'Belgravia's Midpoint Continues to Ask Viewers to Hold

As Belgravia continues, everyone's secrets boil ever closer to the surface in an hour mainly serving as a holding pattern for future revelations. This story's two-steps-forward, five-steps-back nature is highly frustrating, as at least three different sets of characters inch ever closer to discovering the series' primary secret: That Charles Pope is Lady Brockenhurt's grandson. Of course, Charles is not in any of those characters, but there's so much soapy goodness to enjoy otherwise that it's hard to stay angry that preserving this secret requires everyone to be dumb. 

Watching nearly everyone on this show misbehave is vastly entertaining, though some viewers aren't necessarily here for what Belgravia is serving. Almost every central character is terrible - selfish, manipulative, and out to ruin one another simply because they can. At the moment, there are precisely two characters worth rooting for, and while they're both incredibly adorable, they're also dumb as rocks. Any one of at least a half dozen characters could drop dead immediately, and most of us wouldn't mourn. Perhaps Julian Fellowes desperately wanted to make the anti-Downton Abbey? In that, he has undoubtedly succeeded.

Lady Maria Grey is at least bright, charming, bold, and certainly knows her own mind. Is it realistic she'd be able to break an engagement with a future Earl simply because she met a merchant in the square that she liked better? Of course not. But I love Maria realizing she can't waste her life on a man like John, who will make her miserable because he is a miserable person. Also, she and Charles are too cute, even if by this point, anyone with more than three functional brain cells might at least be the slightest bit curious about why all these rich people are constantly showing up at his office to stare at him as though he were a zoo animal. To put it simply: These people are not subtle.

On the plus side, Charles is kind and nice, and his eventual elevation to his proper station will ruin John Ballasis, and that's honestly enough for me. John, for what it's worth, is rapidly working to bring about his own ruin - bribing servants for more intel about the Trenchard family's connection to one Mr. Pope, encouraging his new sidepiece Susan Trenchard to pump her mother-in-law for information and report back; and selling stolen family silver to pay for all these things. John sucks! 

By all rights, Susan should be a fairly sympathetic figure, despite her many flaws. She's married into a family that clearly doesn't like her very much, her own husband barely tolerates her, and she has no friends, children or society position to occupy her time. Her life is the kind of poor tragedy that only affects people of means - it's not like she's starving or being physically abused, but her life is largely meaningless, and she has little to look forward to. Of course, she's having an affair. Of course, her unhappiness has also turned her shallow and mean, so naturally, she ends up having an affair with a man like John, who is openly using her for both his physical pleasure and personal gain. 

Perhaps if Susan were a more interesting character, we might get to witness her realization that John is terrible and never going to give her anything she wants. Instead, we get a shock pregnancy reveal this weak, which might be more interesting if it were likely to be anything but played off as Oliver's miracle offspring. That said, I'm actually looking forward to her inevitable confession to John, he's going to be a complete dirtbag about it, and hopefully, this moment will serve as a sort of turning point for her character. (For some reason, I desperately want to like her. She's intelligent and ambitious, and that's far too often lacking in shows like this - give me a reason to root for her, show!)

Much of this episode is centered around John's efforts to blackmail various Trenchard family servants, which is intriguing for several reasons. One, this is very profoundly not Downton Abbey, in which every member of the Crawley staff was not just happy to be a member of the working class but proud to do good for such an influential family. Speer, Turton, and Ellis all openly hate the Trenchards and revel in snagging as much additional cash and opportunity as they can get their grubby paws on. This is probably a more realistic view of life for these people than the happy downstairs families that Carson and Mrs. Hughes espoused, but it does mean that we do not care about them.

Second, it pushes the narrative forward (finally), cluing various people into something shady that has been going on under all their noses. Ellis' tremendously bad attempt to pump the servants at the Brockenhurst house for information means that Anne Trenchard is now aware that her maid has been somewhere she shouldn't and is lying about her reasons. (But not before Ellis spots a conveniently placed photo of Caroline's son Edmund - a man that, quite frankly, she really should remember, given that she was Sophia's maid all those years ago.) 

Susan's constant questioning of her mother-in-law prompted Ann to admit that Charles is, in fact, not a stranger to her family. (How did this woman keep a secret for 25 years?) Even Lady Maria Grey is getting pretty curious about why Lady Brockenhurst is so willing to visit a cotton merchant in Bishopsgate so often. Only two episodes are left, so the moment of truth must be nigh.