The (totally accurate) Mitfords show
Sep. 20th, 2025 09:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessOutrageous - 1.2 Girl on the rebound
1932-33 was covered in this episode, I think. The show continues to be cartoonish. Nancy and Diana get to have an emotional life, otherwise this was focused on Unity, (I agreed with some of her backchat to her father over Christmas dinner, but not most of it, and not the time and place, child.) Nancy’s voiceover made out that Unity had always been the ‘naughtiest’ offspring and most likely to do something simply because her parents said she shouldn’t, but she really went for fascism here, volunteering to join up the fascist union, (as her second name was Valkyrie, it feels like bad kismet) having bought into ‘the theory’. Diana, who might lean into some of the politics but was mainly about her relationship with Mosely the man, invited Unity to come with her on a trip to Germany – cue a cartoonish rendition of the infamous Nuremberg rally where she looked rapturous.
She kept looking rapturous, and a little more put-together, after coming home. In one of a few lines that sounded far too modern, Nancy said she sounded like she’d joined a cult and whipped the youngest sister away from Unity as she spilled about the trip, but the one who was just as into communism, even if she didn’t seem to have actually gone on marches yet, had to put up with Unity’s student politics/covering her walls with posters of fascists. I’m constantly reminding myself that ‘fascism’ didn’t have quite the resonance then it does now.
Diana (or ‘Nad’) was living with the reality of getting divorced and being socially frozen out. ‘Farve’ (Purefoy is doing a good job of playing a somewhat put-upon man) wanted the family to cold shoulder her too, but her sisters didn’t listen. And then Mrs Mosely died of peritonitis, but also a lack of will to live, and Diana, who’d been blithely ignoring her and thought it would be romantic to remain a mistress, putting a lot of trust in Mosely, found out it was more complicated than that. He didn’t want to be seen in public with her, but was willing to hang out with (one of?) his dead wife’s sisters.
She tried to hang on to her dignity and spine, and that and making an unfavourable comparison to Hitler’s success brought Oswald back to heel. (For now, methinks, mainly based on reading a historical novel where Mosely was a hound-dog.) Some really nice moments between her and Nancy.
Nancy’s brother thought Hamish was gay. Anyway, Hamish, back on this side of the pond, came to tell Nancy that he was getting engaged to someone else (who Nancy thought was stupid, heh) and expected brownie points for telling her in person. It turned out that Joss was definitely gay, and thus Nancy met Peter at a gay bar. She seemed charmed by his pitch, not put off when he wanted to know if she was a virgin but didn’t think she had any right to ask him the same. They were hurtling towards getting married, so she went to bed with him, and he turned out not to care about whether she got off, and indeed tried to blame her. Oh, dear.
But she nevertheless threw herself into preparing to be a suburban housewife (the dream if you’ve always had maids, I guess) until he turned up drunk and announced that he’d resigned and hadn’t ever expected her to agree to marry him. But she had. And she did. Voiceover Nancy said it was because she was on the rebound. Also leery of turning 30 and being single, I guess.
1932-33 was covered in this episode, I think. The show continues to be cartoonish. Nancy and Diana get to have an emotional life, otherwise this was focused on Unity, (I agreed with some of her backchat to her father over Christmas dinner, but not most of it, and not the time and place, child.) Nancy’s voiceover made out that Unity had always been the ‘naughtiest’ offspring and most likely to do something simply because her parents said she shouldn’t, but she really went for fascism here, volunteering to join up the fascist union, (as her second name was Valkyrie, it feels like bad kismet) having bought into ‘the theory’. Diana, who might lean into some of the politics but was mainly about her relationship with Mosely the man, invited Unity to come with her on a trip to Germany – cue a cartoonish rendition of the infamous Nuremberg rally where she looked rapturous.
She kept looking rapturous, and a little more put-together, after coming home. In one of a few lines that sounded far too modern, Nancy said she sounded like she’d joined a cult and whipped the youngest sister away from Unity as she spilled about the trip, but the one who was just as into communism, even if she didn’t seem to have actually gone on marches yet, had to put up with Unity’s student politics/covering her walls with posters of fascists. I’m constantly reminding myself that ‘fascism’ didn’t have quite the resonance then it does now.
Diana (or ‘Nad’) was living with the reality of getting divorced and being socially frozen out. ‘Farve’ (Purefoy is doing a good job of playing a somewhat put-upon man) wanted the family to cold shoulder her too, but her sisters didn’t listen. And then Mrs Mosely died of peritonitis, but also a lack of will to live, and Diana, who’d been blithely ignoring her and thought it would be romantic to remain a mistress, putting a lot of trust in Mosely, found out it was more complicated than that. He didn’t want to be seen in public with her, but was willing to hang out with (one of?) his dead wife’s sisters.
She tried to hang on to her dignity and spine, and that and making an unfavourable comparison to Hitler’s success brought Oswald back to heel. (For now, methinks, mainly based on reading a historical novel where Mosely was a hound-dog.) Some really nice moments between her and Nancy.
Nancy’s brother thought Hamish was gay. Anyway, Hamish, back on this side of the pond, came to tell Nancy that he was getting engaged to someone else (who Nancy thought was stupid, heh) and expected brownie points for telling her in person. It turned out that Joss was definitely gay, and thus Nancy met Peter at a gay bar. She seemed charmed by his pitch, not put off when he wanted to know if she was a virgin but didn’t think she had any right to ask him the same. They were hurtling towards getting married, so she went to bed with him, and he turned out not to care about whether she got off, and indeed tried to blame her. Oh, dear.
But she nevertheless threw herself into preparing to be a suburban housewife (the dream if you’ve always had maids, I guess) until he turned up drunk and announced that he’d resigned and hadn’t ever expected her to agree to marry him. But she had. And she did. Voiceover Nancy said it was because she was on the rebound. Also leery of turning 30 and being single, I guess.
