'Downton Abbey' Final Season: Cast, Creator Tease Romance, Resolutions, and a 'Tragic Hero'
Church bells are ringing on a hazy day in Burghclere, an idyllic little village in Hampshire, England. Outside the church hall, waiting in costume for a wedding reception, are the cast of Downton Abbey — Hugh Bonneville in tweeds on his cellphone, Michelle Dockery and Joanne Frogatt signing a birthday card for Kevin Doyle (Molesley), Brendan Coyle joshing with the show’s josher-in-chief Rob James-Collier. It’s not often that you see all of the cast, both upstairs and downstairs, on location together, but this is a special day. Inside the hall are the pair of newlyweds Downton fans have been waiting to get together for the entire series — and anyone who saw the clinching final scenes of last year’s run will be delighted to learn that the happy couple are indeed Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) and Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan).
Inside however, with tables set for a very English wedding reception — sausage rolls, a ham, boiled eggs, jam tarts and jelly — there is some discord. Not between the bride and groom, but amongst the film crew. The matter at issue is the positioning of a carving knife and a sharpening steel. They have been positioned with one crossed over the other; this probably wouldn’t be a problem on other shows but on Downton Abbey, the arrangement of flatware can interrupt filming. “It’s bad luck,” says Alistair Bruce, the series’ longstanding historical advisor (his director’s chair has ‘The Oracle’ on the back). “It defines that there is an argument impending.”
Liz Trubridge, Downton’s executive producer (her chair is labeled “Good Queen Liz”), agrees that it looks strangely symbolic: “It’s like the Masons.” The knife and steel are uncrossed. Bruce then turns his attention to the amount of cuff protruding from the jacket of one of the servants pouring the punch. He wants to make a change. But now they’re moving on. “Oh blast. They’re always moving on,” he says.
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This year, Downton Abbey will move on once and for all; after six seasons the Abbey is shutting its carved oak doors. “We were going to finish it at the end of [season] five,” says Julian Fellowes, the show’s creator, who has written every one of its 52 episodes. “But then as we got nearer there was too much story that needed to be tied up, and we realized that to have a satisfactory conclusion we needed a season to devote to it.”
He stresses the importance of the conclusion being “satisfactory” for fans: “I think you want to leave a party while people are still sorry to see you go, rather than waiting for them to be thrilled that you’re leaving. Of course, in a way, I’m sad. This has been an extraordinary adventure for me. But I’ve never thought we were wrong to bring it to an end. I’ve never changed my mind since we set the date.” Which leads us to the theme of the final season, set in 1925: Resolution. “The fact that everyone watching it knows this is the end means they will, I hope, indulge us and accept more resolution than we normally go in for,“ says Fellows, "so that we have time over the season to tie up most of the main strands.”
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The question, is, how many of those strands will be resolved happily? Downton Abbey is, in the very best sense, an exquisite soap opera: Calamity and cruel fate have served it well, with the odd marriage or birth to sugar the pill. So should we despair of there ever being happiness for poor Edith, or Anna and Bates? Then again, perhaps despairing is, as the Dowager Countess once put it, “being defeatist, which is very middle class.” Instead, let’s review the storylines that will dominate the final season. (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)
Will Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes live happily ever after?
At the end of last season Carson finally — finally — did the decent thing and proposed to the wonderful woman who has been waiting a long time for him to realize they’re meant for each other. The first few episodes of the new season see them preparing to tie the knot.
“There are some slightly delicate negotiations about under what terms we are getting married,” laughs Jim Carter, who plays Carson. Meaning…? “Erm, it’s about whether as an old bachelor and an old spinster we are just going to co-habit in a friendly way, twin beds shall we say, or whether it was going to be a ‘full’ marriage so to speak.” Suffice to say that Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) is called upon to conduct these negotiations, and comedy ensues.
This being Mr. Carson, a man so starchy he probably irons his hair, their marital bliss is of a very particular sort. “Whilst we’ve seen a slightly softer, more romantic side to him in declaring his love for Mrs. Hughes, if anything he’s even more curmudgeonly once they’re married,” says Carter. “He spends his whole time moaning about the quality of Mrs. Hughes’ cooking! Slightly bizarrely, he also moans about her ability to make a bed. You’d have thought the one thing the head housekeeper would know how to do is make a bed.”
Will Anna and Bates finally get a break?
He was falsely convicted of killing his ex-wife, then she was raped, then she went to prison, then she got out… Surely one of TV’s favorite couples are due some luck? But alas… “At the beginning of season six Anna is not in a very good place, once again!” says Joanne Froggatt. “We start off and she’s just had a miscarriage and that’s her third, or possibly fourth, so she doesn’t think she’s able to have children. She’s hugely upset about that — she feels that she’s not doing her duty as a woman. She just feels that the one thing she’s supposed to be able to do is to give Mr. Bates a baby.”
Whether she and Bates will or won’t be able to produce a mini-Bates is the story that bookends their final series arc. “It’s all they’ve wanted,” says Froggatt. “If I were to picture them 10 years after the show ends I’d hope they’d have a few children. Maybe by then, Bates and Anna have got their little guesthouse somewhere that they’ve always wanted. They could call it The Bates Hotel.” Ba-dum-bum!
Will Edith Ever Be Anything Other Than ‘Poor Edith’?
