Death Comes to ‘Downton Abbey’
I hope it is not vulgar in me to suggest that you find some way to overcome your scruples.
Death finally arrives at Downton Abbey as the series’ second season reaches its midpoint. It is a twist that, as Anna alludes to at one point in the episode, is largely inevitable, given the scale at which World War I decimated an entire generation of young men, but it’s heartbreaking all the same.
That the show decides to kill off a second-tier downstairs character was probably also inevitable, if only because Downton needed to make the horrors of war feel immediate, but can’t possibly sacrifice Matthew, who still has so much story left to tell. So, sorry, William, your number’s up. But at least the young man gets to go out fairly valiantly, saving Matthew’s life at Amiens and marrying Daisy before dying relatively peacefully in a bed at the big house surrounded by those he cares about. It’s, unfortunately, a lot more than most young men during this time period can say they got.
(Your mileage can and likely will vary, of course, when it comes to how you feel about William’s mysteriously unnamed but somehow completely deadly lung-destroying injury that killed him within days but without any visible suffering. Sure!)
