‘Downton Abbey’s Season 3 Finale Kills Again
But then, we don’t always get our just deserts.
The Downton Abbey Season 3 finale is one of the most memorable (and pivotal) episodes of the entire series. Not because it’s a particularly great story or anything, but simply because it’s the episode in which Matthew Crawley is killed. The character not only dies onscreen, but we’re forced to stare at his open-eyed body bleeding in a ditch as the final credits roll. Just so we know that he’s for real, for real gone.
Matthew’s loss still stings, though that pain has been mitigated somewhat in the years that followed by the fact that Dan Stevens has gone on to have such a successful post-Downton career. He’s starred in a Marvel superhero series (the wildly underrated Legion), played a literal Disney prince (Beauty and the Beast), performed kaiju dentistry on King Kong (Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire), and played a dozen weird little guys in various prestige films and offbeat horror movies. It’s honestly so satisfying to see how much success he’s found on his own terms.
But looking back — and we’ll see whether this judgment holds when we revisit the show’s later seasons next year — it certainly seems possible to make the argument that Downton never truly recovered from Matthew’s loss. Sure, it remained must-see TV right till the end, but it was never truly the same. At least the character gets to go out on a true high note, with everything he ever wanted in front of him at last. Of course, that’s also what makes it all so tragic.
