‘Downton Abbey’ season 4, episode 3 (PBS) review: Michelle Dockery’s Mary, a modest proposal

Sunday night’s “Downton Abbey” episode brought a number of things to the table, whether you are talking about the arrival of Jack Ross to the world of the show, or the aftermath of what happened with Anna and Mr. Bates. We feel at the moment like we have talked about that pretty extensively already, though, so why continue going down this road of sadness?

You can read our full review of this episode from when it aired in Britain here; specifically, what we are trying to do with this article is discuss what was a pretty big moment: The drama between Lady Mary and Lord Anthony Gillingham. Tum Cullen’s character made a huge move during this episode to get down on one knee and pop the question, but there was a pretty clear response from her: “No.” Why does she have no interest at all in being with him? Think along the lines of her own past with Matthew. She is not ready to move forward with her life.

But what makes her an interesting character in so many ways is despite saying this, it is not exactly like her body language is saying the same thing. There’s no doubt that Gillingham felt a reason to propose: The two did have a connection during the episode, and their most intimate moment together. Mary is welcoming a certain amount of advances by the man, and then sending him away to an extent. What we can at least tell you is that this story is far from over; “Tony” is very persistent in his advances, and Mary is very persistent with her current philosophy. We also know that this is not going to be the only suitor for Mary this season.

The one thing that we really wish that this “romance” had in it, though, was more fun. There is almost no courtship, and it feels almost like the writers really did not know what else to throw at Mary other than romance.

Since we weren’t grading episodes of the show at the time that we did the review of the British airing, we’ll go ahead and hand one out here. Grade: B-. There just isn’t a lot of action happening these days.