Finally! It's been a few weeks now since these Specials aired and as it turns out there's only a limited amount of time after an episode has been released that I feel in the right headspace to write about it. So I'm going to keep this relatively short (by my standards, anyway).
Watching Downton Abbey used to be like drinking a hot chocolate filled with spices and marsh-mellows. Now it's like scooping up the frothy layer with a teaspoon and never getting to the good stuff underneath. I can still enjoy those spoonfuls of froth, but there's a profound difference in the amount of satisfaction you get out of it.
Julian Fellowes, you've had a good run, but it's time to start wrapping this up. It would seem that two more cast members are leaving for other opportunities: Lily James and Allen Leech, leading to their characters discussing prospects in America. They'll be joining other members of the young cast that have already departed: Rose Leslie and Thomas Howes, Jessica Brown Findlay and Dan Stevens, and that trio of assorted footmen/kitchen maids that no one cared about.
With the third generation too young to have personalities, and Mary/Edith/Thomas heading into early middle age, the cast is beginning to look a little ... um ... aged. All that's really left is Daisy down in the kitchens.
Most of these young actors have used Downton Abbey as a stepping stone to greater things, and with them gone it feels like it's time to either bring the story to a close or go in a different direction entirely. Wasn't there once talk of a prequel exploring Robert and Cora's courtship? I'd much prefer to watch that.
Unlike many previous Christmas Specials, this one felt like a normal episode that had simply been stretched to ninety minutes. There was no central narrative, but a series of vignettes of varying quality, separated into two distinct parts: the hunting trip with the Sinderbys, and Christmas at Downton Abbey.
As ever, the best moments are the quiet, understated ones: Mrs Patmore coming up to the library "for some air", the staff enjoying a candlelit dinner while the family is away, Barrow surprising even himself by defending Branson, Mary/Edith/Tom taking a moment to remember Sybil ("we're the ones who should have grown old with her"), Violet revealing her true motivations in saving Princess Kuragin, and that hilarious/heart-warming split-second after Mr Bates is cleared, where you can see on Mary's face that she would prefer to leave him on the run so as to not give Anna back up to the police.
There were some familiar (though mildly underused) guest stars: the always-great Alun Armstrong and the equally-good Matthew Goode, who seems to be yet another potential suitor for Mary. Problem is, he seems to be a fairly in-demand actor, so it's difficult to see him committing to any long term role here. But then – what was the point of him otherwise, especially given his love of cars and the inevitable friction this will cause with Mary? Though asking "what was the point?" seems rather futile at this stage, as there didn't seem to be any to the Gillingham/Blake love triangle.
Elsewhere the endless Bates felony drama continues, as does the Denker/Sprat feud, and a surprise marriage proposal from Mr Carson to Mrs Hughes. Most are celebrating this development, so I don't want to throw too much cold water over it, but I much preferred them as life partners and work colleges. In many ways the two of have already been married for many years, and that unspoken bond between them was best left – well, unspoken. (What can I say, I like my platonic male/female relationships).
In what must be a new record, Fellowes pulls not one, not two, but three hitherto unmentioned backstories out of the closet to graft onto his characters: that Hughes has a mentally ill sister, that Anna was nearly a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, and that Violet nearly eloped with Prince Kuragin and was "saved" from ruin by the intervening Princess. Oh, and to top things off, Lord Sinderby has a secret love child with a woman who turns up in the middle of the hunting party. I mean, wow. Dirty secrets pulled out of thin air were practically the theme of the episode.
Still, I like the little interlude at the Sinderbys, first with Barrows being a shit-stirrer-for-hire, and then with Rose leaping in to save her father-in-law from social embarrassment by pretending his mistress/former lover was her long-time friend. And one has to laugh: the Crawleys are by now so used to side-stepping scandal that they unhesitatingly rush in to back her up.
So with a turnover rate of approximately three seconds, Lord Sinderby goes from an Old Grump to Father Christmas. And if you think that's the perfect segue from this to Doctor Who, then you'd be right.
