All Creatures Great & Small (S5)

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After watching some gifsets of All Creatures Great & Small cross my dash through the UK airing of series/season 5, it's finally here in the US.

I'll put more substantial recaps in the comments.

ETA: I updated the post date to the end of the season in February, so everything wouldn't be clustered in January.

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S5E1: To All Our Boys

I can't remember which airfield was specified, but it's spring of 1941.

James is training with other pilots in the RAF, and he's pretty good at the encouraging/mentoring part as we see with Banerjee, the navigator. The first long-distance flight over Scotland brought out Banerjee's nerves a bit, but James collapses before he could get in the plane with the rest of his crew. It's brucellosis [everyone was so worried that Helen might have caught it last season that James wasn't tested], and the reoccurring bouts of fever and possible dizziness make him unfit to fly.

On the one hand, Helen is understandably relieved that James is alive and could be discharged to come home. On the other hand, James needs a little bit of time digging trenches to process that four-fifths of his crew died on that long-distance flight he missed, and Banerjee is possibly too injured to ever fly again. (He also needs to be able to help the farmer's cow on the land they're digging trenches, so he can literally see that he still has valuable skills as a vet.) I think the real person this character is based on got past this point of training, but I suspect the show wanted to pull James back to Darrowby sooner rather than later. The episode ends with James meeting his son, Jimmy, in the kitchen of Skeldale House and everyone realising he's home.

In between all that, we saw Darrowby on the home front. There's a coordinator guy and different things to volunteer for. According to the TellyVisions recap, Mr Bosworth is running the Air Raid Precautions headquarters which are shared with the Women's Institute, which is why there's a mix of discussion about the victory garden and blackout warden volunteering. He's initially not keen on letting Mrs Hall volunteer as a warden, since she'll be going out at night, but after sharing her experience with the Wrens, she does get to go [cue all the gifsets of her in her uniform]. (It was interesting that Darrowby's victory garden seemed more like a community garden when I'm used to US based discussion on victory gardens being each family being encouraged to have their own garden, presumably in their yard.)

I could have looked up what Wren/Wrens entailed back when we first found out that why's Mrs Hall could shoot a pistol for that one game or whatever, but we got a little more info in this epsiode. The W.R.N.S. or Wrens refers to the Women's Royal Naval Service. Mrs Hall said that she was on U-boat watch or something like that; these were non-combatant roles and came across like another aspect of volunteering, though (from a quick search) it sounds like this was the women's wing of the Navy. Like, after the war, the Wrens will be joined in with the Royal Navy levels of equivalency.

Also: Carmody is still in training, but Siegfried reluctantly lets him come up with a triage checklist so he can see the relatively easy patients during clinic hours. Unfortunately, there's a paperwork misunderstanding and Carmody gets yelled at a bit. Dot is quite sure that her cat Frisk had passed away, but she's recovering from surgery and can't bury him. Carmody does a very quick visual check, and the cat seems dead. They'll eventually discover that Frisk licked the spoon that Dot took her morphine with before bed, which is why he gets out of the box later and the only current black cat is clearly not Frisk (or dead/terminal).

Also also: The small victory of not being confused by the DPNs when Mrs Hall was knitting. My family was like, 'why's there so many needles? you only need two' and I could tell we were dealing with DPNs [double pointed needles]. You usually see them for socks, mittens, gloves, or small tube shapes that aren't feasible on circular needles. (I wonder if there are any knitting gifsets from this episode.)

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S5E2: Holding The Baby

I'm getting around to this very nearly in time for the next episode, so I'm mostly leaving a link to the Telly Visions recap. The title is a reference to James looking after his son, Jimmy, for the first time solo. There's what seems to be a familiar tv gaffe of leaving the equivalent of a diaper bag on the roof of the car and having it fall off at Skeldale House.

We did get some more development with Mr Bosworth, who finds out that the dog Siegfried and Mrs Hall are trying to look after on the side of the road is his dog Bingo. Narratively, Siegfried reckons that the dog got into a box of something in the home, which led to the poisoning symptoms Bingo died from, but I definitely didn't catch what the box contained. I was initially afraid someone had poisoned Bosworth's dog intentionally, but it seems to have been an accident. (Really, this scene was more of a way to meet Mr Bosworth and have him talk about not having anyone else in his life.)

I hope that Carmody isn't going to run into Doris a lot. (She's helping out on farms around Helen's family, and she's become friends with Jenny.) Like, the point was that she was trying to feed him hints about going out, but he was flustered and didn't quite take the bait. I'm just not interested in watching a ton of that repeat in different ways for the rest of the season; I don't care if the overly nerdy student focusing on studies instead of dating is falling into some tired trope, and I really don't mind Carmody being okay with being single.

