Robert has had his medical crisis and has lived.  We knew that the crisis was coming – leading characters don’t spend weeks clutching their abdomens for no reason – but I doubt that any viewers expected such a dramatic presentation of symptoms.  Fortunately, there was not only a doctor but also the Minister of Health in the house.  My concern was that the writers would kill Robert.  His funeral would have been one way to close out the series.  End of an era, changing of the guard.  Barring a surprise, Robert will be with us when the series closes.  I would prefer to say goodbye to him then.

Mr. Mason’s move into the Yew Tree Farm has caused far more ripples in the plot than his modest demeanor would have led us to expect.  He quickly establishes a small circle of friends.  Daisy and he are already on friendly terms, of course, as she is the widow of his son and they have remained close.  Mrs. Patmore brings a basket of food to welcome Mr. Mason to the farm.  I thought she might be sweet on Sergeant Willis, but there are signs that she is transferring her affections to Mr. Mason, and who can blame her?  Willis would probably have more interesting tales to tell about his work, but Mason has demonstrated wider interests.  He has that sparkle in his eye that suggests a warm heart and a sense of humor.

If Mrs. Patmore were to connect with Mr. Mason, it would help her to keep an eye on Daisy.  Mr. Mason plans to keep Daisy close to him, possibly even have her to live with him.  Daisy herself does not seem keen to share Mr. Mason with the other members of the Downton staff.  Odd that she would become so protective and defensive all of a sudden.  A few more hampers full of Mrs. Patmore’s cooking may be needed to fortify Mr. Mason, but eventually he will get across the narrow moat that Daisy is digging.

The only time since we met him that I recall seeing Mr. Mason get his back up was when Mary and Tom visited him in this episode and suggested that perhaps he was no longer up to the management of the pigs that are to be entrusted to his care.  For an instant, the curtain parted and we saw behind Mr. Mason’s cheerful exterior the hard man full of Yorkshire pride who can handle stoat, sow, and suckling as well as any man in the county and who resents anyone who suggests he can’t.  Tom and Andy save the situation.  Tom suggests that Mr. Mason’s confidence is evidence that he has already hired a helper and Andy steps up to say that he had just been in the process of signing up with Mr. Mason when Lady Mary and Mr. Branson arrived.

Andy leaves Yew Tree Farm with an armload of books on pig rearing.  The casual viewer might be surprised that there is such a wide literature on pigs, but those of us who have read P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books know that Lord Emsworth relied on The Care of the Pig by Augustus Whiffle (whose last name is sometimes given by Wodehouse as Whipple) to keep The Empress of Blandings in top form.  It’s definitely a reading person’s game.  However, it doesn’t matter how many books you carry or how hard you stare at them if you can’t read.  Andy has done a good job of hiding this problem until now, but he will not be able to join the pig keeper’s guild without the ability to read.  Thomas now has the chance to help young Andy.  It seems that he wants nothing more than honest friendship.  His actions as volunteer tutor will put that to the test.

He is not the only gay man in the story who has sublimated his desires.  Edith’s beau, the Agent, whose first name is Bertie, tells Edith, and us, about his cousin, the fellow who owns the castle where we had the bird shooting last year.  The cousin spends his time in Tunisia painting local young men.  Edith draws the obvious conclusion, but I think the reason the writers have tossed us this piece of information is to let us know that the cousin is not going to put any road blocks in the way of Bertie’s eventual succession to the title.  Bertie is about as close a relation to his cousin as Mathew was to Robert.   The only difference is that Mathew and Robert didn’t know each other.  I continue to believe that everything is going to work out for Edith.  Incidentally, Edith has had two romantic flings (not counting the farmer she kissed during the war and forgetting the older fellow who left her at the altar), both in the same apartment.  No doubt she will be more careful this time.

Mary’s path to an eventual marriage to Henry will be less straight.  As she and Tom are walking to their dramatic encounter with Mr. Mason, Mary explains that while she would not want to create the false impression that she is a snob, she won’t marry “down”.  Doesn’t sound a bit snobbish.  You just have to put it the right way.  But saying that to the man who was the family chauffeur before marrying her sister could come across as a little insensitive.  Tom is not the least put off by Mary’s comment.  He and Sibyl were equals, each bringing different advantages to the marriage, and he has enough self-regard not to mind Mary’s indelicacy, realizing that it is a by-product of her self-centered approach to life.

