All her suitors and her interactions with them seem to be nearly the same, with only minor variations. They all look nearly the same too - if I didn't already know Matthew Goode from The Good Wife, I wouldn't be able to tell him from Tony Gillingham - whom I couldn't tell from the other chap Mary was flirting with in…

Daisy is just the worst. "How dare other people like and want to help my poor ageing father-in-law who lives alone and is being told by his bosses that he's too old for the job he was just hired for?"

No one even introduced them! Chamberlain just seemed to act as if he had known Tom for years, when realistically speaking, he would have just raised an eyebrow when Tom 'rescued' him.

Eh. I hate Bates so much that I keep hoping he'll die horribly and then Anna will be free to marry some nice chap who will take her far away from Downton Abbey and its melodrama.

"I really can't believe he/she was kept on after that…" applies to nearly all the servants in DA (with a few exceptions such as Mrs Hughes and Mrs Patmore). After all, both the Bateses have been arrested for murder, and Bates was even convicted. Baxter is a convicted jewel thief. Thomas molested a fellow servant…

The retired Anglo-Indian colonel and his 'native' manservant were stock characters in British fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm kind of surprised that such characters haven't flitted across the Crawleys' social sphere.

The only positive thing that can be said about the hospital storyline is that it's better than watching Bates/Anna get arrested. Admittedly, that's an extremely low bar (ants couldn't crawl under it), but still …

"Fellowes, that's not good plotting!" could be said about 90% of the plots on this show.

Same here. Gwen's return and the sweet Sybil reminiscences elevated this episode to A level for me (compared to other episodes of DA only, of course, not other shows), and Daisy's shenanigans lowered it to an A-.

That would be reasonable .., if only they had bothered to mention it on the show or at least give some sign that Mary remembered that a dude named Matthew ever existed. She didn't even mention him when discussing her son or his inheritance. It was the perfect opening too.

Judging by the previews, that might happen next week.

That was 11 years ago in-universe. Yet Carson treated Thomas a lot better in those days than he's doing now. Frankly, Carson can just be an ass sometimes. As Abbies Dad points out above, he was pointlessly nasty to Molesley as well a season or two ago, just because Molesley had the nerve to hesitate before accepting a…

Frankly, the old Branson was so annoying, he wasn't doing socialism any favours by beings its spokesman.

I loved Gwen so much (IMO, the friendship between her and Sybil in the first season was one of the best depictions of upstairs-downstairs relations on this show), yet I hated Ygritte with every fibre of my being. It was really weird to see Rose Leslie back to being sweet and soft-spoken Gwen rather than smug and…

Well, considering that their former chauffeur married their daughter and has been sitting with them for supper (and other meals) for years, I think Carson could wrap his mind around a former maid having one meal with the family. He wouldn't be thrilled about it, for sure, but he wouldn't blow a mental gasket either.

Frankly, I think at some point the servants will just let Daisy get herself sacked, just so that they can be free of her sophomoric drama. *Sigh* I was beginning to find Daisy tolerable last season, once she started educating herself. But this season, she's fully regressed to her former immature ways.

Yes, exactly. There were a couple of such moments in the earlier seasons, involving Daisy and later Ivy, since both of them rarely left the kitchen. But now, apparently, the Crawleys are intimately familiar with every one of their servants.

Everyone does, really. (Well, not the servants, obviously, who are stuck wearing drab uniforms.) 20s fashions were just gorgeous, and the costumes are one of the few things that Downton Abbey does extremely well.

Barrow's an incomplete bastard. The Duke will make him complete.

Yes, even in real life, people did (and do) sometimes feel close to their servants, and an employer-servant friendship is not unrealistic in itself. However, the keyword there is 'friendship' - as in singular. The idea that everyone in the family is ridiculously close to (nearly) all the members of the staff and take…