Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Writer: Julian Fellowes
Original Air Date: October 10, 2010
Watch It On: Amazon Prime Instant Video
What It’s About: After being thwarted by The Duke of Crowborough (Charlie Cox), and flung at middle-class Cousin Matthew (Dan Stevens), Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) is determined to find a proper aristocratic husband. So, she invites the boring, but likable, Evelyn Napier (Brendan Patricks) to stay at Downton Abbey and join in on a hunt. The catch? Evelyn Napier is bringing an unexpected guest: a Turkish diplomat named Kemal Pamuk (Divergent‘s Theo James). To everyone’s surprise and delight, Pamuk turns out to be exceptionally handsome. He seduces Lady Mary, she goes to bed with him and then he dies in bed with her.
Why It’s So Good: It was kind of a mystery as to why ITV and PBS were funneling so much money into a sleepy period piece set at a fictional Yorkshire manor when the show wasn’t based on a recognizable series or book. Then, Kemal Pamuk died in Lady Mary’s bed.
Downton Abbey immediately shifted from being a slow-moving, yet perfectly delightful, period drama into a soap opera worth obsessing over. It’s true that the previous two episodes featured deaths on the Titanic and the revelation that a main character was gay, but the choice to have Lady Mary go to bed with a Byronic Turk alone was the truly shocking plot twist. It subverted expectations and illustrated that the ice queen had both a heart and a libido. Then, to have him die off-camera in her bed was even more stunning. We still don’t know exactly why he died and Lady Mary’s desire to keep both the scandal of his death and her deflowering out of the society pages became a major driving force in seasons to come.
Don’t Forget The B-Plot: Meanwhile, it��s revealed that Gwen (Game of Throne‘s Rose Leslie) wants to leave service and become a secretary, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) embarrasses herself by trying to flirt with the uninterested Cousin Matthew and there’s more debate over whether or not if they should smash Downton’s entail so that Lady Mary can at least inherit Cora’s (Elizabeth McGovern) money.
There’s also a subplot where Bates (Brendan Coyle) buys a painful contraption to cure his bum leg, but I can’t talk about that because I have an active dislike of Bates.
The Best Moment: When loyal housemaid Anna (Joanna Froggatt) convinces Mary to convince Cora to help them move the body from Mary’s room to Pamuk’s. It’s high stakes drama that veers into slapstick comedy and then swings back into drama when it’s revealed that kitchenmaid Daisy (Sophie McShera) saw them move the body.
Photos: ITV & PBS