Throughout the episode, Tom acted as a catalyst, facilitating developments without himself undergoing change.  When he is sitting in the pub with Mary and Henry – he and Henry drinking pints of manly ale and Mary drinking possibly the first glass of sherry sold in the pub that year – he challenges them to cut through all of their fencing and just announce that they would like to spend more time together.  It’s not the way the British upper classes like to get on, but perhaps the chuckle that he gave them helped to move things in the right direction.  Incidentally, I thought that when Henry referred to Mary as “la belle dame sans merci” and Tom asked him what he meant, it was condescending for Henry not to explain himself.  Perhaps keeping Tom in the dark was a way for Henry to signal to Mary that he would maintain upper class solidarity.  I thought it was rude.

At the end of the episode, Tom acted as a catalyst with the Minister of Health, getting him to tell his secret.  Neville Chamberlain served as Minister of Health three different times.  In 1925, he would have been in the early part of his second tour of duty.  He was a cabinet minister almost continuously from 1923 through October 1940, when he resigned due to ill health.  In addition to his service as Minister of Health, he was twice Chancellor of the Exchequer.  He was a very capable and intelligent man, who evidently performed well in all of his government jobs until he became Prime Minister in 1937.  Now, of course, his name is associated with one of the great cases of diplomatic malpractice.  In fairness, it didn’t look that way to a lot of people at the time.  He was cheered when he got back from Munich.

Those events occurred well after the end of the Downton tale.  His little conversation with Tom was based on a considerable amount of historical fact.  Mr. Chamberlain married a woman named Anne de Vere Cole.  Her older brother, Horace, was a notorious prankster.  As related in the episode, he did persuade the commander of Britain’s most important capital ship, HMS Dreadnought, to give a tour to the visiting King of Abyssinia and his entourage, who were in fact Cambridge students in disguise.  On another occasion, he bought up a large number of tickets to a theatrical performance and handed them out to passersby in the street, seemingly at random, but only seemingly.  All the seats were in the orchestra level and all of the recipients of the tickets were bald men.  When they took their seats, someone viewing the orchestra level from the dress circle would have seen a four-letter Anglo-Saxon obscenity spelled out by the bald heads in the seats below.  Even the “i” was dotted.

The exploit that Chamberlain talks about with Tom was another accomplishment of Mr. Cole.  He organized a group of fellow pranksters dressed as workmen and dug a trench through Piccadilly right under the noses of the police.  However, there is no reason to think that Neville Chamberlain was among the participants.  But if he had been, is it likely that he would have told Tom about it?  He attended the dinner in order to ensure that his wife’s godfather’s widow would keep a secret.  To announce it to a new audience, a stranger with a pronounced Irish accent, would seem imprudent.  Well, the same malleability, the same unwillingness to call a bluff that Violet took advantage of in 1925 was also evident to the eventual Reichskanzler in 1938.

As Violet and Cora were leaving Downton to go to the hospital, Violet said something about Marigold.  I couldn’t make out what Cora said to put Violet onto that subject.  Perhaps the concern was how Marigold would be left in Robert’s will?  Whatever the reason for bringing Marigold into the conversation, Mary overheard it and will take no time at all to learn the truth.  She already knows that Anna is being sly on the subject, so it’s only a matter of winkling the truth out of her, or simply deducing it.  That will leave Molesley as the only character in our story who doesn’t know Marigold’s parentage.  I don’t anticipate that we will have a scene where the scales fall from Mr. Molesley’s eyes.

Denker has displayed the dangers of being more royalist than the king.  She is very good at making cutting remarks in private.  She should avoid making overtly insulting remarks in the street.  Fortunately, she has something to hold over Mr. Spratt (whose first name, we learn, is Septimus, right up there with Atticus) and he is able to leverage his powers of persuasion with Lady Grantham in order for Denker to keep her place.  If only Sergeant Willis had interviewed Denker and Spratt separately, as he ought to have done!

Finally, I would like to suggest to Mr. Carson that, while he may complain of the dull state of the dinner knives in his house, the day may be coming when he will be glad that they are no sharper than they are.