dinner scene at the Ritz to be strange, with Edith acting as if she was the aggrieved party - you tried to hide that you had a daughter from him before marrying him! You aren’t the aggrieved party here, Edith! You should be grateful he wants you after that.