All Creatures Great and Small Season-Finale Recap: Your Lady of the Goats

It’s the season finale! Other than the Christmas special next week. As always, British television is delightful and very confusing. This season, we’ve seen James get brucellosised out of the Air Force, Tristan returned to Skeldale, Mrs. Hall gets another (volunteer) job, and Richard tragically leaves us for the halls of scientific research. I miss Richard.

Siegfried is covered in mud and, possibly, pig shit. Since Tristan is lecturing about camels in Doncaster and Richard is gone from our screens (though not our hearts), James and Siegfried are stretched thin. And falling in mud. Mrs. Hall is also scrambling, as she has a strawberry emergency. The emergency is that there are too many strawberries, and now she must make jam. But to make the jam, one apparently needs sugar, which is rationed. Things are complicated. And by “things,” I mean the process of making wartime jam.

Added to all this mud and jam chaos is that Mrs. Pumphrey is concerned about Tricki Woo, and also James is being weird. Fortunately, Jimmy is there, lighting up all our lives and waving his little arms around. I know I’ve been a Tristan hater this season, and I’m not going to let up in the finale. I blame this interpretation of the character!! Too smug! Or, as Michael Scott says, “smudge.” And his smudgeness makes it difficult to enjoy him. After Siegfried searches for Miss Grantley’s book — or, as Tristan does a great job calling it, “the goat lady’s Persian memoirs” — Siegfried finds it under Tristan’s papers, with a teacup stain on them. Tristan says sorry like an asshole. I will be kinder to him when he gives me a reason! The goat lady comment was indeed funny, though. Mrs. Hall guilts Tristan into offering Siegfried some help with his calls the next day.

They head off in the car that Tristan had promised to gas up, and Tristan asks how Siegfried is doing with “Your Lady of the Goats.” Again, it’s a good line, but maybe I just find goats funny. Siegfried keeps avoiding any questions about Miss Grantley, much like the writers are apparently avoiding my five seasons of demanding that Siegfried and Mrs. Hall finally get together.

Their calls involve two horses. Lucky us! So many horses to gaze upon in wonder. The first is a li’l pony that has to be chloroformed so Siegfried can castrate it. Apparently, this will make the pony less aggressive, so it can be used for pony rides. I do not know how to feel about this. But we don’t have to worry about that because the whole plot here is Tristan and Siegfried bickering about how much chloroform to use. It is a chloroform-resistant pony. Finally, Tristan overdoses it and it passes right out. This is why anesthesiologists are paid so much. You never know when you’ll over-chloroform a pony (the pony is fine).

The second horse is at Mr. Dobson’s, and his name is Algernon, nicknamed Algie. The horse: truly the most majestic of animals. You might say, Alice, wait, what about the stag? And yeah, okay, yeah, that’s pretty good, too. But the horse. Just look at it; it’s perfect. How lucky we are that we get to look at horses. Algernon has something on his neck that requires an injection, and when Tristan administers it, Algie passes right out. Siegfried thinks he’s dead. But then up, he pops! Algie is alive! False horse alarm!

Tristan and Siegfried drive off with two bottles of Mr. Dobson’s elderflower wine, chatting and trying to figure out what made the horse pass out when the car putters and dies. Tristan didn’t put gas in it. Of course he didn’t. So now they have to walk home, drinking the elderflower wine as they go. Tristan keeps bringing up Miss Grantley and asks why Siegfried hasn’t asked her out. After they drink some more, and Tristan gives Siegfried a piggyback ride across a flooded road, Siegfried says that (1) he wants to have a closer relationship with Tristan that involves actually hanging out, and (2) he was going to ask Miss Grantley out, but after she asked him to read her book, he offered some constructive criticism, and she “wasn’t terribly receptive.”

Before they return to town, though, what is everyone else doing? Well, James is in a good mood. A weirdly good mood. Some might say, a suspiciously good mood. He’s been so erratic the last few weeks and clearly Dealing with Something (the something being war trauma), and all of a sudden, he’s singing to himself in surgery and so upbeat that Helen asks him if he has been sniffing the bottles in the dispensary. I genuinely thought he was in a manic state and that we were going to deal with the fallout from that next season. He tells Mrs. Pumphrey that Tricki is a ridiculous dog. True, but still. He starts peeling off his sweater, and we find out that he has a fever. Helen takes care of him while Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Pumphrey (who’s still there with Tricki) watch Jimmy and run the practice. It seems to be a fever associated with James’s brucellosis, which is causing him to have hallucinations. James starts talking to Banerjee and he starts sobbing while apologizing. Helen stays with him, and when James’s fever breaks and he knows where he is again, they talk about what he said, and he finally explains what happened to his crew. I absolutely cannot imagine not sharing that with my spouse before this, but I am not a Scottish man growing up in the 1920s.

Siegfried and Tristan return to town drunk, their shirttails out, holding nearly empty bottles of wine. Everyone in the square giggles at them. Mrs. Hall has made so many jars of jam. James discovers that Tricki’s problem is a tiny chicken bone stuck in his teeth. Everyone pours outside to watch Siegfried subject himself to a series of drunk tests, which apparently include reciting “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Siegfried and Tristan shout the poem, and we exit on an aerial view of beautiful Darrowby and the Yorkshire Dales. Until next time, All Creatures! And by next time, I again mean next week when we see the Christmas special in February.