As far as Christmas Specials go, Last Christmas wasn't the best (A Christmas Carol) or the worst (The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe). It was a fun bit of television, best described as Alien meets Inception with Santa thrown in, and it ticks nearly every box on Moffat's checklist of narrative devices. Of course, this is far from being the first story that's ever dealt with dreams-within-dreams or with dreams as "perfect realities" used to lull a person into surrender/temptation/eternal sleep, but by describing the concept here as "dream-crabs that weaponize our dreams against us," they're given a real movie trailer vibe.
Moffat has a collection of tropes that he just loves: the monsters you can't see, the power of childhood fantasies, the need for fictional constructs, elaborate wordplay (here "last Christmas" refers to what it has been and what it could be, and "it's a long story" ends up being not a narrative cheat but a clue), and the intersecting realms of asleep/awake, reality/virtual space, and adulthood/storyland. And it's not like I don't like some, if not all, of these tropes – it's just that Moffat uses them all the time to tell us the exact same thing.
When Shona asks Santa: "you're a dream sent to save us?" and Santa replies: "I think you've just defined me!" I was split straight down the middle. Yes, it's a great line, delivered perfectly by Nick Frost (whose name alone makes him the perfect actor to play Santa Claus), which reminds us there's a certain bravery in choosing to believe in something that's unprovable. No matter how much age may have jaded my reading experience of The Chronicles of Narnia, I'm still moved by Puddleglum's declaration of faith in The Silver Chair; insisting that he's going to believe in Aslan even if there's no Aslan to believe in.
This follows a similar trajectory; propositioning that the collective subconscious of human beings could collectively and subconsciously (duh) call up the figure of Father Christmas to save them from peril, regardless of whether or not he actually exists. He's real enough in the dreamscape they're trapped in, and that's all that matters.
It's a lovely sentiment, but by this stage Moffat has approached the same idea from a dozen different angles. He's proposed that the Doctor is a make-believe/all-powerful fairytale construct in countless episodes. He goes to the same bag of narrative tricks every single time.
Please, it's time for a new show-runner to tell us something DIFFERENT; to imagine the Doctor and his Companion and their adventures together as something ELSE.
In terms of characterization, things were pretty solid, though Clara is still forced to spout lines that are either pure exposition or awkward banter. The dialogue tries so hard to achieve whimsy and it always falls flat (when Clara is asked if she believes in Santa Claus and she responds: "You know what? Yeah, right now I think I do!" you can practically see Moffat standing behind the camera yelling: "More whimsy, Jenna! Dammit, MORE WHIMSY!")
And the Doctor is still too much like Sherlock. His inability to recognise the scientists because he had already "deleted" them from his mind has just got to be a cut line of dialogue from Sherlock, right?
But it was nice to get some closure on Danny Pink, with enough dream-like ambiguity to make us question whether it was just Clara's subconscious, or if there was some miraculous smidgeon of the real man in there, and the team of scientists did pretty well for themselves as relatively minor guest-stars. But Fiona Bellows is so thinly sketched that the glimpse of her waking up in a wheelchair felt more perfunctory than poignant, and it was mainly down to Faye Marsay's great performance (and dancing!) that the nonsensicality of her as a scientist became an actual clue as to what was really going on.
So the Doctor and Clara are given a second chance to roam time and space together, even though Old!Clara would have been a nice send-off for her character (not sure whether or not to believe the story that Jenna changed her mind at the last minute and forced a re-write of the script), and we end the show with a shot of a tangerine, which is to this Doctor Who episode what a spinning top was to Inception.
Were my heartstrings plucked or did I roll my eyes? Both, probably.
Miscellaneous Observations:
I bet Laura Carmichael wishes she could wear her hair out more often. She looked lovely. And wow, Michelle Dockery can sing! I remember her doing so back in season two, but for the first time in a while it felt as though her character actually deserved the looks of surprise and delight from those around her.
What with all the Robert health issues, I honestly expected this to end with him having a heart attack. Or getting a new Labrador puppy.
Did you recognise Prince Arthur's mother? Or alternatively, Aramis's first love?
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You could tell the budget was in effect when it came to having only three CGI reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh instead of the whole herd.
I had kind of hoped one of the scientists would wake up in the distant past. Like Victorian England or Ancient Greece or something.
Shona ticking "forgive Dave." Sometimes Moffat remembers to be subtle, and it always works out well.
I have never in my life had a nested dream. Are they very common?
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