All Creatures Great and Small Recap: The Gang’s All Here (Except Tristan)

What are we going to do when this show ends? I forget about it halfway through the year, then come December, I think, “Isn’t another season of All Creatures coming up?” And it is! We’re on season five, and I can only hope we get at least five more. Preferably, at least three of them will focus on the domestic bliss of the newly married Mrs. Hall and Siegfried. (It will happen someday; don’t take this away from me).

James is training pilots, I think? It seems like he’s training pilots. But also maybe being trained? I do not know military things. He flies planes, and he has a crew that is very green. He’s all set to fly a long-distance run to Scotland when he passes out. James has brucellosis! Yeah, it’s okay; I forgot what it was, too. He was checking all the cows for that bacterial infection last season, and then they were super worried that Helen got it (but she didn’t). But it turns out James did. So now he’s laid up in the military hospital.

Meanwhile, at home, everyone is busy-busy. I’m not gonna lie; this felt like a scattered episode. Lots of little things happening everywhere. Jeremy Swift of Ted Lasso fame is Mr. Bosworth, seemingly in charge of Civil Defense for the area. Mr. Bosworth butts heads with Mrs. Pumphrey, who, thank God, has Tricki Woo with her, along with Tricki’s elaborate cushion. Bosworth needs more vegetables grown and more wardens for blackout duty. Also, the first Land Girl has arrived, but we don’t see her this week. They probably decided the episode had enough tiny plot threads already.

Helen and James’s baby is named Jimmy, and I love him. HI, JIMMY. I can no longer remember how I felt about babies before having one, which is a shame because I am now extremely insufferable around them. They’re so cute. Jimmy has a little knitted outfit and it’s the best. Siegfried is somehow in the same boat I am and dotes on Jimmy. Why is Siegfried the best? They can get rid of almost any character on this show or send them off to wherever for a season or two, and I will weather that storm, but if Siegfried leaves, all is lost. He is our grumpy anchor. Also, he and Mrs. Hall sit next to each other in their matching armchairs while she knits and they look Extremely Married. Thank you for that visual, show; I appreciated it.

I’m sure we all remember Richard, Tristan’s replacement. Richard is training dogs to shake hands and establishing efficient systems for the practice. You’re doing a great job, Richard. Siegfried also thinks so and entrusts the clinic work to him for a day. Unfortunately, right after Siegfried talks about his faith in Richard, there is a mixup with a not-dead cat.

Dot, who has some connection with Helen that I couldn’t figure out, has had a hysterectomy and is recuperating with no one but her cat Frisk for company. And Helen, I guess, when she visits. But the next time we see Dot, she’s dropping off her now-dead cat at the practice and asking them to dispose of it. Richard makes a note to call the abattoir to pick it up. What’s the abattoir going to do with it!! An abattoir is a slaughterhouse! Is her dead cat gonna get thrown into the offal pile? Disgusting side note: my home city of Chicago has a part of the Chicago River called “Bubbly Creek” because the Union Stock Yards used to dump its waste products there, and the gases made the water bubble up. I had an ex-girlfriend who did crew, and they practiced down there, and she said if you fell in the water, you had to go to the hospital.

Anyway, it’s all fine because Frisk isn’t dead. He escapes the dead cat box, and Mrs. Hall finds him on a chair. Siegfried is very disappointed that Richard was going to be the cause of the cat murder if not for Frisk’s successful escape, and Richard, in turn, looks like he is going to weep due to the loss of Siegfried’s good opinion. It’s a tough time for all except Frisk, who, again, is doing pretty well.

I guess we can switch back to James (I watch this show for sick cows!! Not airplanes!), who has been informed he has brucellosis and his commanding officer doesn’t think James is fit to fly. James is upset because they replaced him with a Bad Pilot, and he feels useless now. He is told that if he’s fit enough, he can dig ditches, which he does! He goes off and digs ditches for a complaining farmer. Why are they digging the ditch? I don’t know. Again, I am here for the animals. And thank God the complaining farmer has an upset cow. James goes to see it and helps deliver a stuck calf. Now he feels useful again! This is a good turnaround for James because the Bad Pilot crashed, and James lost a lot of his crew. Wow, that sounds very hard and something I do not want to think about in this already difficult month of January 2025. Let’s all look at the baby cow! Nothing bad can happen while we look at baby cows.

James goes back home to help the war effort by being a vet. Now, regarding the whole brucellosis thing — the real James Herriot left the military after he had surgery on an anal fistula, but I guess the show didn’t want to talk about that. And that’s fair; I’ll give that to them. So James, sans anal fistula, goes home and surprises everyone, including Helen, in her Helenish sweater and blazer. He’s there just in time to hear about how Dot’s cat kept seeming like it had died because it was ingesting her morphine. Everyone has a good laugh.

Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Pumphrey push Mr. Bosworth into letting Mrs. Hall become a blackout warden. He doesn’t think it’s a job for women, but Mrs. Hall was a Wren in World War I, and she refuses the idea that she can’t “ride a bicycle around Darrowby and tell people to close their curtains.” Siegfried finds out when he sees her in her uniform and he’s SO PROUD OF HER. I love them.

We end with James going up to see Helen and Jimmy and the baby is in the bed. Not to start a controversial co-sleeping conversation in the closing moments of this recap, but my sister-in-law works in a pediatric ICU, and all I can think when I see a tiny baby presumably about to sleep in a bed between two adults is, “Agghhhhhhhhhh!” The stories I have been told. But I looked it up, and Jimmy lives to adulthood, so we’re all okay. We’re all okay.