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“Happiness all ‘round!”

That is what you call the writing approach of the Downton Abbey movie. This is not a movie but instead a two hour long commercial free series finale. A good series finale is hard. If you end it all deliberately, Breaking Bad style, you can make a very satisfying end that puts all your friends out of work. If you just end it without tying up the loose ends, The Sopranos style, you make the fans mad. Most show runners have a season finale that sort of ties it up but then leaves it open for a new season if they get picked up. We all see this happening when it happens.

Downtown Abbey as literature ended with Mr.Carson’s retirement. To make this movie, Julian Fellowes had to put him back in the house. At some level Mr. Carson IS Downton Abbey! The hero of the series is the house/estate/all it represents and Mr Carson is the connection between the two worlds upstairs/downstairs if you will. You have to undo the previous series finale to make the movie. That means taking out Thomas, the gay butler.

To write the script, the task was to get Mr. Carson back in the house and still provide “Happiness all ‘round” for the Thomas Barrow character. This was so poorly done that it ruined the movie for me. How could he be happy and thrown over as butler? Well he finds other gays and learns to keep being secret about it. “Happiness” if one day the stupid Bobbies will change their homophobe ways!

Even if you do not care about the anti-Biblical scolding, it is still NOT literature or art in any sense, because it was so poorly done. I understand the decision though because moving Carson back into the house in an artistically valuable way would have been an entirely different movie. You could not just move Barrow out casually because he’s gay. You’ve got to give Barrow his “Happiness all ‘round” and if you are gonna make the gay community happy, he can only be happy by fully fulfilling his gayness. So there it is. Every other writing decision flows from that.

Please correct me. I do appreciate your thoughts.

I thought it was a literary dirty trick to Barrow. First that he's an incompetent twerp who doesn't know how to run the House, and second that he's basically all faggot all the time. IMO, the proper literary device would the handover from Carson to Barrow, with Carson being brought back to teach his protégé. That would raise an interesting conflict in Carson, as he tries to both run his B&B (or whatever the Brits call it) AND properly educate Barrow.

FWIW, I REALLY liked their handling of Tom Branson's character. Having the Irish Republican save the King AND the princess … just because he's a decent and honest man loyal to his family … was brilliant. He can't stand the aristocracy, yet he can't help being part of it.