Downtown Abbey Had A Fine Endings...

 Lady Edith

I saw the ending of Downton Abbey and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed this whole last season. There may be one or two of you who seem to recall that I swore off the bloody mess some years ago and never spent a moment's time looking at it, except for a few minutes here and there when Barrow was darkly smoking a fag and his distaff partner in crime, O'Brien, lurked about, smirking with sexual and otherwise tension....
 The first season was pretty good, but the second season was awful, and Julian Fellowes sort of showed an unusual inability to stick to a plot.
I  hypothesized that the whole thing was a nonce, and nobody thought it would go anywhere, and Julian Fellowes was off celebrating on some sort of extended LGBT Days of Wine and Roses.

This ghastly hopping around was bad enough, but then he decided to plagiarize vignettes in their entirety without even attempting to disguise them; exampli gratia, the flower or rose show where the dowager duchess won year after year was a barbarous rapine of Lady Beldon's perennially winning roses in Mrs. Miniver!
Shameful.

Things did get better, so I was informed. I stayed quite apart from it. Until the last 2 seasons, that is, and then I found that it had become less primitive and barbarous, more civilized and more suited to mixed company. Even Mr. Barrow had abandoned his rather aimless and uninformed quest for evil frivolity, and become a substantial citizen.

However, there was a certain lapse last night... a certain lapse! That's all I can say about it; a certain lapse!
When Bertie and Edith are on the verge of tying the knot, there is this business of morals rearing its ugly head. So there's Marigold and whatever.... I did not catch a mention of Edith's amours with the local farmers, rolling about in the hayloft... because Sir Julian forget it, I suppose.

But there was a mention of Bertie's cousin, the Marquess of Something - perhaps "of Omnium Et Gatherum!?!? - who died a while back in Tangiers under the most shady and sketchy of circumstances, and we really must not go there! 
It positively reeked of the Reading Gaol.


Rather a bit like Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Rather!
Perhaps the Marquess died while in the abode of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Tangiers. Perhaps Lord Sebastian took him in after he kicked out his German sailor, Kurt.
Anyway, why was it brought up? I mean, the whole Tangiers thing? It was amazing how it focused me on Anthony Andrews. I mean, really a show should not give out such clues as to make one's mind sort of rapidly disconnect and fly to some other series.

Who bloody LGBT knows?

Anyway, it was a fine endings. 
(Note: there is a pun here on "innings: endings" ... not very funny... If you recall, Lord Merton - under the belief that he was critical due to pernicious anemia, told Mrs. Crawley that he had had a "good innings" --- cricket speak... Oh,  I give up!)

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