‘Downton Abbey’ Season 2 Sprints Toward the Finish
Wasn’t there a masked ball in Paris where cholera broke out? Half the guests were dead before they left the ballroom.
The penultimate installment of Downton Abbey’s second season is...well. It’s a lot. Full of a half-dozen storylines that could each have served as the focus of their own hour, it’s an episode that’s definitely trying to do too much. Whether this is ultimately because the back half of this season has pacing problems aplenty or because PBS decided to air this installment — which was originally broadcast as two episodes in the U.K. — as one supersized block, almost nothing gets any real space to breathe. Sure, it’s a fairly breathless ride right up until the final credits, but at what cost?
An hour that not only sees Matthew miraculously walk again, the episode also features Bates and Anna getting married, Robert cheating on Cora, Thomas running a black market grocery store, Bates getting arrested, Sybil agreeing to run off and marry Tom, the arrival of the Spanish flu, and Lavinia’s sudden death. Things happen at a pace that makes it hard to process what’s happened, let alone properly feel anything about it.
(Sure does make you wonder why we needed things like, oh, the Fake Patrick subplot last week, doesn’t it?)
