Hughes, causing Carson to quit a job he didn’t have yet-the butlering at Haxby Park, the future Carlisle estate. Totally grossed out, Anna tattles to Carson and Mrs. Speaking of ill-fated entanglements: as his suspicion of Mary’s Matthew crush deepens, Murdoch-Carlisle decides to yank Anna into his bedroom, offering to pay her if she’ll agree to bind a tape-recorder to her linen apron and start hacking Lady Mary’s voicemail, reporting back any juicy findings. Might we suggest he brush up on Genesis for some reminders about the perils of apple metaphors? Her bushel of apples-from Mum’s orchard, she squeaks! This is a ripe-for-the-picking analogy!- tumble from her basket over the estate’s pea-gravel drive, and Lord Grantham stoops sexually to help her collect them.

The tension between the married couple starts in the parlor, but soon infiltrates steerage, where pinched Cora Lite-brunette maid Jane-repeatedly apparates to soothe Robert’s woes. And Lord Grantham, who never warmed to the war’s expropriation of social power, is even more irritable now that it’s over, impatient that the house hasn’t immediately returned to Edwardian patriarchy. Cora, given a taste of enfranchised usefulness, is straining at returning to a life of dinner silks and seating arrangements. Back to “normal.” But while the rooms have sprung back to their posh pre-war form, the ghosts of the estate’s 30 total dead still loom, and the personalities of the living have manifestly changed-some for the better, as we see with Sybil bluntly saying to Edith’s face, “You’re so much nicer than you were before the war.” (W.W.I’s positive externalities, revealed!) Mary is mulling one of the new Parisian pixie cuts, saying she doesn’t know how feminine she really is, anyway-“ Very, I’m glad to say,” says lascivious tweed-heap Sir Richard “Murdoch” Carlisle. At the curtain-up, we’re in 1919, which means the cots have all been bussed into the U-Haul and replaced with the lovely pink silk-damask upholstery. Let us start, as one does, at the beginning. There was a proposal! A wedding! A funeral! Two adulterous smooches, and some greaser-soc necking! And a fever, all through the night! But how to resolve so many dangling threads, before the exclamation point that is next week’s “Christmas Special”? The answer is a two-hour penultimate installment, with plotlines flung like a fistful of spaghetti against some tasteful William Morris wallpaper. As our eyes mist over with regretful tears, we are beginning to see the evening redness in the west-*Downton Abbey’*s second-season sun is setting over the estate’s spires.

The Fire Night Ball by Anne Carlisle