ITV
Doctor Thorne Closes On 'Any Number Of Happy Endings'
But was Greshamsbury worth the trip?
The series finale of Doctor Thorne really only had to do one thing to satisfy me -- one thing I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time yesterday fantasizing about. And, dear reader, I could not be more pleased to tell you that the episode delivered.
The best part of this moment -- other than that it leads directly to Louis's death, not much later the same day -- is the horse taking off after Louis gets clotheslined, all, "Girl, bye." I suppose I should mention that, in his last moments on earth, Louis expresses his regrets about the way he treated Mary, but eh, I don't really care if he dies in a state of grace as long as I don't have to see him anymore. And I don't! Four forty-two-minute episodes of this story pretty much boil down to the lesson that unpleasant people die unmourned? Seems excessive.
It's not as though I went into this adaptation of a light comedic novel of the Victorian era thinking it would be packed with hard truths and heart-wrenching tragedies; we're in the world of Anthony Trollope, not Thomas Hardy. But when we started, we knew the conflict of the story would arise from two scandals -- one public (the Greshams' debt crisis), and one private (Mary's parentage). And by the end, just as any of us could have guessed as soon as we saw Frank and Mary together, circumstances arising from the private scandal have redeemed the public one: Mary inherits Scatcherd's estate, just as WE ALL KNEW SHE WOULD, and because she's so saintly, she doesn't even lord the reversal of fortune over a groveling Lady Arabella for more than a minute EVEN THOUGH Frank's class-obsessed mother TALKED HER INTO BREAKING OFF HER ENGAGEMENT WITH FRANK by making Mary feel selfish for inflicting upon the man who loves her a murky past over which Mary never had any control. Mary wouldn't be the paragon of virtue for whose safety Louis's advances were meant to make us fear (which: mission accomplished) if she had treated Lady Arabella the way she deserves, but that doesn't mean Lady Arabella wouldn't TOTALLY DESERVE IT if she did.
The characters end up exactly where we knew they would the minute we met them because it's a traditional comedy, and a traditional comedy ends in marriage. Even so, the nearly four hours it takes us to get there feels a lot longer. Other than Louis, the characters are pleasant enough to spend time with -- even the ones, like Lady Arabella, you love to hate; and since it's a period production made by and starring British actors, there's not a bad performance in the bunch. (Well, one: Cressida Bonas as Patience Oriel is pretty bad, but one imagines firing her would risk the destruction of the sets by royal drone strike.) But as in his last big TV hit, Julian Fellowes has a very weird sense of which conversations to include in the final cut and which to leave offscreen. In this final episode, we have to sit through three and a half separate scenes in which Doctor Thorne tells someone the truth about Mary's ancestry and the fact that it's made her a spectacularly wealthy heiress. But when Doctor Thorne brings Louis home from his disastrous dinner with the Greshams to see Jonah looking like this...
...and hear from his own servants that they won't stand for Jonah spending another night in the house, we don't (a) see what happens when someone (the teeny little Thorne himself?) throws Jonah out, nor (b) find out WHY HE LOOKS LIKE A FUCKING VAMPIRE?
The other frustration is that, for a titular character, the actual Doctor Thorne is so recessive -- and since we're just coming off another British miniseries in which he's a scene-stealing delight, Tom Hollander feels sadly wasted being so straight-faced and correct in a production one would have thought would be his showcase. Not even Doctor Thorne gets to needle Lady Arabella about her snobbishness once the truth of Mary's new wealth is revealed, other than the actual telling; when Mary and Frank do have their (inevitable) wedding, he has to stand with her as their families are joined forever and thank her for the reception she's put on even as we all know it's Mary's thousands of pounds that must have actually paid for it.
The saving grace of the eminently predictable ending is that among the happy endings is the one I didn't dare really hope for after Episode 2.
If keeping his niece's secret, protecting his relationships with the Greshams who matter, and looking after Louis as well as anyone living possibly could have means that Doctor Thorne has earned as his reward this witty, beautiful woman and all the oil of Lebanon, I suppose his unfailingly decorous comportment was all worth it, even if my having watched his whole unnecessarily long journey kind of wasn't.