I really should stop being surprised when series disappoint me
I am well aware of series rot from long experience. I know that those nagging problems at the beginning are highly unlikely to be a set-up for subverting cliches and stereotypes and will probably grow until they overwhelm everything that was once good about the series. And yet I keep hoping. Futilely, so far.
Some recent disappointments:
The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr
Granted, based on The Alienist I wasn't expecting much more than a competent mystery. But I was encouraged by the relative absence of gore and prostitutes, because it's nice to see criminals who are driven to do things other than murder prostitutes for once. And it started raising some interesting points about how much damage the constant message that a woman must have babies and be nurturing to be A Real Woman and worth anything causes, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton makes a cameo appearance, and Sara Howard's friendship with Nellie Bly is mentioned in passing. Also Stevie drops a not-so-subtle hint that Sara might get her own novel to narrate someday. (Alas, this does not seem to have happened...)
But. Remember how in The Alienist, one of the ways we knew Things Were Getting Serious was that Dr. Kreizler's girlfriend got murdered? Well, in The Angel of Darkness, it's Stevie's not-quite-girlfriend's turn to get murdered for the same reason, hooray! Oh wait... Granted, a boy prostitute Mr. Moore had tried to help also got murdered in The Alienist, and a lawyer friend of his gets murdered in this book (hm, note to friends of Moore: watch your backs...), but still. Can't a girlfriend not get murdered around a detective for a change?
I haven't even gotten to the new Filipino sidekick they pick up for a while. The one Stevie keeps referring to as "the little aborigine." Instead of, you know, BY HIS NAME. Which is... uh... wait, why is he asking the characters to call him by the nickname his hated Spanish ex-boss probably gave him, anyway? What is this poor character's NAME, Carr?
The Big Bang Theory
I know, I know, this one was obvious. But sometimes they had such good science and fannish jokes! Like the episode where they had the (movie prop of the) One Ring and it started working on them and we got the fabulous makeup job turning Sheldon into Gollum.
And they had Amy Farah Fowler. For maybe three glorious episodes, she was the kind of character who said things like this:
PENNY: What I was going for was, you know, how is your life?
AMY: Just like everyone else's. Subject to entropy, decay, and eventual death. Thank you for asking.
And, defending her answer that we would not eat cheese danishes in a world ruled by giant beavers, this:
"In a world ruled by a giant beaver, mankind builds many dams to please the beaver overlord. The low-lying city of Copenhagen is flooded, thousands die. Devastated, the Danes never invent their namesake pastry. How does one miss that?"
And, of course, this:
"I find the notion of romantic love an unnecessary cultural construct that adds no value to human relationships."
What? A female character uninterested in romance and happy that way? Is this allowed on television?
No, of course not. Silly me. Now Amy is constantly obsessing over romance and how Sheldon isn't cooperating. And sexually harassing her girlfriends.
I'd be happy if they'd even just bring back the days when Amy might experience attraction to a handsome man but decide to take up the disciplines of Kolinahr once he opened his mouth. Better yet would be if Original Amy, Leslie Winkle (hey, show, remember Leslie Winkle?), Bernadette, and Priya got their own show and their own weekly collection of science (and law!) jokes. Four women being smart together onscreen at the same time! Talking about many things, not just men! While having distinct personalities and being friends! I guess that would make the network explode. We had a brief moment recently where Amy, Bernadette, and Penny got into a debate over whether if only Thor can pick up his magic hammer, someone else can pick up Thor while he's holding the hammer... but I don't expect that sort of thing to happen very often, based on the show's history so far.
The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
I enjoyed The Night Watch, overall, though it had its annoyances. Like the whole tired Light vs. Dark thing, and this faintly skeevy undercurrent whenever a woman appeared on the page. But I expected, as one might, that - for instance - now that two of the women were no longer untrained and clueless or stuck as an owl, that they would become more prominent and interesting in the next book, only as opponents because the female Day Watch character would be narrating the whole of the sequel as Anton had narrated the first book. The twisty intrigues also promised to continue, especially given the huge cliffhanger at the end of the first book.
