stringbook

By Emily Nussbaum
January 23, 2012 

The first season began with the Titanic disaster; the second plunges us into the trenches of the First World War, emphasizing the ways in which battle causes class distinctions to at once dissolve and become more starkly apparent. As veterans return from the front, Downton becomes an auxiliary hospital, an event that confronts its wealthier inhabitants with the uselessness of their lives. (Well, most of them; Maggie Smith’s fabulously haughty dowager isn’t having any mournful breakthroughs.) The season begins slowly, but with each episode the pace intensifies; and just when you feel that you can’t take another dignified refusal there’s a resonant insight. “‘Flattered’ is a word posh people use when they’re getting ready to say ‘no,’” one suitor in a cross-class flirtation says.