Plus if the walkers were all by the barn doors - as they obviously were - how come they were all apparently felled some distance from it? I mean, from the way the survivors were huddled against the door, the walkers were all clustered just outside it, not artistically scattered yards away.

Oh yes, Tom springing up and calling him a bastard was wonderful.

Edith really did look lovely after she decamped to London. Honestly, the idea that Edith is somehow an ugly duckling to Mary's swan is more ridiculous as time goes by; especially when you consider that while Mary has Anna to do her hair and look after her, Edith seems to be on her own in that regard.

Lord Merton's sons: even more abrasive and annoying dinner guests than Miss Bunting? Discuss.

I suspect this episode is going to sharply divide people: those who thought it a welcome chance for characters to reflect (however obviously) on the reality that is their life, and for people to grieve over those they've recently lost, and those who thought it was a snoozefest of yada yada yada enlivened by the odd…

I can't remember learning much about Henry Hudson in school (I'm a Canuck too), although it was a longish time ago. I do remember that we did a fair bit on Champlain and Cartier and the founding and settling of what's now Ontario and Quebec. What I know about Henry Hudson I've learned since school, by reading a lot…

I looked at the FJ clue and began parsing it. 'Okay, well before America was a country. But hang on, it says North America, and I think that's this show's subtle code for "Not the U.S., the other country on the continent." The person was from England, so not Champlain or Cartier or anyone French. What's a pretty big…

'I've heard older people describe this and Fantasy Island as ridiculous 70's holdovers that everyone made fun of but everyone watched anyway.'

If you haven't already seen it, get hold of The Tall Guy starring Thompson, Jeff Goldblum, and Rowan Atkinson. Thompson and Goldblum have the most (intentionally) hilarious sex scene I've ever seen in a film (and Geraldine James is a hoot as Goldblum's sex-crazed, but very sweet, landlady). Plus it's the film that…

I'll have to go look that issue out. Yes, I have a complete run of TZ; first magazine I ever subscribed to (a couple of years into its run, after discovering a copy on a Vancouver newsstand in 1984 and falling in love with a magazine that was interested in so many of the same things I was; I subsequently picked up the…

Please, turn Downton Abbey into Murder by Death.

No, she understood that Bates found the device, when he was searching for the button box.

Agreed!

Hey, the Grand Trunk Railway was a totally safe investment; if the company's president hadn't died on the Titanic, and WW I hadn't come along.

I knew he was fake from the moment he started talking; his accent was completely North American, with not a trace of a British accent, even though he was supposed to have been in Canada for only four years maximum. My English husband has lived in Canada for 18 years, and still has a marked British accent, and I know…

'Harsh-Face'? Ah, someone else here who reads Viv Groskop's wonderful Downton blog in the Guardian!

On the other hand, you could say that Mary is cold-blooded and clinical enough to think of these things in advance (at a time when most women didn't), whereas Edith was carried away by passion, hence getting pregnant out of wedlock. 'Passion' and 'Mary' aren't two words that go together; it makes Edith look the more…

Someone should really offer the investigating policeman a room at Downton; he's there often enough.

I've always loved the use of ambient sound in this series, and there were some lovely examples tonight: the flies buzzing, for example, and just the simple sound of shovel on dirt over the closing credits.

As Chekhov said, if you’re going to hide an unspecified contraceptive device in a drawer in one episode, it had better be found in another by a man desperate for children and wondering why his wife hasn’t conceived after several years of marriage.