Uh, no. Major spoilers for both books, warning warning.
So, The Night Watch was fully of twisty intrigues from "go." The Day Watch, on the other hand, was 95% intrigue-free for its entire first third, only to pick right back up with the intrigue for the second and third sections. This is quite a jolt, pacing-wise. Basically all that happens in the first third is this: Alisa is mopey because Zabulon (the boss) isn't into her anymore and she has no friends because everyone's a competitive bitch. She gives a long speech to the random guy she makes give her a ride about how there's no such thing as morals and people are all so fake and hypocritical and do what you want because freedom, man - a subject on which she'll continue to harp on at great length but with no additional insight frequently. She goes on a team mission involving the prologue redshirt and gets drained of her power. Then she is happy because maybe Zabulon forgives her and likes her again! Off she goes to summer camp to regenerate, which you'd think would be interesting because she does it by stealing kids' nightmares, but it's mostly blah blah blah until, suddenly, there is a cute new camp leader guy and it's TWU WUV FOREVER. Why? Who the hell knows. But alas, he is a Montague Light One! So he challenges her to a duel and she dies. Yes, DIES. There are hints that this is a set-up for something, but Alisa is clueless, so we get nothing to work with.
In my edition, it took a whopping 167 pages for Alisa to get de-powered, fall in love, and die. This might even have been tolerable, had the rest of the book turned out to adhere to the sames leisurely pace and reflective tone. But no, as soon as we stepped into a new narrator's head, it was back to twisty intrigue and a fast pace - a fact which really starts to rankle once reach yet another narrator in the third section, and get intermittent sections about the first book's narrator Anton, and realize that of the four main narrators so far, only the girl drops all that complicated thinking stuff to focus almost exclusively on petty daily concerns and puppy love. And while one of the guys does die, only Alisa dies because she's just plain weak. Fantastic.
And the powerful Olga who is now free of being an owl? Uh, she makes a cameo to serve drinks. Svetlana? Does nothing, then gets de-powered, then gets lined up to give birth to a messiah (surprise! no, of course you don't have a choice about it, why do you even bother asking?). The warrior Tiger Cub? Summarily squashed. Literally. That messiah, who is predicted to be female? She's not only not even conceived yet, but because some dude decides to die instead of wait around to be her mentor, she's not going to be the messiah after all. That's right: you can't even be the Chosen One on your own if you're a girl, because the real Chosen One is your teacher. (The text notes that Jesus was the last one, but funnily enough, no reference is made to him having a special teacher without whom he would have been just another powerful Light magician instead of a messiah...) There is almost some consolation in the fact that the Destined Mentor dies because he's in wuv with Dead Alisa, except that by that point we've also heard about his long life of being a Tough Man Making Tough Choices, so his motives might actually be more complex. Not to mention it's his choice to die, not forced upon him by his own weakness.
Incidentally, the reason he's the Destined Mentor is because he's just so much more nurturing and able to impart ethics to the youngsters or something. So this means that all the women in the book are not only weaker, less smart, less well-rounded and complex (ie, shallow), and less possessed of agency, they're worse at raising children too, which leaves them with... um...
Oh. And there's also the small detail that all the complicated intrigue in the first book, picked up in the latter two thirds of this book, was all leading up to that messiah plot, which fizzles like a wet firecracker. Meaning all that running around and desperate plotting for two whole books got us precisely nowhere. I know there's a lot of Cold War parallels here (except the narrators assure me that the conflict between the Watches is way more important than such a piddly human endeavor, honest), but that doesn't make it any less frustrating to read.
Downton Abbey
Hey, they were emphasizing from the beginning that Society Is Changing, and they would occasionally point out how the aristocrats were majorly screwing up something or other. I could hope that they actually meant it. Right?
