<p>Well, Cobrat, I’m relieved to hear that you weren’t guilty of such horrible behavior in a normal movie theater setting!</p>
<p>Regarding Branson, I think you have to take into account that he periodically has to make himself scarce in Ireland due to his revolutionary activities.</p>
<p>I don’t find it in the least unbelievable that Mary was about 20 when we first saw her, and is now about 28. Edith is a harder sell. If Daisy was about 16, she’d now be about 24. Not wholly implausible, although I think they should let her mature a bit more.</p>
<p>Honestly, you just have to relax and enjoy it. :D</p>
<p>I will keep watching, but the implausibility is ruining my escapism. Even today, it’s not that unusual for younger women to marry distinguished middle-aged gentlemen, and if the couple seems mutually thrilled about it, their families don’t usually predict a life of misery for the woman. One of my childhood friends hit her mid-30s and married a guy 25 years older than she is. Now they have 3 kids and seem very happy. Her family was 100% on board when they got to know him, and if he dies/becomes disabled while she’s still young, so be it. Frankly, they can afford help.</p>
<p>With old-maid-hood looming for Edith, people of Lord Grantham’s and (especially!) the Dowager Countess’s generation would never see this as some kind of awful fate. For heaven’s sake, the man is high-class, rich, nice-looking, an old family friend, and very kind to Edith. An excellent match for a not-that-young, not-that-beautiful middle daughter without much of a dowry. Heck, <em>I</em> would tell her to marry that guy, and I’m coming from a 21st-century feminist point of view. Women who are close to their expiration date (as Edith was – mid-20s then was like late 30s today) and want a home and children are wise to marry a nice, reliable guy instead of holding out for Prince Charming. I guess we’re meant to think Lord Grantham is an idiot.</p>
<p>Yes, that whole little plotline was ridiculous, not to mention the guy’s humiliation of Edith at the altar. Give me a break! I didn’t really buy that from the Hayden Panettiere character in Nashville (who at least had the grace not to go to the church to break up); I’m certainly not buying it from landed gentry in Edwardian Yorkshire, unless it was on the basis of some secret sadistic streak, something for which the show had provided no predicate.</p>
<p>Everyone had a lot of nerve criticizing Edith’s choice, given that as far as we have seen they have done frick-all to get her married over the past 8 years, and it would take a moron not to recognize the threat to Lady Mary’s wellbeing posed by an unattached Edith around the house. At the very least, you would think some young clergyman would have gotten a living with Edith attached, but no . . . .</p>
<p>Dramatically, however, a wounded, resentful Edith is very promising. Especially since I am tired of both O’Brien and Thomas, and not looking forward to their Alien vs. Predator matchup.</p>
<p>In Season One, Mary was old enough to have an expectation that she would marry the cousin who was next in line to be Earl of Grantham, but young enough so that she had not yet had her first London season. That probably made her 17 or 18, with Edith a year or two younger than that (now confirmed as 16 or 17), and Sybil a serious case of jailbait.</p>
<p>During Season 2, much of which took place 5-6 years after Season One, no one seemed to notice that Ladies Mary and Edith were approaching (and indeed may have passed) their sell-by dates. (According to the custom of the time, not according to me, just to be clear.) Maybe that was common due to the war, but I wondered about it a lot. Especially since, after all the fuss about Mary, no one seemed to be making any kind of fuss about Edith.</p>
<p>By the way, someone commented upthread that it was surprising that Julian Fellowes was making some of the characters seem unsympathetic. If you go back at watch Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, for which Fellowes wrote the script and won a knighthood, you will see that almost every main character in Downton Abbey had a specific predecessor in that script, and every single one of them was unsympathetic, if not reprehensible. (The Lord Grantham-equivalent was murdered halfway through the movie, and the main question was who didn’t have a good reason to kill him.) Downton Abbey is effectively a rewrite of Gosford Park with all the characters scrubbed up and made goody-goody for TV.</p>
<p>Almost certainly due to the war. As I believe I posted up thread in an earlier Downton season, Britain lost so many young men in WWI that in the post-war decades nearly a million British women never married due to a lack of available men. These British aging spinsters were so common that they became a literary stock character - Miss Jean Brodie being a well-known example. Wasn’t it Sybil who said something to the effect that nearly every boy she had danced with at the balls prior to war had died in the fighting?</p>
<p>Yes, this is why the older generation objecting to Ediths marriage based on the age and “crippled” hand of a live, wealthy and landed gentry husband was unbelievable. A woman of her age ad class would have very very few choices. Someone kind and who fit into the family would have been seen as a savior, especially by Papa and Grandmama. And if he couldn’t fulfill all his husbandry duties? So what, she could be the dowager for a while on his estate.</p>
<p>ETA, spellcheck change Husbandly, not husbandry. Although the meaning is the same…</p>
<p>I agree with that, dragonmom. He was a perfectly respectable gentleman who lived nearby and the arm injury was not all that debilitating. Very unrealistic for Lady Violet and Papa to write to him to ward him off. And older men often married younger women because wives often died in childbirth. That would not have been so uncommon.</p>
<p>I also think it completely unrealistic for Sir Antony to ditch her at the altar. He was a gentleman with traditional values and would have been honor-bound to go through with the wedding at that stage. But we must have a plot…and now Edith can explore other avenues.</p>
<p>I agree with everyone that the objections to Sir Anthony rang very false and so did his behavior, despite my "go with the flow’ attitude re Downton Abbey. On the other hand, What transpires with Edith later in the season seems more reasonable…</p>
<p>CC Downton Abbey viewers, we are now to the point where I always tell my kids, “you have now thought about this for longer than the folks who wrote it did.”</p>
<p>“My D feels that poor Patrick (with the burns) should come back, be proved to be the legitimate heir, marry Edith and then she would be Lady Grantham…”</p>
<p>I think your D is onto something! It seemed so awkward how Patrick appeared and disappeared in one episode with no further mention. It must have been for some reason, right? That has been bothering me! And it would be satisfying to see Edith displace Mary - hee hee!</p>
On the other hand, What transpires with Edith later in the season seems more reasonable…</p>