“Classic Mary!” That about sums up the Crawley family’s troubles in the Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale trailer (and more or less the entire series). Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is a sensation for both good and ill as she attempts to win over society as—gasp!—a divorced woman. She and husband Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode, who had scheduling conflicts) are done, and high society isn’t exactly kind to a divorcée, as evidenced by Mary getting kicked out of a party for the crime of being newly single.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale “follows the Crawley family and their staff as they enter the 1930s,” reads a synopsis for the third film. “When Mary finds herself at the center of a public scandal and the family faces financial trouble, the entire household grapples with the threat of social disgrace. The Crawleys must embrace change as the staff prepares for a new chapter with the next generation leading Downton Abbey into the future.”
The future of Downton is in Mary’s hands, and she’s got a progressive attitude: “Families like ours must keep moving to survive,” she says. That attitude may be at odds with the aristocratic traditions instilled in them by the late Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), whose legacy looms large over the Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale trailer. “If mama were alive, what would she do?” the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) ponders. “There is a clear sense in the film that the family continues to be, in a sense, dominated by Violet,” series creator Julian Fellowes told Deadline earlier this month. “The fact that she’s dead is a detail. It’s her beliefs, her demands, and her sense of how the Crawleys should behave, and what they’re there for, that live on. We tried to find ways to make that as clear as we can. Of course, we do miss Maggie in the film, but we should miss Maggie in the film. That’s quite deliberate. We don’t want people not to miss her. We want them to miss her. I think she created a wonderful character that I will be grateful for to my dying day.”
Though this is obviously being billed as the end of Downton Abbey, the 75-year-old Fellowes expressed a “never say never” attitude about bringing the show back in some form, “But I think it’s the last with the original cast,” he said. “They’ve done 15 years, and that’s a long time on a TV show. The young women who arrived in their early 20s are now in their late 30s, and they’ve all married, had babies, been divorced, and God knows what else, since we started the show.” Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale premieres in theaters on September 12.