Even at the beginning of season 3, they made a point that Lord Grantham is, frankly, an idiot, and just about anyone else in his household would be more competent to manage things than he is. Cora, his mother, Matthew... every single person who learns about his investment adventure exclaims first thing, "But wouldn't it have been more prudent not to risk everything on one company?" Because DUH. But people of the Right Sort told him he couldn't lose, so he believed them. At this point, we have also already witnessed that despite all his insistence on proper behavior, he doesn't have enough self-control to resist making out with a maid while his wife is possibly dying in the next room, which secondarily is a big hint as to how emotionally helpless he is - if he doesn't have a designated woman there to coddle him, what ever will he do? Must have one lined up at all times! Prepare for emergencies and have a backup if it looks like you're going to lose one! (Besides, how can he handle the grief of losing one crutch without another, right?) And now we also know that he can't figure out that you don't have to choose between letting elderly tenants stay on your farms to not farm them and turning them out in the cold: there are things called pensions. And I think Matthew pointed out that when you own a bazillion cottages, you can put retired tenants in them. And of course, we kicked the whole show off by highlighting how ridiculous it was that inheritances had to go to random third cousins one has never met because Y Chromosome.
So I felt some cause for hope that the point was that Lord Grantham's - and by extension, the aristocracy's and men's - inherited authority was not only unjustified, but basically wrecking the lives of everyone around him, and this had to stop.
Then came The Fridging of Sibyl.
So, okay, Grantham doesn't trust the doctor who's treated his entire household for like thirty years because he got one major diagnosis out of hundreds wrong. Fine. Even if his further complaint that Dr. Clarkson didn't predict Lavinia's death is so obviously stupid - as Cora pointed out, one of the scary things about the flu was how quickly and unpredictably it killed people - that it's obvious Grantham isn't entirely rational in his distrust of Clarkson. (Gosh, could it be because Clarkson isn't a Sir?) And there's a much higher-status doctor around telling Grantham just what he wants to hear (everything's fine!). But surely the news that Sibyl could hardly tell where or when she was would plant a little doubt in his mind as to whether things were entirely perfect? Just a smidge? Especially when two women who have actually had babies and no doubt been involved one way or another in the births of many more are concerned as well? Just how delusional can you be not to even worry that you're wrong in that situation? But he is shocked - just shocked - when Sibyl is Not Fine. In a dead kind of way.
While absorbing this development, I first grumbled that if the show wanted to shake things up by killing someone off, they should have killed Lord Grantham. Let Matthew the lawyer from Manchester - sympathetic to Edith's budding feminism and newspaper career, not quite as enamored of tradition for tradition's sake, potential friend of his Irish revolutionary chauffeur brother-in-law - suddenly be Earl and see what happens!
Which is when it sunk in that the story isn't about all the characters and how the slowly waning power of the system embodied in Lord Grantham affects them. It's about Lord Grantham, and how his gradual loss of power affects him. All those other characters? Just there to illustrate his journey. The show wouldn't work without Lord Grantham. And while some people may be interested in the show because they misidentified its point, like me, how many feel an instinctive identification with the show's actual viewpoint? How many feel like an embattled minority trying to hold on to "civility" and all that while a bunch of uppity rabble are trying to take away all their pretty things? ZOMG, they are being accused of oppressing people even though they are totally nice! It's not fair!
If Sibyl had, say, had a seizure and then spent a long time recovering, I might still have thought that the show was emphasizing how everyone was in danger because of Lord Grantham's lordly upbringing. But they killed her off, and the focus was on how Lord Grantham felt about it. And his mother, instead of responding to his realization that this just might be his fault with an especially barbed zinger as you would expect, tells him it's totally not. Now, Mary has drunk enough of the patriarchal aristocracy kool-aid that I'd expect her to defend her father. But the Dowager Countess? Who earlier was pointing out that since Sibyl wasn't capable of weighing in (and shouldn't that have been a clue, Grantham?), it was Branson's decision what to do, not Grantham's? Pity she didn't get more forceful about that before Grantham insisted everyone let the doctors argue for an hour... Right, so anyway, that struck me as suspiciously like a soothing balm for the viewers, by proxy - sure, you ignored a problem because you didn't want to hear it and only your inferiors were telling you there was anything wrong, but don't beat yourself up! These things just happen!
