Brendan Coyle as John Bates. (PBS)
Last night’s double-length episode of Downton Abbey neatly tied up with ribbons and bows several major storylines that had been building all season. It also laid the groundwork for a potential plot complication or two to come.
This penultimate episode, to be followed next Sunday by the two-hour, season-ending Christmas special, gave nearly everyone at Downton Abbey, both upstairs and downstairs, a happy ending (though not the massage parlor kind), at least for now.
As the episode opens, the wrongfully imprisoned John Bates (Brendan Coyle) is finally released from the hoosegow (after an unnecessarily complicated and barely comprehensible plot to clear his name that dragged out all season). His ever-loving wife, lady’s maid Anna (Joanne Froggatt), is there to meet him.
Back at Downton Abbey, all the residents, upstairs and down, are thrilled to have Bates back. Everyone except for scowling Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier), who rightfully fears that Bates will be getting his old job back as Lord Crawley’s valet, a post to which Thomas had ascended in Bates’s absence.
Bates and Anna move into their new home, a somewhat decrepit cottage on the estate. Thrilled at the prospect of actually living together for the first time in their married life, they set about sprucing up their cozy love nest with patching and paint.
Thomas finally does more than merely cast longing looks at Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers), the new footman. Mistakenly believing that his advances will be welcomed, Thomas attempts to kiss a sleeping Jimmy in the footman’s bedroom. He does so only because lady’s maid Sarah O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) has deliberately misled her former ally-turned-nemesis into thinking that Jimmy is sweet on him, too.
“Alfred says he’s always going on about you. Silly sloppy stuff,” she coos. (Alfred, played by Matt Milne, is her nephew and also a footman.)
Jimmy takes umbrage at Thomas’s advances. He swears to Alfred, who has walked in and seen the two men in an apparent embrace that it’s not what it looks like. Jimmy tells Thomas, “There’s nothing between us, except my fist if you don’t get out.” Thomas realizes the sad truth: O’Brien has played him.
It all turns into a major cause célèbre. Jimmy, after being egged on by O’Brien, demands that Mr. Carson (Jim Carter), the butler, fire Thomas without a reference, which will render it impossible for Thomas to find a new position.
READ MORE: http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2013/02/downton-abbey-recap-season-three-episode-six/
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