Two righteous women ruled the roost on TV on Sunday night — Michonne, the sword-wielding avenger on AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” and Lady Mary Crawley, of PBS’s “Downton Abbey.”
Of the two characters, Michonne, played by actress Danai Gurira, has always been the biggest badass. With her steel katana, she fearlessly slices her way through the zombie apocalypse, cutting off heads like so many slices of Swiss cheese. Anybody who gets her in her way feels the sharp prick of her displeasure.
But Lady Mary, played with icy perfection by Michelle Dockery, wields a mighty sword herself — her acid tongue — and this week she caused more damage than Michonne has in her many seasons on the series. The episode sees Mary ruin her sister Edith’s (Laura Carmichael) life by telling her prospective fiancé, Bertie Pelham (Harry Hadden-Paton) — who, by the way, has just been named the new Marquess of Hexham — that she had an out-of-wedlock child, the oft-mentioned, adorable Marigold. Edith’s hopes of finally finding love and marriage are dashed yet again. Fie, fie, fie on Mary!
Such cruelty does not go unnoticed. After Bertie excuses himself from the lunch table, the family lights into her. Brother-in-law Tom Branson (Allen Leech) corners the termagant and says, “You can’t stop ruining things. Like all bullies, you’re a coward.” A scandalized Mary has trouble keeping her poker face. When she later disingenuously apologizes to Edith, the lovelorn Crawley really lets her have it. “Shut up!” she screams, and calls Mary the unthinkable — “a nasty, selfish bitch.”
Seldom has a character spoken so clearly and bluntly for the audience. It was obvious that Mary was jealous of Edith potentially marrying a title with greater prestige than the Grantham title. It was also glaringly clear that her unhappiness with her own marital state, and being actively courted by commoner Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode), was dispiriting, to say the least. The entire family was disgusted with her nonetheless.
A second, prolonged apology from Mary did not fool Edith, but she proved magnanimous: “In the end you’re my sister, and one day only we will remember Sybil or Mama or Papa or Matthew or Michael,” she says, “until at last our shared memories will mean more than our mutual dislike.” As the French say, “Touché!”
If the pen is mightier than the sword, the tongue is crueller. We can’t unsay what is said, and Lady Mary — now married a second time, to poor Henry Talbot — will always be remembered as one of the meanest women who ever walked across a TV screen. She makes Michonne look like Mary Poppins.