In lieu of any meaningful posts today — the bronchitis still has me feeling at about 70% — let’s talk Downton Abbey!
PBS is currently showing the season season of the ITV hit, and I absolutely adore the series. I can’t explain why I love it, except that the characters are awesome and it’s fun to watch. I have felt that the second season has lacked something — there’s a certain charm that seems absent, probably because of the horror of the trenches and the Western Front lurking in the background.
That said, I’m still enjoying the show a great deal. I keep rooting for Lady Edith, the overlooked middle daughter who doesn’t seem to have any purpose in life.
Somehow in the past two days, probably because of coughing and wheezing fits, I missed the news that Shirley MacLaine is joining the cast for the third season as Martha Levinson, the mother of Cora Grantham, and “who will be a wonderful combatant for Maggie Smiths Dowager Countess” according to the article.
In a way, that brings me back to the feeling of something missing in the second year. In the first season, there was a wonderful one-upsmanship and withering snark between Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and Isobel Crawley, the mother of Matthew Crawley. There hasn’t been that this year, the characters have been traveling in different circles.
Then there was an amusing video that depicted Mitt Romney butting heads with the Dowager Countess. On Facebook, someone wondered what would happen if Newt Gingrich had to match wits with the Dowager Countess, and I wrote this brief dialogue:
Newt: “At the end of my second term, we’ll have a colony on the moon.”
Violet: “Really, now. However will you deal with the problem of rats?”
Newt: “Rats?”
Violet: “The moon’s made of cheese, is it not? You cannot have a colony there, not if the rats are going to eat it out from under them, you know.”
Newt: Head explodes.
No matter what the Weekly World News might’ve said in the mid-90s, Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham would be the closest thing to an alien Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich, Ph.D. would have ever met. 😎