There's a letter from Tristan which obviously doesn't go into detail on anything negative. He's in Cairo, and he's supposedly enjoying himself at bars. I've heard from some UK watchers that he's coming home later this season, and I'm making a note of this letter because I'm a little curious if Tristan will be as okay as his letters portray.

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S5E3: Homecoming

Telly Visions recap. Jimmy's christening brings James' parents to Skeldale House. A telegram comes about Tristan, and he's unexpectedly also coming home in time for the christening, too. He's got a position somewhere in England to lecture about veterinary things, so he's not actually done with his service, but he's close enough to visit now.

Someone sharing gifs from the UK airing of this season pointed out that they appreciated how no one gets weird about Siegfried being happy to hold and help take care of Jimmy, and I can see that in this episode. I can't say I care about christenings and the minutiae of them, but Siegfried and Mrs Hall are Jimmy's godparents. (I also didn't really care for the bonding as mothers thing around Helen and Mrs Herriot seeming to understand the dog's phantom pregnancy in a 'only mothers know' way, but it wasn't half bad to see Helen and Mrs Herriot finally click towards the end of the episode.)

According to the recap, there are two references to anchor this in actual wartime events: the update that Mrs Hall's son is alright specified that HMS Repulse is on its way to Norway, and Tristan was around the Battle of Sidi Barrani along the Egypt/Libya border.

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S5E4: Uninvited Guests

Telly Visions recap. Carmody was back in London to take his final exams in the last episode, so Tristan doesn't get to meet him until this episode. Carmody is nerdy, not interested in grabbing a pint at The Drover's, and just not instantly clicking with Tristan, which isn't helped by him residing in Tristan's old room. (For those who need a memory jog: There's a large closet with a second bed in the room, which James used to sleep in however many seasons back. Despite what I've heard about fans going There's Only One Bed for them, there literally is another bed.)

Siegfried takes a surprisingly hands off approach, but Mrs Hall looks into some inn or wherever to see if there's another room and sees if there's a better mattress for the second bed (when it's clear no one's leaving). She also has Tristan go off to Mrs Pumphrey's with Carmody to help with finding a snake. One of the soldiers brought back a non-native snake that's loose, but there are an awful lot of people who haven't seen the snake so it's not guaranteed to exist (Tristan definitely thinks it's just a fun story from the soldiers initially). Tricki Woo winds up leading them to the room where the snake's at, Tristan is not a fan of snakes, Carmody is unbothered (and does the handling), and then they get a chance to talk things out when the door handle falls off and they're trapped in the room alone.

Initially, I thought there might be two snake actors, but according to this cast video [about 1 minute in], it seems like there really just is one snake actor. The in-universe name given to the snake is Schrodinger, who will be going off to a zoo for proper care, so I wouldn't expect to see it again. (Not to downplay James telling someone outside of Skeldale House about how he was discharged and opening up to Helen about his crew dying in a training mission (that he was supposed to join) or how Carmody met a soldier convalescing at Mrs Pumphrey's and was told that's it rude to ask about injuries.)

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S5E5: Pair Bond

Telly Visions recap.

We finally found out what happened to Bingo: Doris hadn't been told exactly how deep to bury the rats she was killing on the farm with strychnine, so creatures were able to dig them up and died themselves (evidenced by at least one fox found in the scene where Doris showed Helen where she buried the rats). Mr Bosworth wasn't happy, clearly, but he didn't want Bingo's death to bring misery to Doris by holding this mistake against her. Not having a creature to look after is aggravating his worry and concern over his warden duties, but the unidentified object he needed Mrs Hall to identify with him in a field was just a jettisoned care parcel, essentially. He did have an encouraging word for Mrs Hall when she admitted she didn't feel like she was handling her son being away, though.

Carmody got a letter about his exam results, and it was important that he got a distinction thing that qualified him for the Warner research prize. He could go off to London and research something instead of staying on at Skeldale House, and after Siegfried talks to Mrs Hall and realises that some of the not wanting to leave may be related to finally feeling like he's got a family and home, Siegfried was clear that Carmody can always come back. He ultimately accepted, and needing to leave soon meant that he had enough of a time crunch that he finally asked Doris to meet at The Drover's with less awkwardness than usual. (The title of the episode was in relation to Carmody admitting that he liked Doris to Siegfried, and Siegfried developing a bit of a crush on someone who's recently returned to the area. Ms Grantley was an archeologist in Persia until the war put an end to that.)

