Certainly, it was a tearjerker of an episode in which Midwife’s, er, midwife, showrunner Heidi Thomas, had doubled the usual doses of bittersweet poignancy and shiny optimism, injecting them into proceedings like emotional steroids. From Rosalind and Cyril’s shotgun nuptials and Beryl reconciling herself to being a Sister and never a mother, to Susan Mullucks gaining an independence unimaginable when she was born a thalidomide-affected baby a decade earlier, our 133rd visit with Nonnatus’s nuns’n’nurses delivered.
It was never more affecting and tender than when concerned with the passing of Sister Monica Joan. Hers was a death foretold, mostly by Sister Catherine, who was two-for-two in her predictions about Monica Joan’s demise – how her condition would worsen without treatment and who would guide her to the pearly gates. (With prognostics like that, Cathy’d make a mint down Walthamstow dogs).
“With the death of Sister Monica Joan, I was very much inspired by the death of her late Majesty the Queen,” Thomas told Radio Times in an exclusive, post-finale interview. “As early as the Platinum Jubilee, we all knew the Queen was going to pass away but there was still this visceral sense when she died that we had all lost something. My grandmother lived to be 101 and there's a different kind of shock that comes in, because you think that when somebody lives that long, they won't ever die.”
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But, with no fear of the hereafter, die Monica Joan did. And her end, when it arrived, came mob-handed, with a host of [checks notes] ghostly nuns in tow. Leading the spectral sisters was none other than Sister Evangelina, whose fatal stroke a decade ago provided quite the finale to series five. A surprising cameo, then, from Pam Ferris, who has retired from acting, it’s a treat of a scene for the show’s legions of loyal fans.
With Ferris on-board, Thomas finished the script and the scene was filmed, well ahead of the rest of the episode, in September. “It was top, top secret: it wasn't on the call sheet, we put a fake name – Sister Elizabeth instead of Sister Evangelina – and we smuggled her onto the set,” Thomas says. “As soon as we had her back in her old costume, it was as though she’d never been away. Pam was so generous and the scene between them is just magical.”
For Thomas, telling Monica Joan’s story up to the very end was a labour of love.
"It seemed to me that that was a very interesting story to tell, and something you don't very often see on television where the story is often about action and surprise and pace. The the idea that we could do something gently and lovingly and slowly was very appealing to me as a dramatist. It was something that we could invest in and share in and part company with a character who's become very important to many people, not just in the show, but beyond the show as well.”
“Rather than ask him to be an advisor, I thought ‘why don't I ask him to actually do the scene?’ So that's a real priest in those scenes who knows exactly what he’s doing and the congregation is people from my own church. They came in a minibus and brought the church vestments. It really elevated the occasion and gave it a perfection and purpose that made it feel like much more than a pretend funeral.”
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“Judy is a great actress,” Thomas says, “and she'd been very humorous about her deathbed scenes and was always wearing sparkly red toenail polish. But there was a very real moment where Judy and I were sitting alone in this rather scabby dressing room we have in the basement of Nonnatus House. She was in her night dress and I was dressed as a nun and she took my hand and her eyes filled with tears, and she said,’ You see, to me, she is a real person.’ I said ‘To me, she is too.’ We had our little moment then.”
We know that the 220 babies born over the course of the series will have, on average, healthier, longer and more prosperous lives than their parents. We know that technological advances will make everyone’s lives better (until they don’t, of course).
Call the Midwife - which began with nurses on bicycles carrying glass rectal tubes ended with ultrasound and an electric wheelchair – has hope baked in. Its last episode (for a while at least) was celebratory, elegiac, joyful, cathartic – and the apt, happy ending that the show and its audience deserves, even if it is just a pause and not an ever after.
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