In the first episode of this series of Downton Abbey, Matthew had a line about the breaking down of the class system in the trenches where he said to Thomas that “war has a way of distinguishing between the things that matter and the things that don’t” — and ever since that moment all I have been able to think is that I can’t believe it still matters to Matthew that Mary didn’t fall over herself to prove that her love for him was her sole priority, that she loved him enough to live out the rest of her days as his bored housewife. I can’t believe how impervious to self-examination and character development Matthew is that he has lived through all of the things that have happened to him this year and his childish, undeveloped worldview has survived intact. What is wrong with Matthew? What is wrong with Julian Fellowes that he has so completely failed to exploit the true pathos of Matthew’s story, that he has failed to show Matthew as intellectually and emotionally shattered by his experiences during the war? What is wrong with Julian Fellowes that he has failed to show Matthew re-evaluating Mary’s “transgressions” against propriety and femininity — her hardness, her masculine pragmatism, her failure to prioritise his ego over her material well-being — in the light of the horrors he has witnessed and participated in and realising that they are not transgressions at all? What is wrong with him that he set up what could have been an incredibly human and resonant story about Matthew getting over himself and completely failed to follow through on it?

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Around halfway through the first series of Downton Abbey Mary challenges Cora’s assertion that her father loves her by stating that, “he wouldn’t fight for me”. The heartbreaking thing about this week’s episode was the way it showed that this line — which referred to her father’s refusal to consider the possibility of breaking the entail so that Mary could inherit his estate — has come to encapsulate Mary’s relationships with almost all of the men who claim to love her. There is nobody in Mary’s life who will fight for her. There is nobody in Mary’s life who would make any real sacrifice for her; there is nobody in her life who privileges her material well-being over abstract concepts like honour. What is the value of love when it comes from someone whose reaction to discovering that you’re in an abusive, controlling relationship is to abandon you to it? What is the point of being soft, of being forgiving, of being self-sacrificing when nobody will protect you? When you play at being female in the Edwardian British aristocracy you win or you die.

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I think that if someone asked me to present them with one scene from the entirety of Downton Abbey which most completely encapsulated my respective feelings on Mary, Matthew, and their relationship I would choose the opening scene from this episode. In a few short lines of dialogue Julian Fellowes communicated the idea that Matthew believes he is — or should be — living in a karmic universe and had Mary answer, “but things are not and have never been that simple”. Matthew and Mary subscribe to two separate and fundamentally opposed worldviews. Matthew is idealistic to the point of naïveté: he believes he is (or rather, should be) living in a world where people are rewarded or punished according to the strength of their character; Mary is pragmatic to the point of self-sabotage: she believes (or rather, accepts) that sometimes bad things happen for no rhyme or reason at all — which is why she’s “never down for long”, and which is why she has a plan for every contingency and finds it difficult to take risks to grasp at illusory promises of future happiness. And somewhere in the space between these worldviews — between yearning for what should be and acceptance of what is — lies their relationship, and the form that relationship takes when all the dust has settled depends entirely on how they bridge that gap.

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