'Downton Abbey' and the Mother of All Tropes
Spoiler Alert: Like everyone else on the web, we're talking about the Season Three finale of Downton Abbey. If you haven’t seen the episode yet, proceed no further...
Matthew Crawley's wipe-out in the final moments of the season finale of Downton Abbey was all the talk this week. (Matthew just didn’t go off to India for a year, after all.) There were articles about how writers historically get revenge on actors leaving casts of popular shows by writing them out in final, grisly deaths, making it impossible for them ever to return. There were other stories about creator Julian Fellowes needing to dispense with the Matthew (Dan Stevens) and Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) storyline because it had run its course.
That Matthew took a header in the last two minutes of the finale wasn't a huge surprise. The news that Stevens was leaving the show had been swirling in the months since the show aired in the UK in the latter part of 2012. All that remained was how the Downton writing room would dispense with him. (And that also lead to a few pieces on why PBS is unable, or unwilling, to run Downton concurrently with its run in the UK. Apparently PBS stations don't want to risk losing the best ratings they've had for a long while running Downton against network TV's new fall programming.)
And that Matthew bought it, ripping along in his sportster — top down — and full of joy about the news of his newborn son, was also no shocker. Downton Abbey is, after all, a soap opera as lavish as the mansion in which its characters live. Up to this point Matthew had gone of to war, been crippled, risen miraculously out of a wheelchair, and also as miraculously saved the Crawley family from financial ruin. All that was left was for his evil twin to arrive, and you couldn't blame Stevens for deciding to exit.
But the real story here — which I pondered as I sat watching the finale with my girlfriend, Agnes, and her daughter, Christina — is how conditioned we are by TV script conventions. At the instant the episode cut to Matthew at the wheel, they both howled "Noooooo!" They knew what was coming, and it literally took them only a nanosecond to react in a moment of insta-clairvoyance made possible by only having it seen done in television a hundred times before. Why would the writers bother to show someone happily going along at the wheel of a car unless something tragic is about to happen?
And so splat went Matthew, veering off the road into a tree to avoid a head-on collision, ensuring that he'll never again return to Downton's finely draped halls.
In 2011, TVWW found the website TVtropes.org, a wiki compendium dedicated to cataloging and giving distinctive titles to all of the standard plot devices used by scriptwriters. It's a fascinating, hilarious website that describes script tricks such as Hero Tracking Failure (where the hero cannot be wounded, even though sprayed with a hail of machine gun fire) and, my favorite, The Unflinching Walk (in which the character, staring stonily ahead, walks away from a fiery explosion, never reacting to, or turning around to see, the blast — as demonstrated by the stoic hit-men cousins in Season Three of Breaking Bad.)
But to my surprise, despite a couple of hours of searching for devices similar to the "Innocent But Doomed Drive" trope, I could not find one that described Matthew's all-too-familiar method of demise. (Maybe you will have better luck finding it. If you do, please leave me a comment below.)
There were some that were close. There was the Too Happy to Live trope, where characters — like Downton's Matthew and Mary — achieve happiness after a series of great struggles, only to have one, or both, die in the end. But nothing nailed the innocuous drive to Kingdom Come.
Downton, despite its high level of soapy drama and occasional retread antics, is still a great series, thanks to the majesty of its lavish art direction and the wit of the snippy insults the aristocrats dish out. The Season Three finale was a good one, establishing future story lines on which to build: the financial rescue of the Downton estate, the introduction of new trouble-making niece Lady Rose MacClare (Lily James), and a redemption of sorts for the scheming Thomas (Rob James-Collier). And, let's not forget, Mary's newfound motherhood and widowhood.
During my perusal of TVtropes.org, I spent some time on the YKTTW page ("You Know That Thing Where..."), a place where readers can post tropes they're itched by, in the hopes that they'll become a new page for the site. I think I might be be submitting the "No Reason to Drive But Die" trope very soon...