call the midwife part 2

[NimbleHiker]

I am setting up the next thread before i forget.

@WarrenTofficierexcept for Morecambe & Wise of course.

The Amazon movie (I think in the UK, it was a two-part series) I saw Paul McGann in is A Mother's Son. It's pretty grim and depressing in my opinion, but he was good in it.

I'm in the US, so I haven't yet seen any of season (as we call them here) 15 of Call the Midwife, and by following this thread I have a few spoilers to look forward to, but nothing I would be surprised by. It begins here on March 22nd.

I watched the final episode tonight. How sad that Jenny Agutter's husband was going through cancer treatment during filming and has since died. I did think she was a bit in and out this series, but of course it makes sense now.

I do wish a few more people could have popped up for the funeral, but I suppose why would you attend the funeral of someone you used to know through a previous job 10 years ago...

Trixie and Beryl's side storylines felt a bit surplus to requirements, unless they're planning for Trixie's private hospital to have its own series in the future.

I don't know whether I've understood correctly what happens next. A prequel series and then a film, which may or may not star the cast of this last series... I'm looking forward to the prequel series.

The thing that bothered me about the funeral was that the church wasn't full of ordinary people. Poplar would surely have come out for Sister Monica Joan? I would have expected a massive crowd paying their respects.

I thought the same. Sr Evangelina’s funeral made a point of the people of Poplar coming out for her.

In anything other than the final episode, I think that’s what would have happened, but this was all about us saying goodbye to the characters we know, so it was more insular. I still would have liked to see old faces from Nonnatus there, though.

I thought they would have had the poplar residents lining the streets as SMJ made her last journey on the costermonger cart, if not in the church.

I am really sad that the series has finally come to an end. It has been a welcome part of my life since Covid, when I started watching all the series from the beginning. I thought everything was tied up satisfactorily in the last episode and I cried buckets when SMJ died. So sad.

Actually, yes, me too - it all seemed quite rushed towards the end so we did wonder if it had been filmed for a feature length episode and then edited down to an hour. Trixie’s storyline was tritely wrapped up in two lines, and quite a lot of the scenes in the second half hour seemed noticeably brief.

Quite restful for Judy Parfitt, though, given that in virtually every scene she was either sitting or lying down.

What I didn't get about this is that the menopause doesn't suddenly start with a bang, it would have been creeping up on her anyway; and even if it wasn't, she's of an age when she must have known it was around the corner and her chances of meetilng someone and conceiving her own child were realistically nil anyway.

Yes, I thought we might at least reach the point when the Thalidomide compensation issue was resolved.

I think the sudden burning desire for a baby was the hormonal last fling. Then she began to have/notice her peri symptoms. With hindsight I was peri for a good while before it dawn on me that I was.
Her 'leave the order have a baby' plan was never going to work but at least she could move on knowing that whereas if she hadn't explored the (im)possibility it would have potentially gnawed away at her at she wouldn't have moved forward.

Trixie and Beryl's side storylines felt a bit surplus to requirements, unless they're planning for Trixie's private hospital to have its own series in the future.

Maybe they are. Trixie will insist on having a wing for the poor of Poplar, staffed by the Turner family with Beryl as Health Visitor and her brother as attached osteopath. Joyce will be a ward sister, Fred will be handyman, and Cyril will occasionally pop up as a social worker.

I suppose the trip out in the wheelchair to the market was a way of showing the community saying goodbye and the man on the fruit stall represented all of Poplar.

Also she said quite clearly she wanted a pomegranate and she got bananas.

Which are also high in potassium - the reason that she was told she couldn't have a pomegranate!

The bananas were given as a gift by the grocer, he wouldn't know that she shouldn't eat them. And I think that by this stage they had accepted the inevitable, and were letting her have what she wanted, hence the G+T!

Yes exactly. Where mil was (care home) there was a lady 107 who seemed to live on chocolate and ice cream! Also MIL ate and drank what she wanted.

I did think there was a certain irony that the order was moving from Poplar so would no longer be so involved in births and babies etc. and that this was all going on in her absence.

It just seemed weird to write about her wanting a pomegranate, take her to a fruit market and then have her movingly presented with... bananas.

Pomegranates may not have been widely available at that time

I don't think she was being realistic. I think in her situation its very easy to not be realistic. I mentioned my own experience of this upthread and I never even liked or wanted a baby.

pomegranates are still quite seasonal and would have been totally seasonal then.

me too.