It's basically Gone With the Wind prettied up and made more acceptable by making some of the "rabble" characters a little more complex than either dumb villains who don't like to serve or dumb loyal peons who do, is what I'm saying. It should have been obvious from the beginning, but I still managed to miss it.
Sibyl had to die so her dad could feel bad and people could comfort him. And the show lost one of its most interesting characters, one of the most likely to keep popping in to shake things up. I hardly think that's worth it! Just think, if she'd lived, we could have had a spinoff show about her and Branson in Ireland. It would have been a totally different show, pulling in viewers on the strength of its Downton connection, and it could have been totally awesome. Even if they tried that now, just covering the months before they went back for a fatal appointment at Downton, it wouldn't be the same knowing what was coming.
Add to that the increasingly ridiculous and convoluted Bates subplot (no really, can we be done with this whole "my ex-wife was inexplicably psycho and now I am SUFFERING, SEE HOW NOBLY I BEAR THE PAIN" thing? seriously, I am starting to hope he did kill her, or at least was such an awful guy back when they were married that he really did drive her to suicide), the muddled messages the show is sending about Branson (is he supposed to be a hypocrite who makes speeches about not wanting to wear the suit representing oppression but doesn't feel it strongly enough not to put one on immediately and sit around drinking champagne? are we expected not to care that the Irish really are suffering under the rule of people like Grantham, or are we supposed to be appalled at their callousness when they don't want to talk about it because it spoils the party mood and is mean to people they like? what's the point of all this if it's never going to be addressed?), and how characters like Mrs. Hughs can't be allowed to just go on doing their jobs while not worshiping the Almighty Crawleys but must have terrible cancer scares so they can be Very Touched when a Crawley is nice to them about it... well, I could go on for quite a while... and all my hope that the show would ever end on an awesome note rather than degenerating into ever-increasing reactionary conservatism is dead.
Well, nearly all. I'll still keep watching, because I am a sucker like that. Maybe Cora will not just cave and forgive him tonight, and there will be lasting consequences for his bad judgement! Also, Lucy will totally let me kick that football this time.
And what have I been doing, after so many disappointments? Watching Fringe. I deserve whatever's coming.
Some recent disappointments:
The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr
Granted, based on The Alienist I wasn't expecting much more than a competent mystery. But I was encouraged by the relative absence of gore and prostitutes, because it's nice to see criminals who are driven to do things other than murder prostitutes for once. And it started raising some interesting points about how much damage the constant message that a woman must have babies and be nurturing to be A Real Woman and worth anything causes, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton makes a cameo appearance, and Sara Howard's friendship with Nellie Bly is mentioned in passing. Also Stevie drops a not-so-subtle hint that Sara might get her own novel to narrate someday. (Alas, this does not seem to have happened...)
But. Remember how in The Alienist, one of the ways we knew Things Were Getting Serious was that Dr. Kreizler's girlfriend got murdered? Well, in The Angel of Darkness, it's Stevie's not-quite-girlfriend's turn to get murdered for the same reason, hooray! Oh wait... Granted, a boy prostitute Mr. Moore had tried to help also got murdered in The Alienist, and a lawyer friend of his gets murdered in this book (hm, note to friends of Moore: watch your backs...), but still. Can't a girlfriend not get murdered around a detective for a change?
I haven't even gotten to the new Filipino sidekick they pick up for a while. The one Stevie keeps referring to as "the little aborigine." Instead of, you know, BY HIS NAME. Which is... uh... wait, why is he asking the characters to call him by the nickname his hated Spanish ex-boss probably gave him, anyway? What is this poor character's NAME, Carr?
The Big Bang Theory
I know, I know, this one was obvious. But sometimes they had such good science and fannish jokes! Like the episode where they had the (movie prop of the) One Ring and it started working on them and we got the fabulous makeup job turning Sheldon into Gollum.
And they had Amy Farah Fowler. For maybe three glorious episodes, she was the kind of character who said things like this:
PENNY: What I was going for was, you know, how is your life?
