- I am a big suspender of disbelief, but there is something bothering me. I can buy the fact that Matthew Crawley is sufficiently dense not to realize that Mary is sending "Dude I Still Love You, You Nitwit" smoke signals from her tormented eyes, but is there really any universe in which Mary wouldn't have told Cora -- at some point during the two years that have elapsed since Season 1's conclusion -- that Edith was the one who spilled The Secret to Pamuk's father?
- I was glad to see from the pre-show interview with Elizabeth McGovern that her odd Americo-Brit accent on the show is in fact Elizabeth McGovern's own odd Americo-Brit accent, stemming from years of living in London and picking up that weird British intonation thing that all Americans living in London for more than 15 minutes seem to be affilicted with, rather than a studied dialect decision.
- Lady Sybil is to-die-for gorgeous.
- This show has an odd habit of making all of its characters reasonably well-rounded except for those who we are intended to roundly dislike, who are one-dimensionally awful. Thomas, O'Brien, Edith . . . not a redeeming characteristic among them. The good news, however, is that Bates's surprise visitor would seem to make the usual suspects seem nuanced and three-dimensional.
- Lack of Verisimilitude Department: After also having watched Jude Law in Contagion this weekend, I am struck by the fact that Downton Abbey apparently employs the best dentist in all of England.
Who's watching?