This Article About Thomas Barrow Is Bananas

No, right, it’s GREAT, just bananas (and spoiler-y for the last season, but not the season finale itself, if you somehow magically fit into that category?) It’s longer than the average undergraduate thesis, is a classic “he wrote breathlessly,” and if all you really want from the internet is for someone who writes well to spend way too much mental energy meditating on a TV show you’re into, a good month after it wraps for another year, this is your lucky day:

Thomas’s hopes were nudged along by Miss O’Brien, the lady’s maid who defies all efforts to motivate her malevolence, although one reason might be a hairdo that would drive anyone to evil, featuring two coiled hair-Slinkies that sprout from her forehead and serve, it seems, as receivers for Satan’s commands. (None of the Downton women come off too well, really; they are either bitches, fools, or nannies. The bitches include Miss O’Brien, Lady Mary, the Dowager Countess Maggie, and, I would argue, the humorless and worthy Mrs. Crawley, Matthew’s mother, who somehow strikes a tent in all three camps. The fools are [redacted for spoilers, read the article if you want them.] The Head Nanny is the housekeeper Mrs. Hughes, who has all sorts of practically perfect Nannies-in-Training scurrying about, hoping to please her. And then there is Elizabeth McGovern’s Lady Grantham, a bemused and beaming American whose fortune floats the joint and who seems to be kept in line by some early version of a strong benzodiazepine. But one must feel for these women; their men are, again for the most part, either maimed, martinets, or man-sized Christopher Robins.)

Ahhhhhhhhhh. Richard Kramer, can you do “The Americans” recaps? Or just narrate our daily lives with eye-rolls and sweeping hand-gestures and devastating summations?