'All Creatures Great and Small' Recap: Season 5 Episode 2
Daniel Hautzinger
January 19, 2025

All Creatures Great and Small airs Sundays at 8:00 pm on WTTW is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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James is ready to slip back into civilian life in Darrowby, but is already left behind his very first morning back when he wakes to find that the rest of the household has risen earlier to help out Mrs. Hall due to her new duties as a blackout warden. Siegfried is reading a textbook to baby Jimmy to help Richard, who’s preparing eggs, prepare for his exams. Mrs. Hall has a meeting with Bosworth, who leads the blackout wardens, and Helen is planning to help out at her father’s farm. James offers to watch Jimmy and give Helen a break from the baby for the day.
Helen’s excited that she can help out at the farm more, with James back to share parental duties. She feels like she has missed her sister Jenny growing up into an independent woman, and Jenny’s rearing of their younger horse, Candy.
But there’s already an extra hand on the farm: Jenny’s friend Doris, a native of Leeds who’s working on a farm as part of the Women’s Land Army during the war. Despite being a city girl, Doris proves herself able, but she gets on Helen’s bad side by inviting Jenny to Leeds, where she can get Jenny a job at a department store.
Helen always thought Jenny was a farmer to the core, and is shocked by the idea that she might want to do something else. Plus, her dad needs Jenny’s help on the farm – but he’ll let the headstrong Jenny do whatever she wants.
When Jenny wants to go riding with Doris, Helen balks: Candy isn’t ready yet. Jenny insists that they will be fine.
Siegfried is also out at a farm, on a call. One of Mrs. Sudderby’s cows has been hit by a car. With the blackouts in place due to German air raids, people keep accidentally turning onto her lane. Bosworth has warned her that she could be fined and ordered her to paint her cows with white stripes so that they are more visible.
Siegfried is apoplectic. Lead paint is toxic, and Sudderby isn’t breaking any laws either. Siegfried has already had a run-in with Bosworth: on Mrs. Hall’s training shift as a blackout warden, Bosworth noticed a light in the window of Skeldale because a curtain had fallen slightly. Bosworth made sure to note down the infraction.
When Siegfried returns to Skeldale, he begins laying into Bosworth’s “idiocy” before he even sees Mrs. Hall. When he does find her, she’s sitting with Bosworth himself. The two men exchange testy words, and Bosworth leaves.
Siegfried halfheartedly apologizes to Mrs. Hall, who has learned she has some daytime duties as well. Siegfried seems irked by Bosworth’s claims on her time, but she reminds him that he agreed to her being a warden and that she can stand up for herself.
As Mrs. Hall sets out on her duties, she comes across a whimpering dog and calls Siegfried from the nearest phone box. When he arrives, he induces vomiting: the dog has ingested some sort of pesticide. While it has white paint on its paws, the poison is not from paint. Siegfried is too late to save the dog, which dies as Bosworth appears. It’s his dog, and he is grief-stricken.
Mrs. Hall and Siegfried return to Bosworth’s home with him, and Siegfried apologizes for what he said about Bosworth earlier. Bosworth laments his lonely life, noting that Siegfried is also at an age where he’ll never find a partner again.
They search the house and find an overturned paint can as well as some old slug killer. Bosworth insists that the paint killed his dog, despite Siegfried’s certainty it was the slug killer, but the veterinarian accepts Bosworth’s idea that he should no longer tell farmers to paint their cows for visibility during blackout.
Driving back to Skeldale, Siegfried tells Mrs. Hall that he’s grateful for his practice and household after seeing Bosworth alone, and she jokes that they’re not dissimilar – they’re both stubborn tyrants. He despairs, but she reassures him: he hasn’t given up on life, like Bosworth.
She suddenly yells at him to stop the car: there’s a white-striped cow in the road, visible in the darkness. Bosworth’s idea worked.
James wants to get back to veterinary work, so when the farmer Dowson calls and asks for James explicitly, he decides to go with Richard on the house call – with Jimmy in tow. He immediately loses Jimmy’s bag of nappies by forgetting them on top of the car as he and Richard leave Skeldale. They fall off right away.
Dowson thinks the world of James, and wants him to help with his new calf, which keeps kicking over its bucket of milk. James tells him it’s just a matter of training, not medicine, but Richard indulges in some showmanship, having learned from Siegfried and James, and doses the calf with a vitamin, promising that it won’t kick the bucket over next time.
In the meantime, James goes to change Jimmy’s nappy and has to get help from Dowson’s daughter Elsie, who improvises with some tea towels. That finished, Dowson yells out that the calf is drinking its milk – good luck for Richard.
Driving away to the Alderson farm so Jimmy can have his meal from Helen, James compliments Richard on his tact with Dowson. And then he realizes that he left Jimmy behind at the Dowson farm. They quickly return to pick him up from Elsie.
They’re stopped on the way to the Aldersons by Doris, who has just tried to call the vets from a phone box. She’s looking for a ride back to the Alderson farm. While she and Jenny were out riding, an RAF plane flew over and frightened the older horse she was handling, sending her into the woods, where she tripped on some roots. She might have been lamed in one leg.
Richard examines the horse – it’s fortunately just a sprain. But James warns that she’s getting on in years; she shouldn’t be ridden any more, because of a greater chance of injury. Jenny is upset: the horse was a link to her late mother. Helen comforts her, telling her she was right that Candy was ready to ride. She tells her sister that she won’t stop her from going to Leeds – but only if she, and not Doris, wants it. Jenny explains that Doris thinks she should stay on the farm; it was Jenny who asked about a job in Leeds. She just wants to see what the city is like – Helen always told her there was a wider world than the farm, and now she’s starting to see some of it via the people moving through the Dales because of the war. She wants to see what’s out there.
Back at the farm, James leaves Richard with Doris – Richard is stunned by her, and she has been flirting. But Richard is too nervous to ask her out.
Back at Skeldale, James lauds Helen for managing with Jimmy without him. He admits that he left their son behind at the Dowsons – he tried to jump back into everything all at once, too quickly. Helen says she’s made plenty of mistakes as a parent, too. They just have to take time to get used to it.
Siegfried helps serve dinner, trying to assist Mrs. Hall now that she has warden duties. As they sit down, Bosworth yells from outside that a light is shining through the curtain again. Siegfried will be fined. Siegfried goes to argue with Bosworth while everyone else enjoys their meal.