Welcome, Gentle Readers, to another episode in our current season of the Telly Visions podcast, a Downton Abbey Rewatch with Lacy Baugher Milas and Sophie Brookover.

As they rounded the final corner and pelted flat-out down the straight to the finish line of Downton Abbey’s second season, your stalwart rewatchers gathered to sort through all the good, the eye-rollingly bad, and the swooningly great story and character developments.

We were pleasantly surprised at Lady Mary Crawley’s continued growth into a woman of substance (no, not that one, but we love Emma Harte, too) – look at Mary befriending Lavinia and deciding to be happy for her and Matthew! Hearken unto her savvy crisis management advice to Sybil and Tom when they briefly consider eloping – and gutted by Lavinia succumbing to the flu pandemic of 1918. Downton Abbey doesn’t pull its punches with character deaths, does it?

Sometimes that gives us earned tears, and other times it tries our patience horribly, and we’re sorry to say that the whole situation with Bates being suspected and then accused of murdering his first wife, Vera, is firmly in the latter category. We’ll talk about it a bit each episode, but just a bit, because there are far more interesting events unfolding in each episode for us to invest our time in. Plus, as Lacy puts it, plot foolishness like Bates On Trial For Murder and Patrick Crawley, or Nah? require everyone involved to make the stupidest decisions possible at every turn. We rebuke it!

On the far end of that plot spectrum, we all but stood up and cheered for Mary and Matthew as they finally admitted their mutual enduring love and got engaged. We can’t wait to see them down the aisle and beyond in Season 3.

A few further tiny notes for alert listeners:

The Latin motto Lacy couldn’t remember, which translates to “Justice be done, though the heavens fall,” is “Fiat justitia ruat caelum.”
We rolled our eyes pretty lavishly at the use of the Ouija board to transmit Lavinia’s blessing to Mary and Margaret from beyond the grave. Modern Spiritualism and its seances were still quite popular in this era. Fun fact about the movement and its use of spirit boards like the one in the season finale: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an adherent, and took it so seriously that it destroyed his friendship with Harry Houdini, who considered spiritualism to be a fraud.
Sophie was able to dig up a single Downton Abbey/All Creatures Great & Small crossover story on Archive of Our Own. Sadly, it does not feature Mr. Mason taking a day trip over to Darrowby to give Siegfried Farnon a stern but loving talking-to, but it’s charming and thoroughly G-rated, so we feel just fine about sharing A Fortuitous Meeting with you all.

We look forward to bringing you coverage of the first half of Season 3 in a few weeks!

Downton Abbey Seasons 1 through 3 are re-airing this summer, from mid-June through mid-September 2026, at 10 p.m. ET on most local stations and on the PBS app. All six seasons are available to binge on PBS Passport for members and on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.

Since this podcast renaissance is something of an experiment, we are currently running a special subscription tier for it, priced at $48/year (or $4.88/month) for 12 episodes. Your subscription dollars – for which we are eternally grateful! – will help fund future episodes. The more listener subscriptions we have, the closer we get to a regular biweekly (or, dare to dream, weekly) podcasting schedule.

The 12-episode podcast (two episodes per season) will span most of this year and take us into 2027. Masterpiece is rerunning the entire series, soup to nuts, on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. ET; Seasons 1 through 3 will air back-to-back, starting Sunday, May 17, and running through mid-September 2026. As always, we will follow the airing schedule. The debut dates for Seasons 4 through 6 have not yet been announced; once they are, we will follow accordingly.

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‘Return to Downton Abbey’ Episode 4: The Maturation of Mary Crawley