“Poor Edith.” It just rolls off the tongue. (Watch a montage of “Poor Edith” moments below.) Yet at the end of last season things were finally looking up for the youngest (surviving) Crawley girl. She had found a way of living with her daughter Marigold. She had found a way of telling her parents that Marigold was her daughter. And she’d established the basis of another life in London as a newspaper editor, away from nasty old Mary and dull old Downton. There was even a touch of romance in the offing, with a cheery old cove called Bertie Pelham (Harry Hadden-Paton) whom she met on a visit to Brancaster Castle in the fifth season finale. And now Bertie’s back! “They bump in to one another when he’s down in London,” says Laura Carmichael. “They arrange to meet up but suddenly she has a newspaper to get out! And so in the end he comes and helps her out and they stay up all night getting the job done. It’s a really nice scene, and it gives a few nice moments to Edith because she’s surprised and impressed by how at ease with himself Bertie is. He’s not thrown by her having this job. He just gets on with it.”
Bertie turns out to be very much the modern man to Edith’s increasingly modern woman — but there’s a problem for (poor) Edith. “She wants to achieve something with the newspaper and her life in London now, but the Marigold part of her life is not just going to disappear — and the fact that Marigold remains a secret, at least from Bertie,“ continues Carmichael. "She’s a sort of working mother, if you like — it’s trying to find a balance, which is an incredibly relevant and modern dilemma.”
Will Mary marry… someone?
The final scenes of last season’s finale saw Mary flirting with a blue-blooded, toothsome chap who looked and acted a little like all of the other blue-blooded toothsome chaps Mary has flirted with ever since Matthew died at the end of season three. The fact that Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) is a speed freak and a motor-car obsessive may cause problems for a woman whose previous husband died in a car crash. “She’s intrigued by him but she’s a little put off by his lifestyle. It’s just all too familiar and bizarre,” says Michelle Dockery. “And so in classic Mary style she hides, puts the barriers up and decides, ‘No, this is wrong. I can’t possibly spend the rest of my life with this man.’ Then she goes into a very dark place — it’s like the stuff with Matthew comes out again and she begins to grieve once more.”
The upside of Mary’s dark turn is that it brings out the cranky in her — and of course she takes it out on Edith, which leads to the sort of delightful sisterly contretemps that lit up Season 1. As Branson once said to her, “Just because you’re unhappy, you don’t have to make everyone unhappy.” Sorry Tom — we’d prefer that she does.
Will “tragic hero” Thomas become a victim of progress?
The background to the last few seasons of Downton has been the end of a certain way of life. The great houses could not afford to keep going as they did before the First World War. Maintaining a full staff was expensive. Thomas, his antennae always twitching, is well aware of what this means for his position, and he starts looking for alternatives. “They have to get rid of people downstairs and Thomas, because of his misdemeanors in the past, is starting to get paranoid,” explains Rob James-Collier. “He thinks, ‘Well, I’m public enemy No. 1, so it’s going to be me.’ It gets worse from there and instead of keeping it in, he projects it out to anyone who will listen. It’s probably the worst thing he could do because actually they wouldn’t mind seeing the back of him.”
That’s not the case for the audience though — Thomas has always been a fan favorite, first as a pantomime villain in cahoots with O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) and then as a more sympathetic figure, as he battled both with his own sexuality and also with the stern prejudice of the times. Some of the best performances in the show have come from James-Collier when his character has hit rock bottom. Speaking of which… “Julian [Fellowes] said to me at the read through, ‘I hope you’re prepared to be the tragic hero,’ so that could mean anything, couldn’t it? Am I going to die? I don’t know,” muses James-Collier. “Thomas has been, I think, one of the more complex characters because of his sexuality so he’s always had these tremendous roller coaster rides. It’s all or nothing with Thomas and it very much continues in that vein in the series.”
Will Isobel and The Dowager Countess actually come to blows?
Let’s be clear, Penelope Wilton and Maggie Smith going at it would be the best scene ever committed to film. But for the time being we’ll have to make do with verbal sparring, as Season 6 introduces a plotline about the governance of the local hospital. The storyline, frankly, is a little tiresome, but the upshot is welcome, in that it sets Isobel and Violet on a collision course. “We don’t ever fall out personally, although we have our moments, but it’s a matter of this particular argument and who’s going to win,” says Penelope Wilton. “It’s all a test of strength between me and Violet. I won’t say who comes out on top. Violet has every right to fight her corner, but she is seen as wanting to keep her position and she has every reason to think that these changes will be a diminishment of her power. The hierarchy is changing a bit I think — that is a theme across the whole series.”
Will old acquaintances be forgot?
As the final season begins Branson (Allen Leech) is in America. So is Rose (Lily James). Now that’s only a few days by luxury ocean liner away, so… yes, both of them will make an appearance, Branson in larger role than Lady Rose. Rose Leslie, who played housemaid Gwen in the first season, is also set to return, though details on her storyline are scant. (Personally we’d love to see her storm the Downton battlements dressed as Game of Thrones wildling Ygritte, shouting "You know nothing John Bates,” as he tries to push her down the stairs with his walking stick — but we’re not holding our breath.)
Will the end actually be the end?
While Julian Fellowes talks about the final season being all about resolution, the cast and producers have at the same time talked about a Downton Abbey feature film. Executive Producer Gareth Neame has even mentioned a stage show. But with Fellowes now writing The Gilded Age, a period drama for NBC, Downton Abbey will be done after these final nine episodes air. But hang on… “You never know,“ says Neame. "It wouldn’t involve me and Julian, but if in 30 years’ time somebody at NBC Universal, or ITV or whoever at that time owns the companies says, ‘Well we’ve got this old property, it was incredibly popular in the golden age of television in the 2010s, let’s revive that…,’ then who knows.” Stay tuned: Downton Abbey 2.0 (perhaps starring Christopher Cumberbatch?) coming January of 2045.
Downton Abbey premieres Sunday, January 3 at 9 p.m. on Masterpiece on PBS.