The Downton Dish (Downton Abbey Season 3, Episode 6 recap): "Stay in bed! Read books!"

Fair is foul and foul is fair!

A double episode: yoiks! Let's get down to all of the sticky wickets.
Bates is sprung! (Somewhat anticlimactically.) But he has a spring in his step as he and Anna walk amongst the cottages to scout out potential new digs. Thomas the Usurper is still attending to Lord G, who tells Bates to “Stay in bed! Read books!” Jolly good all-purpose advice, if you ask us!
Lady Edith and the newspaper editor are getting along famously. He likes both her and her column on the plight of veterans. Hmmmmm ... perchance Lady Mary is not the only Crawley girl who can bewitch a denizen of Fleet Street in quest of a potential mate. But wait: she's sleuthing on the phone and finding out disquieting info. (What is this convenient dirt-digging service she's using?)
As is her wont, National Treasure Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess wins the acting smackdown hands down. (Those droll faces! That dry martini delivery!) As The Guardian's tv critic puts it, “You can give her the worst lines imaginable and they still come out like Shakespeare.”

Housemaid turned prostitute turned cook Ethel: “These days a working woman must have a skill." 

Cousin Violet: “But you seem to have so many...”

Ethel gets to stop being the elephant in the room thanks to the well-meaning machinations of Lady Violet, securing a place near her son where she can see him sometimes by pretending to be a former nanny. But not before Vi accuses Mrs Crawley of “surrounding us with a miasma of scandal.” Not fair! How about Lady Mary and the Turkish gent?

No more tea and strumpets at the Crawley house.

Lord G continues to act like a dodo and a spoilsport about the management of the estate, but once again his mother puts things to rights by nominating Tom/Branson as the estate manager, thus securing Baby Sybie's continued presence. Touchdown and field goal! (I won't use the appropriate cricket language because we in America have no clue about that bizarre-looking game, which dominates the end of the episode.) Grandmother Cora (a character who continues to be underused) also gets her wish that Tom and the baby live with the family at the big house until she’s older instead of in the estate agent's cottage.

How would the plot chug along without Lady Violet?

Thomas's fate keeps bobbing up and down like O'Brien's proverbial “bar of soap” in the bathtub. With all the hullabaloo, Lord G gets a pile of redemption points for asserting that “Thomas does not choose to be the way he is” and making mention of all the fellows who wanted to kiss him at Eton. (I'll bet ... those lips!) And Thomas, who is being railroaded out of town without a reference, stands up to Carson's Biblical wrath with an “I Am What I Am” moment: “I’m not foul, Mr. Carson. I’m not the same as you, but I’m not foul.”
“Human nature is a funny business, isn't it?" muses Carson. Mrs Hughes: “Oh, why didn't the poets come to you? They'd have saved themselves an awful lot of time and trouble.” Snap!

“It feels like the outer circle of Dante’s Inferno,” Matthew calls the jazz club. No, dude, that would be the eternal wrangling over running the estate!

I don't want this recap to go on longer than the episode, so I'll just say that Edith's potential new beau has been cast in Mr Rochester mode and both Mary and Matthew are seeing doctors clandestinely in pursuit of an heir (activities that would have been moot if not for O'Brien's fateful bar of soap!) Oh yes, new character Rose (the daughter of “Cousin Shrimpy”) cuts up with some scandalous behavior in a jazzy London nightclub that is nipped in the bud by Matthew et al., but she does provides the transition to the next episode, which will apparently involve a house party in a castle in Scotland. See you next week!