*A few season 2 premise spoilers.*
With more than three full years between seasons, I was grateful for the “previously” recap when season 2 premiered. I like the show, but there were a number of plots I’d forgotten about, and it was good to ease back into the storylines before being tossed into the swing of things.
Anne has all kinds of balls in the air, and most of them aren’t cooperating as well as she’d like. On the business side, she’s having foreman issues over at her coal pit, and her attempts to cow her naysayers by very lavishly and visibly spending money on improvements is hampered by her dwindling liquid assets. And on the romantic side, Miss Walker is as devoted to Anne as ever, but she won’t pull the trigger on some important decisions that need to be made, and Anne is having trouble pacifying her meddlesome relations.
The most apparent thing is this episode is that Anne is Doing the Most, in the most literal sense of the phrase. She has a million things going on, and despite her brisk, confident air, the strain is beginning to show. She races from finance consultation to work site inspection to romantic rendezvous, and she holds interviews for a new servant position in between visits to Miss Walker’s relatives demanding information. All this juggling leads to things getting fumbled in various aspects of her life. She snaps at Miss Walker when she gets fed up with her new wife’s dithering, and after threatening to shoot a back-talking ex-employee, she doesn’t understand how Marian could possible think the servants are afraid of her.
The Anne/Miss Walker relationship is at an interesting place here; I sympathize with both of them to different degrees. Miss Walker has spent most of her life doing as she told, and that’s included being “delicate”—it’s understandable that she’s feeling unsure of herself in these new steps and is trying her best under difficult circumstances for her. At the same time, Anne is a bold person who’s used to defying society’s rules, and I get that it sucks to be continually holding Miss Walker’s hand and giving her pep talks over every little thing. Likewise, I see why Anne fears that Miss Walker’s reluctance to amend their wills for each other is a sign that she isn’t fully committed, even as Anne’s obvious money troubles make her preoccupation with Miss Walker’s money and properties feel opportunistic.
There isn’t a ton from Peter Davison/Mr. Priestley today. He appears briefly for an “Anne tries to put Miss Walker’s relations in their place” scene. It’s no surprise that he’s perpetually clueless and/or indignant about everything Anne says—Miss Walker having been under their thumb so long, it’s unthinkable that, from his perspective, she’s being “stolen” out from under them. I swear, every line he has in this episode is some variation of, “What?”, “How?”, or incredulously repeating what Anne just said.
No comments:
Post a Comment