Otherwise, Tristan struggled with some procrastination on writing his lecture notes, and he sort of bothered James throughout. James was still recovering from a night out, but he needed to repair Jimmy's playpen structure and tend to Doris' ferret [ferrets replaced strychnine for eliminating rats]. He did take Tristan up on a little cricket distraction, but he did have to admit that he wanted to have a night in with Jimmy instead of going out drinking for another night. (Tristan took it in stride. The characters aren't terribly far off in age, but Tristan is not taking care of a baby or doing a full day of surgery.)

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S5E6: Glass Half Full

Telly Visions recap.

Siegfried is a bit out of sorts. Ms Grantley might not have appreciated that his read of her manuscript led to pointing out some grammar errors and discussion that he maybe thought wasn't that bad but she took a little personally. (Tristan tries to encourage him to just ask her out and Siegfried reveals this, so it was more a time of Tristan trying to pivot to how Siegfried does have more charm than he feels he has right now instead of digging into what was in that "robust discussion".) Ms Grantley is either legitimately out of town or telling someone else to use that excuse and avoiding his calls, so who knows if we'll hear about her again.

Tristan has just enough free time after grading his students' papers (and being encouraged by Mrs Hall to help out a little) to join Siegfried on farm calls. They have two visits: a pony castration, and a horse checkup. Tristan initially wants to make a guesstimate of the amount of chloroform for the pony, and Siegfried wants to carefully follow the slower process of incrementally adding more (though the pony needs enough extra that Tristan's tactic ultimately works). The horse drops in a drastic reaction to an injection, so there was a brief moment of Siegfried and Tristan panicking about what happened but it all ended well. Mr Dobson shared some of his infamous elderberry wine (the last of the previous year's bottles), and Siegfried and Tristan wind up drinking their respective bottles while walking back into town.

They both thought the other was going to use their fuel coupon to fill up the car, so they run out of gas on the way back to Skeldale House. (Tristan thought that a certain walking trail would be a shortcut, but my family wasn't sure if it was a ridiculously long trail or if, as the Telly Visions recap states, they briefly got lost.) Either way, the point isn't that Tristan and Siegfried get back to Skeldale House quickly; the point is that they're forced to talk and getting drunk on the elderberry wine brings their defenses down a bit. Siegfried doesn't understand why Tristan is treating military service like a lark, and Tristan admits that he knows he's been lucky to not currently have a worse experience (in the 'you think I haven't suffered enough' portion). Tristan agrees to spend a little more time at home with Siegfried instead of going out so often, since some of this conversation also gets into Siegfried missing his brother (and perhaps wanting some time with him before he's reassigned elsewhere).

[The episode ends with them walking back into Darrowby on foot noticeably drunk, but everyone seems to take it in stride. My family wasn't sure if word had spread about Dobson's wine (known to be strong), or if it was deemed funnier if everyone acted nicely about them looking like they'd lost a battle with some sort of thorny bush and they were trying to walk like they were sober.]

Otherwise, James starts acting unlike himself in a way that's a sign of fever induced delirium. Initially he's just cracking jokes with the humans of patients waiting to be seen, but he starts complaining about being hot, taking off layers, calls Mrs Pumphrey a silly woman for worrying about Tricki Woo (who has something going on that's not presenting around James), and doesn't recognise Helen after reciting Robert Burns poetry. Helen takes cold water to him upstairs while he thinks he's back in RAF training, and he cries about Banerjee being the only one to survive. (Helen does talk to him about it when the fever's broke, and he admits that he didn't see brucellosis as a positive for bringing him back home in quite the same way she has. This is probably the narrative goal of the bout of fever moreso than just inconveniencing the veterinary practice.)

Mrs Pumphrey sticks around to help Mrs Hall by looking after Jimmy, taking calls (and making note of what everyone said), and possibly helping with the jam. The victory garden has done overly well with the strawberries, so Mrs Hall is making strawberry jam. They also get to talk a bit; Mrs Pumphrey has enjoyed answering the phone as it's rather like the clerical work she was able to do in her husband's mill [reduced work force in WWI], but she wasn't allowed to keep working after the war ended. In contrast, Mrs Hall transitioned from the Wrens to being the Farnon housekeeper, so she never really got the same 'not able to work' experience. (After apologising for his inappropriate behaviour, James is able to look at Tricki Woo and finds a sliver of chicken bone stuck between his teeth.)

The final image is everyone finding Siegfried and Tristan outside Skeldale House where Siegfried is standing on an overturned metal bucket, holding his finger to his nose, and reciting "The Jabberwocky" (a show of passing a sobriety test). Mrs Pumphrey joins in on the poetry recitation, and it's a slightly silly but positive ending in a way that's kinda nice. (For UK viewers, this was the finale before waiting for the Xmas special, and I can't deny that it would seem like a good way to end a season that's gotten serious with the war effort at points.)