'All Creatures Great and Small' Recap: Season 5 Episode 6

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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been coughing, she tells James. But the dog refuses to do so in front of James, so he kindly sends Mrs. Pumphrey home and tells her she can return if something more goes wrong.

James and Siegfried have little time to waste, now that Richard has left for London. Tristan has just finished teaching his first course to veterinary trainees for the military, but he’ll be starting another one soon, so he tells Siegfried that he can’t step in and help out with the practice.

Mrs. Hall presses Tristan to find some time after Siegfried comes home spattered in muck, complaining that attending to an 800-pound sow is not a one-person task. Tristan begrudgingly offers to help Siegfried on his rounds the next day – and the brothers squabble over who will fill the car’s tank with gas, since Tristan is supposed to be contributing some of his gas ration.

The arguments continue the following day as they prepare to castrate a pony and dispute how much chloroform to give it. They then head off to examine a horse recently acquired by Dobson. The farmer is excited to see Tristan home and gives him his last two bottles of homemade elderflower wine for the year. Despite the drink being a gift, Dobson hopes it will lower the price of Siegfried’s visit – until Tristan notices that Siegfried missed a spot of sweet itch on the horse.

Siegfried has Tristan administer his proprietary mixture, although Tristan notes that a new antihistamine has been developed – and the horse collapses. As Siegfried begins to deliver bad news to Dobson, the horse gets back up, fine.

Neither Siegfried nor Tristan have any idea what happened, but they have bigger problems: neither of them filled the car’s tank. It dies far from any human inhabitation, leaving them stranded.

Things have also gone south back at Skeldale. Despite uncharacteristically falling asleep for an afternoon nap the previous day, James starts the day oddly cheerful. He has a full waiting room of patients, among them Mrs. Pumphrey and Tricki-Woo. Tricki has started pawing at his mouth. But James sunnily dismisses Mrs. Pumphrey’s concern, calling her a silly woman before launching into recitations of poetry and stripping off his clothes – isn’t it warm, he asks?

He’s delirious with fever, thanks to a returning bout of brucellosis. Helen puts him to bed while Mrs. Pumphrey watches baby Jimmy – Mrs. Hall is busy dismissing the waiting patients and turning a bumper crop of strawberries from the victory garden into jam so that the fruit doesn’t go to waste. Helen calls the doctor, who tells her that the fever will break in a few hours or days.

Mrs. Pumphrey is still concerned about Tricki, so Mrs. Hall lets her wait at Skeldale until Siegfried returns. Mrs. Pumphrey decides to stay in the kitchen while Mrs. Hall prepares the jam, so Tricki can enjoy the company of the house’s dogs. She soon starts helping the harried Mrs. Hall by answering the phone and door and watching Jimmy while Helen tends to James.

He’s now hallucinating that he’s back in training to be a pilot. He begins talking to Banerjee, the navigator whom he took under his wing, crying and apologizing for not protecting him – Banerjee went down in a training flight that James was supposed to lead before brucellosis took him out of commission.

When the fever finally breaks, Helen cries in relief in front of Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Pumphrey. She then asks James about his hallucinations and learns that, while she and others think the brucellosis was a stroke of good luck by taking him out of harm’s way as a pilot, he blames it in part for preventing him from saving Banerjee and his other colleagues.

Mrs. Pumphrey has enjoyed helping Mrs. Hall – she did clerical work for her husband’s mills during the first world war, and perhaps rues not being allowed to continue working after it ended. She’s ready to give up on waiting for Siegfried and leave, but James recovers enough to come downstairs and apologize for his earlier behavior. While doing so, he witnesses Tricki pawing at his mouth and examines it to find a chicken bone stuck in his teeth.

Siegfried and Tristan have set out on foot to return to Darrowby – arguing, as always, over the best way to go. Tristan begins needling Siegfried about Miss Grantley, whom he has lately been visiting to talk about her book – and perhaps also to just enjoy her company; Siegfried has been eagerly awaiting a phone call from her, but has been told by her servant that she’s out of town. Annoyed by Tristan’s questioning, Siegfried agrees to walk cross country, as Tristan suggests.

Unlike with the day’s medical proceedings, this time Tristan is wrong. The Farnons rip their shirts on shrubs and have to wade through a flooded ford, Siegfried piggy-backing on Tristan. At this point, they are drunk, having opened Dobson’s elderflower wine. Siegfried wonders how Tristan is able to treat his war experience as such a lark, offending Tristan, who returns the favor by telling Siegfried that he should just ask Miss Grantley for a date already.

Siegfried eventually admits that he thought Tristan’s time at war would give them a shared experience to talk about. All he wants is to spend a bit more time with Tristan at home; Tristan would like that as well, and says he’ll stop going to the pub every night. Siegfried also admits that he was going to ask Miss Grantley out, but they argued after he offered some criticism of her book and haven’t spoken since. He’s not sure if she’s actually out of town or just lying to him, and he worries that he’s boring compared to the adventures she recounts in her book. Tristan assures his brother that he’s an irresistible catch.

The brothers are bedraggled and soused when they finally arrive in Darrowby, but Siegfried insists that he could still pass a sobriety test. Thus it is that Mrs. Pumphrey, Mrs. Hall, James, and Helen all emerge from Skeldale to investigate a noise and find Siegfried balanced on one leg on a bucket, finger to nose, reciting the “Jabberwocky.”