Downton Abbey, Christmas special, Christmas day, review 5 Stars (spoilers) (The Telegraph)

Sarah Crompton reviews the Christmas day special of 'Downton Abbey' and is relieved to find the love story perfectly wrapped up for Christmas.

5

Young love: Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Crawley Photo: ITV

By Sarah Crompton

10:00PM GMT 25 Dec 2011

 

So now the last eye has been wiped, the last heart string wrung: Downton Abbey (ITV1) has delivered the consummation devoutly to be wished. That handsome, kind-hearted Matthew has got down on one knee in front of Lady Mary in the gently falling snow, and she has agreed to be his wife.

It wrapped up the Christmas special as perfectly as a gift. But the entire two-hour episode represented a remarkable return to form for a show that had gained viewers but lost its way. Julian Fellowes managed to pack more into his script for the time between Christmas Eve 1919 and shortly after New Year 1920, than he poured into the entire First World War as depicted in the last series.

While there, everything was stuck in a rut so deep it felt like being on a circular drive, here everything fairly whipped along. Bates finally came to trial for the supposed murder of his wife, allowing poor Brendan Coyle, who plays him, once more to wear the look of saintly suffering that has dogged him for far too long. Unfortunately, he was found guilty, though not hanged: which may mean he has to adopt the expression for a considerable portion of series three, too.

Put-upon kitchen maid, Daisy, found her voice, and stood up for her rights for promotion within the servant hierarchy. But she also stopped moping about William, the footman she’d married hours before his death from war wounds, and in a scene which was almost indecently touching, forged a new relationship with her bereaved father-in-law. Lord Grantham finally discovered his backbone, and declared that he hadn’t suffered a war and a murder in order to let his oldest daughter Mary be engaged to a man who threatened her with ruin.

That fiancé, Sir Richard Carlisle (Iain Glen, heroic in a thankless role) had from the very start of the episode proved himself to be an utter cad, not only by the sword he held over Mary’s head of exposing her sexual shenanigans with the late Mr Pamuk, but by suggesting there was a tiny possibility that Bates might actually be guilty.

In both these contexts, it didn’t matter a fig that there was in fact a strong strain of truth in his assertion that “glaciers are fast compared to you on this” when he asked Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to name the date for their wedding. He was doomed from the moment Matthew (Dan Stevens) returned from the war, clutching to his bosom the keepsake Mary had given him. From then on, he couldn’t even raise his voice to her without Matthew appearing. They even rolled about the drawing room, having fisticuffs, and breaking a vase. “It was a wedding present from a frightful aunt,” said Maggie Smith, alias Violet, the Dowager Countess, with a curl of the lip. “I have hated it for half a century.”

All that needed to happen, to make the episode complete, was for Matthew to get over his sense that “I deserve to be unhappy. So does Mary”. No you don’t, we all screamed from our sofas. No you really don’t, said his mother, the magnificent Penelope Wilton, firmly. And that was that. Sealed with a loving kiss.

All of this unfolded with the help of an excellent sub-plot involving Nigel Havers as a fortune hunter, and a slightly tedious one about dastardly Thomas’s theft of a dog. It was beautifully filmed – the hunting party emerging from the mist, Sir Richard departing framed in the morning light – and acted with gentle conviction. Stevens and Dockery in particular grounded all the high emotion in warm truthfulness, giving the series its beating heart.

Best of all, Fellowes had relocated his wit along with his narrative touch; the episode was shot through with wonderful lines, many of them delivered with withering brilliance by Smith.
“No fortune?” she remarked of the unfortunate Havers. “He’s lucky not to be playing a violin in Leicester Square.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/downton-abbey/8975463/Downton-Abbey-Christmas-special-Christmas-day-review.html