Downton Abbey
ITV
****
Mr Robot
Amazon Instant Video
***
In an act of dramatic daring that recalled the political theatre of George Bernard Shaw and Howard Barker (if only dimly), Julian Fellowes turned a dinner party in Downton Abbey last night into an allegory of Munich 1938. Neville Chamberlain, at this stage Stanley Baldwin’s health minister, was coming to dinner, blackmailed into accepting the invitation by the Dowager Countess, to whom he was almost related (her late husband was his wife’s godfather, apparently).
Her plan was for Chamberlain to intervene in this season’s tedious dispute over the administration of the local hospital. The countess, you may recall, is demanding its continuing “independence” under the Grantham family’s aegis. Cousin Isobel is campaigning for its amalgamation with the Royal Yorkshire. To get the most from this summit, I ask you to substitute Maggie Smith for Hitler, and the autonomy of the cottage hospital for Sudetenland’s. All Nev has to do is stand up to the tyrant.
Downstairs, the Bateses “do not give much for Mr Chamberlain’s chances”. Upstairs, over the consommé, Chamberlain is, indeed, proving no match for Smith’s fuhrer. One moment he is refusing to make a stand, the next there is blood everywhere. Lord Grantham’s burst ulcer, its sanguinary content vomited spectacularly over the dining-room table, is, of course, the Second World War: the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Cora Crawley dead. “Give me napkins,” shouted Cousin Isobel, as Chamberlain made himself scarce.
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What was so great about this scene, besides the technical effects and the metaphor, was the expectation that Grantham was a gonner. “If this is it, just know I have loved you very, very much,” quoth Robert to Cora. Carson told the staff that “life is short, death is sure, [and] that is all we know” — even truer 90 years ago than today. From the preview at the end, however, we know that Robert will, actually, be sitting up in bed next week. As a prefiguration of catastrophe (ratings in this case for ITV when Downton closes shop) it was terrific stuff, however; daft but disturbing.
Much the same can be said for the American import Mr Robot, released in its first-season entirety on Amazon over the weekend. It is a cyber-crime paranoia thriller told by a paranoid cyber-criminal, Elliot (hollow-eyed Rami Malek), to the imaginary friend in his head, ie us. Intentionally, this does not help viewers to know where they stand. This morphine-addled, delusional, Asperger’s punk, whose maths genius alone keeps him employed in a digital security firm, is a highly unreliable narrator.
The baddies are a big business called E-Corp (Microsoft?), but Elliot, and we, hear it as “Evil Corp”. Their potential nemesis is Mr Robot (wild Christian Slater), but he seems to be running a bit of an Evil Corp himself. His big idea is to hack the banks and cancel debt everywhere. That sounds a bit Corbyn to me. With allusions to The Third Man’s Ferris wheel and The Sopranos’ Dr Melfi, the first two episodes would have earned further stars if Elliot’s drowsy narration had not been so irritatingly samey. I am, nevertheless, not ruling out a binge watch.