Call the Midwife 6.03.
Feb. 6th, 2017 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakWhich is all about the humanizing of authority figures, and also about the impending doom of rationalizations, if that's the right English word.
While Sister Ursula's arc did follow the Evil Alternate Superior trope I mentioned in my previous review - she makes misjudgments, catastrophe nearly happens, she leaves -, she was humanized in this episode, given a background that explains her rules rather than letting her be a bureaucrate just because, and the capacity to see the error of her ways and put others first. I also liked that she wasn't humiliated by our regulars to achieve this; rather, the show continued its humanism by letting Phyllis Crane when speaking up for Barbara do so in a firm, matter-of-factly yet also sympathetic to what drove Ursula's rules to begin with manner, and by letting Sister Julienne show compassion to Ursula. Moreover, Sister Ursula's personal reason for being so insistent on running a tight ship, as Phyllis Crane puts it, - the fact that a previous house she headed was closed -, is tied to one of the episode's general subjects by Dr. Turner's maternity home being inspected because it's on the list to be shut down/absorbed into a greater hospital. Here, too, the inspector is humanized; he's not a soulless bureaucrat but someone who can seee and respond to the dedication at work... yet also a realist who points out at the end that his favorable judgment can at best delay the inevitable. And of course the audience from decades later knows he's right. Institutions like the Maternity Home, and in fact Nonnatus House, are going to be abolished/absorbed into big hospitals in a few more years. (And that's before we get to the current threat to the NHS.)
(BTW: it didn't escape my attention that the politician named as the architect of shutting down maternity homes is Enoch Powell, whom this non-Brit mostly knows via his "rivers of blood" speech as an infamous Tory racist. No question as to which party the producers of this show won't vote for.)
In the case of the week, Mrs. Chen Senior is also an authority figure humanized. Mind you, having read several of Amy Tan's novels, I could figure out her secret early on, and expected the story would end with a reconciliation between her and Lucy, the younger Mrs. Chen, but it was movingly done regardless. Oh, and Lucy's background - British/Chinese, born in Liverpool, speaking with Scouse accent - was a neat way of avoiding exotisizing her, and pointing out the changing demographics of Britain instead.
(Mind you, the carbon monoxide poisoning gave me a bad sense of deja vue not due to the show but due to the fact we had a horrible tragedy here in Franconia where I live last week; a father found his children and their friends, six people all in all, dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning in the garden house where they were celebrating a birthday.)
Trixie's return was most welcome and I felt like hugging her, too. Especially since I had a bad feeling re: Shelagh through the episode, and when Baby Chen survived, I thought, that's it, Shelagh will lose hers. There's of course still the possibility that she won't, but I suspect she will. And as if that's not worry enough, there's the mystery of Cynthia. I now suspect one of two possibilities - either her story will be the show's take on the inadequacies of psychiatric care in the early 1960s, or Cynthia has run away and will show up a few episode's later having found an alternate life style to help her cope, i.e. has become an early hippie. After all, these are the 1960s, and while Trixie is usually the one used for introducing then-new trends, I can't see her becoming a flower child for fashion reasons alone.
While Sister Ursula's arc did follow the Evil Alternate Superior trope I mentioned in my previous review - she makes misjudgments, catastrophe nearly happens, she leaves -, she was humanized in this episode, given a background that explains her rules rather than letting her be a bureaucrate just because, and the capacity to see the error of her ways and put others first. I also liked that she wasn't humiliated by our regulars to achieve this; rather, the show continued its humanism by letting Phyllis Crane when speaking up for Barbara do so in a firm, matter-of-factly yet also sympathetic to what drove Ursula's rules to begin with manner, and by letting Sister Julienne show compassion to Ursula. Moreover, Sister Ursula's personal reason for being so insistent on running a tight ship, as Phyllis Crane puts it, - the fact that a previous house she headed was closed -, is tied to one of the episode's general subjects by Dr. Turner's maternity home being inspected because it's on the list to be shut down/absorbed into a greater hospital. Here, too, the inspector is humanized; he's not a soulless bureaucrat but someone who can seee and respond to the dedication at work... yet also a realist who points out at the end that his favorable judgment can at best delay the inevitable. And of course the audience from decades later knows he's right. Institutions like the Maternity Home, and in fact Nonnatus House, are going to be abolished/absorbed into big hospitals in a few more years. (And that's before we get to the current threat to the NHS.)
(BTW: it didn't escape my attention that the politician named as the architect of shutting down maternity homes is Enoch Powell, whom this non-Brit mostly knows via his "rivers of blood" speech as an infamous Tory racist. No question as to which party the producers of this show won't vote for.)
In the case of the week, Mrs. Chen Senior is also an authority figure humanized. Mind you, having read several of Amy Tan's novels, I could figure out her secret early on, and expected the story would end with a reconciliation between her and Lucy, the younger Mrs. Chen, but it was movingly done regardless. Oh, and Lucy's background - British/Chinese, born in Liverpool, speaking with Scouse accent - was a neat way of avoiding exotisizing her, and pointing out the changing demographics of Britain instead.
(Mind you, the carbon monoxide poisoning gave me a bad sense of deja vue not due to the show but due to the fact we had a horrible tragedy here in Franconia where I live last week; a father found his children and their friends, six people all in all, dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning in the garden house where they were celebrating a birthday.)
Trixie's return was most welcome and I felt like hugging her, too. Especially since I had a bad feeling re: Shelagh through the episode, and when Baby Chen survived, I thought, that's it, Shelagh will lose hers. There's of course still the possibility that she won't, but I suspect she will. And as if that's not worry enough, there's the mystery of Cynthia. I now suspect one of two possibilities - either her story will be the show's take on the inadequacies of psychiatric care in the early 1960s, or Cynthia has run away and will show up a few episode's later having found an alternate life style to help her cope, i.e. has become an early hippie. After all, these are the 1960s, and while Trixie is usually the one used for introducing then-new trends, I can't see her becoming a flower child for fashion reasons alone.
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Date: 2017-02-06 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-02-07 08:15 am (UTC)