AMY: Just like everyone else's. Subject to entropy, decay, and eventual death. Thank you for asking.
And, defending her answer that we would not eat cheese danishes in a world ruled by giant beavers, this:
"In a world ruled by a giant beaver, mankind builds many dams to please the beaver overlord. The low-lying city of Copenhagen is flooded, thousands die. Devastated, the Danes never invent their namesake pastry. How does one miss that?"
And, of course, this:
"I find the notion of romantic love an unnecessary cultural construct that adds no value to human relationships."
What? A female character uninterested in romance and happy that way? Is this allowed on television?
No, of course not. Silly me. Now Amy is constantly obsessing over romance and how Sheldon isn't cooperating. And sexually harassing her girlfriends.
I'd be happy if they'd even just bring back the days when Amy might experience attraction to a handsome man but decide to take up the disciplines of Kolinahr once he opened his mouth. Better yet would be if Original Amy, Leslie Winkle (hey, show, remember Leslie Winkle?), Bernadette, and Priya got their own show and their own weekly collection of science (and law!) jokes. Four women being smart together onscreen at the same time! Talking about many things, not just men! While having distinct personalities and being friends! I guess that would make the network explode. We had a brief moment recently where Amy, Bernadette, and Penny got into a debate over whether if only Thor can pick up his magic hammer, someone else can pick up Thor while he's holding the hammer... but I don't expect that sort of thing to happen very often, based on the show's history so far.
The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
I enjoyed The Night Watch, overall, though it had its annoyances. Like the whole tired Light vs. Dark thing, and this faintly skeevy undercurrent whenever a woman appeared on the page. But I expected, as one might, that - for instance - now that two of the women were no longer untrained and clueless or stuck as an owl, that they would become more prominent and interesting in the next book, only as opponents because the female Day Watch character would be narrating the whole of the sequel as Anton had narrated the first book. The twisty intrigues also promised to continue, especially given the huge cliffhanger at the end of the first book.
Uh, no. Major spoilers for both books, warning warning.
So, The Night Watch was fully of twisty intrigues from "go." The Day Watch, on the other hand, was 95% intrigue-free for its entire first third, only to pick right back up with the intrigue for the second and third sections. This is quite a jolt, pacing-wise. Basically all that happens in the first third is this: Alisa is mopey because Zabulon (the boss) isn't into her anymore and she has no friends because everyone's a competitive bitch. She gives a long speech to the random guy she makes give her a ride about how there's no such thing as morals and people are all so fake and hypocritical and do what you want because freedom, man - a subject on which she'll continue to harp on at great length but with no additional insight frequently. She goes on a team mission involving the prologue redshirt and gets drained of her power. Then she is happy because maybe Zabulon forgives her and likes her again! Off she goes to summer camp to regenerate, which you'd think would be interesting because she does it by stealing kids' nightmares, but it's mostly blah blah blah until, suddenly, there is a cute new camp leader guy and it's TWU WUV FOREVER. Why? Who the hell knows. But alas, he is a Montague Light One! So he challenges her to a duel and she dies. Yes, DIES. There are hints that this is a set-up for something, but Alisa is clueless, so we get nothing to work with.
In my edition, it took a whopping 167 pages for Alisa to get de-powered, fall in love, and die. This might even have been tolerable, had the rest of the book turned out to adhere to the sames leisurely pace and reflective tone. But no, as soon as we stepped into a new narrator's head, it was back to twisty intrigue and a fast pace - a fact which really starts to rankle once reach yet another narrator in the third section, and get intermittent sections about the first book's narrator Anton, and realize that of the four main narrators so far, only the girl drops all that complicated thinking stuff to focus almost exclusively on petty daily concerns and puppy love. And while one of the guys does die, only Alisa dies because she's just plain weak. Fantastic.
