One of my favorite of these stories has been that of Joseph Molesley (Kevin Doyle), who in Sunday’s episode got an opportunity he never expected. After tutoring assistant cook Daisy Mason (Sophie McShera) as she prepared to take her school exams, Molesley got to sit for the tests himself. And he performed so well that the local schoolmaster, Mr. Dawes (Patrick Brennan), told Molesley “I’m impressed … There are Oxford and Cambridge graduates who know far less than you. You should be proud,” and offered him a job on the teaching staff.

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By the standards of social mobility in England between the world wars, Molseley’s new position represents a considerable rise from the physical work he was doing several seasons earlier, when he had failed to find another position in service after leaving Downton.

One of the big themes of this season, expressed through Thomas Barrow’s (Rob James-Collier) search for a new job, has been the shrinking of the servant class. But Molesley’s struggle to find work was an even earlier indicator of that change.

And Molesley and Thomas’s experiences illustrate another significant point: that within the already limited confines of servant work, there were limited opportunities for advancement. Molesley found himself in difficulty during his prior job search in part because he was initially reluctant to accept a job that would allow him to return to Downton if it meant taking a demotion. Thomas, as an under-butler at Downton, has had difficulty finding another family that actually lives formally enough to require his talents. Having already accepted that they’ll both be doing service work for the rest of their lives, both Thomas and Molesley are reckoning with the possibility that they might not even be able to rise in this comparatively modest way.

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Part of what’s lovely and liberating about Mr. Dawes’s job offer is that it frees Molesley from thinking his life is constrained and offers him another path forward in life, one more suited to his actual interests and talents. “Service is ending for most of us, Daisy. I’ve just got a head start,” Molesley tells his former pupil, acknowledging that it was unlikely that he would ever “make butler.”

The end of an era when a large number of grand families kept great houses certainly means a great deal of economic uncertainty for some of the characters we’ve gotten to know so well on “Downton Abbey.” But as one category of jobs begins to dry up, people like Molesley who have actual passions and skills are being freed up to think about how they might live their lives differently, unconstrained by the sense of what makes for a respectable career and successful trajectory in service.