Downton Abbey III-6

Can we really be up to the sixth episode of Season Three already? The producers snuck in a two hour episode that drops so many lines in the water you'd think it was a party boat fluke fishing. Thank goodness for the DVR. This episode was longer than Super Bowl half-time, even with the electrical outage.

What year are we in? Obvious clue is the cinema that Ivy and Alfred go to, where Lillian Gish is playing in 'Way Down East,' a story not quite unlike that of Mrs. Crawley's Ethel. That makes it only 1920. Yikes, time is not flying.

And if that clue is too subtle that we're in the 1920s, then we have the 18 year-old cousin Rose who drinks, flaps, and sneaks off to smokey London jazz clubs with married men where black people play the clarinet. It's all so delicious.

Lord G. is having a tough time asserting post-war authority. In the prior episode, he wasn't able to scare a single crow out of Mrs. Crawley's luncheon dining room. The dessert trumped him.  And here in episode six, he's having a Dickens of a time with Bob Cratchit, son-in-law Matthew, who owns half the pile and has all the ideas.

Lady Edith goes to London to consider becoming a columnist, and enters the world of offices and women who type and smoke. And married men who flirt. The times, they are a changin.'

But on the male side there's an emerging triumvirate developing here between Lord G., Matthew and Tom (Branson). Lord G. is not wholly without skills. The money here is that Lady Edith's columns get him roused enough to run for Parliament. Stay tuned.

The Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lord G.'s mother, played by Maggie Smith, gets all the good one-liners. Thus, Branson's brother after the inevitable one-too-many-for-the-Irish, is a "drunken gorilla," while hardly looking like a gorilla. Or, does she mean guerrilla? These IRA types, you know. Granny is the slyest of them all. Close captioned says 'gorilla.' But which one does Granny really mean? Hmmm.

If her son Robert's influence is slipping, her's is Gibraltar. She is the eminence gris of the household; Carmine De Sapio without sunglasses, but tapping a cane instead.

If this were a Norman Lear production in the 1970s, Granny would have her own show by now. Aside from the drawing room intrigue, she acts as judge and jury when she banishes the young thing Rose to Scotland for a month with a maid. She is decades ahead of Judge Judy.

Despite the sodomy laws in laws in Britain in the 1920s, a man-to-man a kiss on the lips is just one of life's slips. Lord G. as much admits that when he discloses that if he yelled out at Eton whenever he was bussed by a male, he'd he hoarse. If he were Italian, that much kissing would have left him dead.

Mary and Matthew now seem medically cleared for parental take-off. But what guy goes to his wife's gynecologist? Ours is not to ask, I suppose. Only marvel that they don't seem to have to stay within network.

Bates leaves jail dressed like he's ready to serve tea. He meets Anna outside H.M.S. York prison, which until now has been Bates Motel. He and Anna, I guess because they're married servants, will get a cottage on the estate. Lord G. insists. Can a cradle be far behind as he an Anna plop onto a ruptured sofa, much like John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara breaking the bed in 'A Quiet Man?'

And then there's the episode closing cricket match. The English playing that thoroughly incomprehensible game that has everyone wearing the same sweater with no numbers, running between wickets while holding onto the bat. Things are settling down. For now.

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