Delivery, Departure...Demolition?

Given how much I love Chummy (Miranda Hart), as described in a great deal of detail last week, it stands to reason that the Season 2 finale of Call The Midwife -- in which Chummy and her husband Peter (Ben Caplan) welcome their first child, a boy -- would be one of my favourites ever. The whole episode builds to Chummy's delivery, as she tries to resume all the activities around Poplar that she performed before her missionary work in Africa and her pregnancy: leading the local Cub Scout troop, treating clinic patients, wearing a girdle (though she finally gives up on the last one). Chummy's patient of the week happens to be Dolly (Ella Smith), daughter of handyman Fred (Cliff Parisi), whose husband is away working at sea; a minor issue causes Dolly to finish out her pregnancy on bed rest, and Chummy helps make the experience as easy as possible, by arranging for Fred to bring Dolly's toddler son by at the same time every day, to coincide with the few instances Dolly's allowed to stand, so she can get a peek and her boy. During Dolly's labour, Chummy ignores her own physical distress to serve her patient properly. Why? Because she's the best. I missed Chummy's manner -- warm yet brisk, kind yet efficient -- so much. Hart does such a lovely job of showing how little it takes to make people feel reassured, welcome, and cared for. She makes uncommon grace look easy.

Chummy tries to bring her usual self-effacement to her own delivery. For dramatic purposes, her labour has all the terror Dolly's didn't, as she hemorrhages and has to be moved to a hospital for surgery. This means she can't be attended to by her friends (and after they were ordered to give her an enema and everything!), which is the saddest part; it's hard to get very tense about it because if the show's producers killed Chummy off in childbirth, they would have a hard time attracting viewers to Season 3. But even if we never quite worry that Chummy is in real danger, the moment she regains consciousness -- after Jenny (Jessica Raine) has draped Chummy with the blanket her adopted family members at Nonnatus House have all shared in making for her -- is sweet and perfect. With all due respect to the Conners, I don't think I've ever rooted harder for a TV family to make it.

Alleged protagonist Jenny continued her streak this season of being boring all the time. I guess I should cut the character some slack, since the show is based on the memoirs of a real person and everything, and maybe producers are hamstrung with regard to Jenny because there is or was a real Jenny with descendants who might get pissed. But still: the return of Jimmy (George Rainsford) had so much wasted potential. Admittedly, Jimmy proved himself, earlier this season, to be a lame-ass secretary knocker-upper who even as he awaited the birth of his child was still flirting with Jenny pretty hard; it would have at least given a frisson of the soap opera if Jimmy were unhappy with his daughter's mother or if she'd left him or...whatever -- if he'd been trying to get with Jenny and she could shut him down decisively since, as we now know, he's a trifling fool. I think that's what makes it more infuriating to me that he's recast himself as the keeper of Jenny's happiness by pushing her so hard to get with Alec (Leo Staar); how dare Jimmy act like he has life figured out just because he found some girl to poop out his baby? On the other hand, Alec does seem pretty cool, despite Jimmy. It seems pretty clear that we'll see more of him next season.

And yes, it is a little heavy-handed in the stargazing scene when Jenny tells Alec that her first constellation was the Pleiades, I didn't care, because I love the way the show revels in its communities of women, and the different ways they relate to each other. The finale finds the sisters under attack; they've already been losing Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) to senility, and Sister Bernadette (Laura Main) to worldly concerns (more of her later), and now Nonnatus House and the parish hall are in jeopardy of being torn down for the sake of "progress." The clash of the old ways and the new has been an ongoing theme this season; the new ability of Dr. Turner (Stephen McGann) to knock out his obstetric patients with gas, for instance, has caused the sisters to fear that midwifery will be displaced by the standardization of hospital birth -- a fear we know, of course, to be well-founded. But if the authorities have determined that the mission of Nonnatus House is no longer worthy of preservation, then this community of women (or two communities, really --  the nuns and the midwives -- under one roof) will be displaced. And in the moment that all the women of Nonnatus House gathered to commiserate while Chummy was in surgery, to finish her blanket and agree that they were her true family, not her crappy mother nowhere near London, we all got a renewed sense of how much strength they all take from their unique living situation.

But...not to be too openly failing the Bechdel test or anything, but all of that paled in comparison to the long-awaited resolution of the Dr. Turner/Sister Bernadette story. I honestly couldn't tell from episode to episode whether the romantic interest being kindled between the two would end with Sister Bernadette reaffirming her vows -- and if it had, it would have been fine with me -- so I appreciated the way the writing built suspense believably, as both parties internally debated the wisdom of what they were possibly thinking about maybe doing. But once letters are exchanged and a confession is made to Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter), it's pretty clear where things are going to go. And when Dr. Turner finds Sister Bernadette walking along a road with her suitcases, the viewer feels almost as much relief as the characters do.

Sidebar about those suitcases: I loved the scene between Sister Julienne and Sister Evangelina (Pam Ferris) about getting Bernadette her civvies. When Sister Evangelina starts rifling through the clothes Sister Bernadette had brought with her when she joined the order, back in the '40s, she tuts that the clothes are too old and outdated and that Sister Bernadette will look silly. Even someone as tough and unsentimental as Sister Evangelina -- who's put aside all worldly cares to devote herself to service in the name of God -- is a woman underneath it all, worried about Sister Bernadette taking her first steps into the secular world wearing ugly shoes. But just as this viewer was empathizing with Sister Evangelina, the show's deft writing swung me back over to Sister Julienne's side, as she noted the importance, to Sister Bernadette, of having back the very few material things that are actually her own personal property. This brief scene between her sisters shows us so clearly what Bernadette is giving up, and why she would be reluctant to do so.

But...you know, she's in love. And Dr. Turner's behaviour when he finds her is perfect: that his first motion to touch her is to lay his palm on her forehead to test her for fever -- she has just been walking, kind of a long way, from a TB sanatorium -- is both in keeping with his vocation and an acceptably chaste way of being physical with her. And then he gives her his coat, because he's a gentleman. And then he proposes, because when a girl you like leaves Holy Orders for you, it's not really okay for the two of you just to date, and that's perfect too, because he makes it clear that the ring he's giving her is not only from him, but from his son, Timothy (Max Macmillan) too.

Just as I wasn't concerned that Chummy was really in mortal danger, I'm not that concerned that the midwives are about to get split up. But I am anxious to see how producers write their way out of the problem while maintaining suspense and giving the story real stakes. And I'm happy that all my favourite characters were dealt exactly the right hands as the season closed. I miss them already.