And the powerful Olga who is now free of being an owl? Uh, she makes a cameo to serve drinks. Svetlana? Does nothing, then gets de-powered, then gets lined up to give birth to a messiah (surprise! no, of course you don't have a choice about it, why do you even bother asking?). The warrior Tiger Cub? Summarily squashed. Literally. That messiah, who is predicted to be female? She's not only not even conceived yet, but because some dude decides to die instead of wait around to be her mentor, she's not going to be the messiah after all. That's right: you can't even be the Chosen One on your own if you're a girl, because the real Chosen One is your teacher. (The text notes that Jesus was the last one, but funnily enough, no reference is made to him having a special teacher without whom he would have been just another powerful Light magician instead of a messiah...) There is almost some consolation in the fact that the Destined Mentor dies because he's in wuv with Dead Alisa, except that by that point we've also heard about his long life of being a Tough Man Making Tough Choices, so his motives might actually be more complex. Not to mention it's his choice to die, not forced upon him by his own weakness.
Incidentally, the reason he's the Destined Mentor is because he's just so much more nurturing and able to impart ethics to the youngsters or something. So this means that all the women in the book are not only weaker, less smart, less well-rounded and complex (ie, shallow), and less possessed of agency, they're worse at raising children too, which leaves them with... um...
Oh. And there's also the small detail that all the complicated intrigue in the first book, picked up in the latter two thirds of this book, was all leading up to that messiah plot, which fizzles like a wet firecracker. Meaning all that running around and desperate plotting for two whole books got us precisely nowhere. I know there's a lot of Cold War parallels here (except the narrators assure me that the conflict between the Watches is way more important than such a piddly human endeavor, honest), but that doesn't make it any less frustrating to read.
Downton Abbey
Hey, they were emphasizing from the beginning that Society Is Changing, and they would occasionally point out how the aristocrats were majorly screwing up something or other. I could hope that they actually meant it. Right?
Even at the beginning of season 3, they made a point that Lord Grantham is, frankly, an idiot, and just about anyone else in his household would be more competent to manage things than he is. Cora, his mother, Matthew... every single person who learns about his investment adventure exclaims first thing, "But wouldn't it have been more prudent not to risk everything on one company?" Because DUH. But people of the Right Sort told him he couldn't lose, so he believed them. At this point, we have also already witnessed that despite all his insistence on proper behavior, he doesn't have enough self-control to resist making out with a maid while his wife is possibly dying in the next room, which secondarily is a big hint as to how emotionally helpless he is - if he doesn't have a designated woman there to coddle him, what ever will he do? Must have one lined up at all times! Prepare for emergencies and have a backup if it looks like you're going to lose one! (Besides, how can he handle the grief of losing one crutch without another, right?) And now we also know that he can't figure out that you don't have to choose between letting elderly tenants stay on your farms to not farm them and turning them out in the cold: there are things called pensions. And I think Matthew pointed out that when you own a bazillion cottages, you can put retired tenants in them. And of course, we kicked the whole show off by highlighting how ridiculous it was that inheritances had to go to random third cousins one has never met because Y Chromosome.
So I felt some cause for hope that the point was that Lord Grantham's - and by extension, the aristocracy's and men's - inherited authority was not only unjustified, but basically wrecking the lives of everyone around him, and this had to stop.
Then came The Fridging of Sibyl.
So, okay, Grantham doesn't trust the doctor who's treated his entire household for like thirty years because he got one major diagnosis out of hundreds wrong. Fine. Even if his further complaint that Dr. Clarkson didn't predict Lavinia's death is so obviously stupid - as Cora pointed out, one of the scary things about the flu was how quickly and unpredictably it killed people - that it's obvious Grantham isn't entirely rational in his distrust of Clarkson. (Gosh, could it be because Clarkson isn't a Sir?) And there's a much higher-status doctor around telling Grantham just what he wants to hear (everything's fine!). But surely the news that Sibyl could hardly tell where or when she was would plant a little doubt in his mind as to whether things were entirely perfect? Just a smidge? Especially when two women who have actually had babies and no doubt been involved one way or another in the births of many more are concerned as well? Just how delusional can you be not to even worry that you're wrong in that situation? But he is shocked - just shocked - when Sibyl is Not Fine. In a dead kind of way.
