This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the second season of Downton Abbey.

So, caveat! I am almost but not entirely caught up on the first season of Downton Abbey, so I am relying a little bit on Wikipedia for backstory here. I will be caught up by next week, but for now, please be merciful.

I really am struck by the atmosphere of creative destruction in this episode, the way the war clarifies and distills the characters priorities. I agree with critics who say that Downton Abbey is predictable, more a product of its genre than a subversion of it. But it’s the rare thing that both can be qualified that way and that is executed so strongly that it’s a bracing reminder of why these cliches exist and are powerful. Even when I can see something coming from a mile away, whether it’s a hand injured in the war, a maid’s disappointment or a nobleman’s wrongfooting, it still lands like a blow to the chest. And there are enough surprises that are true to character that there’s fresh air in it.

The walls between the upstairs and the downstairs were already crumbling in the first season, whether in Lord Grantham’s tie to Bates or Carson’s confession to Lady Mary that “even a butler has his favorites” after he reassures her that her life isn’t over yet. But the war’s brought them down in force, with Isobel as something of an intermediary. First, there’s Sybil, who, after realizing bitterly that “Sometimes it feels as if all the men I ever danced with are dead,” decides she wants to try nursing, and by extension, learn how to be a functional woman rather than an ornament of the aristocracy. “Have you ever made your own bed, for example? Or scrubbed a floor?” Isobel asks her gently. The scenes of Mrs. Patmore and Daisy trying to teach her how to do the simplest tasks, including filling a kettle without drenching herself, are kind, revealing Sybil’s foibles but helping her work beyond them. It’s fascinating to see Violet and Lady Grantham’s response to her desire. Violet, surprisingly, sides with Isobel, insisting that “You can’t pretend it’s not respectable when every day we’re treated to pictures of queens and princesses in a Red Cross uniform.” And Lady Grantham’s concern for Sybil ultimately undoes her objections: her daughter’s emotional well-being trumps her concerns with propriety. “I was worried about Lady Sibyl. But I’m not worried anymore,” she tells the butler. “Carson, the cake will be a surprise whether you approve of it or not, so please don’t give it away.”
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I recently read David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts, which is a kind of depressing, if enlightening enterprise. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised than the man who created Charlie Brown was chronically depressed, but the story of his infidelities, and in particular, the way he pressured his oldest daughter to get an abortion in Japan and then barely acknowledged what he’d done when she got back, is less than gratifying.

But I think the counterfactual question that stood out at me most when reading the book is what it would have meant if Schulz or Peanuts had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. Michaelis writes in particular about Snoopy. In one strip, “Snoopy, invited to make a distinguished-grad speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, finds himself caught up in a riot protesting the drafting of dogs to serve in Vietnam…Snoopy, at the podium, his hit with a dog dish, then teargassed.” He writes “One of the few ‘enemies’ that Americans could agree on in those years was the Red Baron…From 1966 to 1969, Snoopy could be found pursuing—or being pursued by—the Red Baron wherever American explained itself to itself.”

The answer as to why Schulz didn’t come out against the war lies in this observation: “His opinions on subjects ranging from the miniskirt to the sexualizations of Peanuts were surprisingly tolerant, indeed hospitable.” You don’t get to be a national sage without being largely agreeable. But that quality also denies you your ability to speak forcefully and decisively on divisive issues without alienating somebody. It’s the same thing as perpetual reelection to Congress: if staying the nation’s tolerant Grandpa, or staying a member of the House becomes more important than anything you actually do with the position, you’ve got to start wondering what the point is.

The origins of my deep and abiding love for Michael Fassbender include Neil Marshall’s bloody showdown between Romans and Picts, Centurion:

So I’m pretty excited to hear that he’s going to direct one of the most important sequences in the next season of Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin’s novel A Clash of Kings, a battle in which one side manages to trap the other. Marshall did a very nice job of communicating the panic of both a plan gone wrong and reacting to a plan gone horribly wrong in a (relatively) confined space, and so I’m excited to see what he’ll do with the larger dynamics of that scene.

And more importantly, it strikes me that Marshall’s a good fit for Martin’s material, which makes war out to be incredibly ugly. Marshall’s one of the few directors who, like Zack Snyder, has an extremely distinct visual style. But unlike Snyder, who tends to make things look burnished and as a result, creates some emotional distance between viewers and events, Marshall’s good at a kind of hyperclarity that brings events closer. This battle in Martin’s novel is literally hell. If Marshall can do on a small screen what he did on the big one, he’ll make that fear and cognitive shutdown even more direct.

The Decemberists have achieved geekvana with their latest video, a recreation of a scene from Infinite Jest:

It’s odd to see Colin Meloy and company old enough to credibly be the middle-aged parents on the sidelines at a school event, when just five years ago the members of the band were young enough to play high school kids at the bleeding edge of that range where people in their 20s are allowed to play high school students in exchange for our willingness to pretend it’s not ridiculous. I think I might like the video for “Sixteen Military Wives” a bit more, if only because I’m susceptible to Rushmore allusions, and because there’s something useful in the pointedness of the blame the song assigns, even if it is a little heavy-handed:

Certainly, its humor is more direct that the Vogue-photoshoot mock-battle the band staged earlier in the year with the video for “This Is Why We Fight,” which, unusually for the Decemberists, cut away from the bloodshed:

But then, the band’s always been more direct about intimate violence than geopolitical conflict: