By contrast, her sister, Mary, is working a little too hard for her liking. In perhaps the most pulse-pounding scene, she and Anna have to go out into the rain to retrieve folding chairs. The whole thing is staged like Dunkirk, with Earl G and Dickie Merton sailing to the rescue at the last minute (having remembered that they, too, once got wet, and it went all right). But Mary’s tired, y’all. She wants everything to “stop being such a struggle,” and she’s wondering if she should just “chuck in the towel” and sell Downton to a school or an old folks’ home. Anna’s got no time for that. “Downton Abbey is the heart of this community,” she declares, “and you’re keeping it beating!” “So you think we should battle on?” asks Mary. “While there’s blood in your veins!” cries Anna, reaching for a torch, an Anglican hymnal and the nearest Union Jack.

All right, I made up that last bit, but in Fellowes’s world, servants are the most devoted monarchists of all. Just look at how the Downton staff react to the idea that they must stand aside in their own home and allow the king and queen to be served by palace retainers. The enemy incursion includes a snooty French chef and a loathsome butler (or, as he curiously prefers to be called, King’s Page of the Backstairs). Well, it’s not long before the Downton crew are locking up Mr. Backstairs, drugging the chef and dismissing the palace housekeeper with a single Mrs. Hughes-ian glare. Whereupon Mr. Carson squares his shoulders and says, “I must go where my king needs me.”

Didn’t any Downton servant want the night off? Even Molesley puts aside his promising educational career for the chance to wear state livery. The only no-show is Thomas Barrow, who has been temporarily relieved of his duties and finds himself, before he knows it, wandering into Yorkshire’s hitherto unsuspected gay demimonde. How quickly it goes down, Abbots. One minute, he’s sitting in a local pub; next minute, some mustachioed rascal is up in his business, cooing, “Why don’t you come with me? You know you want to.” Then it’s off to the local speakeasy, where the sight of boys dancing and smooching leaves Thomas murmuring that he’s never seen anything like it. Nor will he again for the joint is promptly raided. “You dirty perverts!” snarls the lead constable. And I held out hope that Thomas would: a) point out that “dirty perverts” is a redundancy; and b) turn himself into the Marsha P. Johnson of his era and go out swinging.

Instead, he meekly takes his place in the paddy wagon and is sprung only by intervention of the royal valet. The two men share an arrested kiss, plus the promise of something down the road, and Thomas, by movie’s end, has reverted to the patient sexless biding that Fellowes seems to prefer for him. But am I wrong for wanting our butler to beat a path right back to that mustachioed rascal?