While absorbing this development, I first grumbled that if the show wanted to shake things up by killing someone off, they should have killed Lord Grantham. Let Matthew the lawyer from Manchester - sympathetic to Edith's budding feminism and newspaper career, not quite as enamored of tradition for tradition's sake, potential friend of his Irish revolutionary chauffeur brother-in-law - suddenly be Earl and see what happens!
Which is when it sunk in that the story isn't about all the characters and how the slowly waning power of the system embodied in Lord Grantham affects them. It's about Lord Grantham, and how his gradual loss of power affects him. All those other characters? Just there to illustrate his journey. The show wouldn't work without Lord Grantham. And while some people may be interested in the show because they misidentified its point, like me, how many feel an instinctive identification with the show's actual viewpoint? How many feel like an embattled minority trying to hold on to "civility" and all that while a bunch of uppity rabble are trying to take away all their pretty things? ZOMG, they are being accused of oppressing people even though they are totally nice! It's not fair!
If Sibyl had, say, had a seizure and then spent a long time recovering, I might still have thought that the show was emphasizing how everyone was in danger because of Lord Grantham's lordly upbringing. But they killed her off, and the focus was on how Lord Grantham felt about it. And his mother, instead of responding to his realization that this just might be his fault with an especially barbed zinger as you would expect, tells him it's totally not. Now, Mary has drunk enough of the patriarchal aristocracy kool-aid that I'd expect her to defend her father. But the Dowager Countess? Who earlier was pointing out that since Sibyl wasn't capable of weighing in (and shouldn't that have been a clue, Grantham?), it was Branson's decision what to do, not Grantham's? Pity she didn't get more forceful about that before Grantham insisted everyone let the doctors argue for an hour... Right, so anyway, that struck me as suspiciously like a soothing balm for the viewers, by proxy - sure, you ignored a problem because you didn't want to hear it and only your inferiors were telling you there was anything wrong, but don't beat yourself up! These things just happen!
It's basically Gone With the Wind prettied up and made more acceptable by making some of the "rabble" characters a little more complex than either dumb villains who don't like to serve or dumb loyal peons who do, is what I'm saying. It should have been obvious from the beginning, but I still managed to miss it.
Sibyl had to die so her dad could feel bad and people could comfort him. And the show lost one of its most interesting characters, one of the most likely to keep popping in to shake things up. I hardly think that's worth it! Just think, if she'd lived, we could have had a spinoff show about her and Branson in Ireland. It would have been a totally different show, pulling in viewers on the strength of its Downton connection, and it could have been totally awesome. Even if they tried that now, just covering the months before they went back for a fatal appointment at Downton, it wouldn't be the same knowing what was coming.
Add to that the increasingly ridiculous and convoluted Bates subplot (no really, can we be done with this whole "my ex-wife was inexplicably psycho and now I am SUFFERING, SEE HOW NOBLY I BEAR THE PAIN" thing? seriously, I am starting to hope he did kill her, or at least was such an awful guy back when they were married that he really did drive her to suicide), the muddled messages the show is sending about Branson (is he supposed to be a hypocrite who makes speeches about not wanting to wear the suit representing oppression but doesn't feel it strongly enough not to put one on immediately and sit around drinking champagne? are we expected not to care that the Irish really are suffering under the rule of people like Grantham, or are we supposed to be appalled at their callousness when they don't want to talk about it because it spoils the party mood and is mean to people they like? what's the point of all this if it's never going to be addressed?), and how characters like Mrs. Hughs can't be allowed to just go on doing their jobs while not worshiping the Almighty Crawleys but must have terrible cancer scares so they can be Very Touched when a Crawley is nice to them about it... well, I could go on for quite a while... and all my hope that the show would ever end on an awesome note rather than degenerating into ever-increasing reactionary conservatism is dead.
Well, nearly all. I'll still keep watching, because I am a sucker like that. Maybe Cora will not just cave and forgive him tonight, and there will be lasting consequences for his bad judgement! Also, Lucy will totally let me kick that football this time.
And what have I been doing, after so many disappointments? Watching Fringe. I deserve whatever's coming.