Yes! Downton Abbey Part II coming up in 5 minutes!
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Anonymous
| The TV Guide website says the Christmas episode, 2 hours, I think, will air at the end of the season on Feb. 19. |
Anonymous
| omg. What is this show? It has a huge following. I'm going to check it out...brb. and thanks! |
Anonymous
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I do love the show, but this season's opener was WAY too fast paced. Each scene was just crammed into the next one.
With such beautiful scenery, the scenes could at the very least more slowly fade into one another. |
Anonymous
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Love the show... can't wait for next week!
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Anonymous
It's available from the pbs website but Netflix has the longer version available streaming. Apparently they cut out 2 hours from the first season when bringing the show over to the US... thought we would't be interested in all those details about the "entail". |
Anonymous
| So now I'm confused. Are there two hour-long episodes we Americans missed last season? Or are they snippets taken from the whole thing that add up to 2 hours? |
Anonymous
I just watched it online (Mon., Jan. 9) on my computer, it is on the day after airing. Watched all two hours. |
Anonymous
That PP was getting all snarky, but didn't understand the problem was pretty ironic. |
Anonymous
| Last night was soooo good, but I missed one part. So Lady Edith and the farmer she kissed. He's married right? That is his wife who sees them kissing in the barn? |
Anonymous
| I'm watching NBC Nightly News right now. D.A. is such a hit that they're gonna have a segment about it right after the commercials. Wow. PBS doesn't usually get a lot of attention on broadcast news. |
Anonymous
The latter. |
Anonymous
| Can somebody please explain who Miss Swire is and how she and Matthew hooked up? Also, does anybody else think that Matthew and Lady Sibyl are a better match than Matthew and Lady Mary? Remember when he rescued Sibyl at the political rally? Didn't you think that might blossom into a romance? |
Anonymous
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Yes, that is the same farmer. Edith had talked about his health improving at the start of the episode.
I can't imagine Matthew with anyone but Mary! |
Anonymous
Well here you go any way, from a lawyer in Britain: First off, what’s an entail? It is a limitation on the current tenant’s (in our case, the 6th Earl of Grantham) ownership interest in the estate. If he owned Downton Abbey outright, he would have a fee simple. Instead, he has a fee tail, which gives him a life interest so he can’t be evicted in his lifetime, but not the right to say who gets Downton Abbey after he dies. Okay, so how would an entail work? The normal entail would be to “the 6th earl and heirs of his body” (meaning his legitimate biological children) or “and heirs male of his body” or “and heirs male of his body to be begotten on Cora.” When the 6th earl had no sons, the second and third of those would terminate, allowing the 6th earl to dispose of the money by will. The first would allow a daughter to inherit, but I’m not sure if it would pass to Mary or to the three daughters jointly or in shares… If Mary, the eldest daughter, marries Matthew, the third cousin who has a "job" and knows what a "weekend" is, does that solve the problem? Mary marrying Matthew would "fix" things because their eldest son would inherit the earldom and the money, and would be a descendant of the American nabob, so everybody gets what they wanted. It matters that it's Mary rather than Sybil or Edith if, and only if, there is a settlement or entail to heirs, not limited to heirs male, and only if that has the effect of passing the money to the eldest daughter rather than to daughters jointly. If Mary inherits by the 6th earl's will after the settlement or entail fails, then he could equally make Sybil or Edith his heiress. Why can't Matthew relinquish all rights to the title and estate and thus agree with Robert to break the entail? Matthew is the heir presumptive, not the heir apparent. Bluntly, he could be superseded as the heir to the earldom if Robert has a legitimate male heir. Matthew's right to inherit the title and the estate are conditional, so he does not have the legal right to break the entail. Only an heir apparent would have that right. Only an eldest son meets the conditions of an heir apparent: direct descendant of the current title holder, male, and can't be superseded by another. Which is a bit of a catch-22, isn't it? If they had a male heir of Cora's American family as well as of the first earl then the money and the estate both go to the rightful person, and they don't need to break the entail. Without a son, Cora's money goes, with the title, to this fellow no one knows and who doesn't seem to want it. But because the earl still might have a son, Matthew can't help Robert break the entail. Welcome to property law, where rules established in the 13th century are only now passing slowly out of favor... Okay, so assume they go to court to break the entail. Do they have an argument? Their best argument is that Cora's father was inadequately briefed by his lawyer and thus got bamboozled by the 5th earl. But unless they can show something fishy was going on, it's unlikely that any English court would believe that an American nabob couldn't afford the best lawyers to protect his interests. S.O.L., hunh? 'Fraid so. |
Anonymous
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DVR's this Sunday and just watched it last night. Riveting!
Loved: the Mr. Bates/Anna saga, but can't believe he's been gone a year! The William/Mustard Gas blindness guy story Agree that Lady Sybil is the hottest daughter and maybe Matthew will have eyes for her, which would be interesting Lady Mary needs a better alternative to Matthew than Carlysle robber-baron to make it more of a contest, me thinks I predict that O'Brian will fall for Lange. What is up with the young farm boy and the young girl matched? That makes no sense to me. The cook cracks me up. |