'Call the Midwife' Recap: Season 14 Episode 8

Call the Midwife is available to stream for a limited time. Recap the previous episode and other seasons.
Keep up with your favorite dramas and mysteries by signing up for our newsletter, Dramalogue.

Two weddings are approaching, one conventional and one symbolic. Nancy is due to marry Roger, and Catherine is due to take her final vows to become a novice of the Order of St. Raymond of Nonnatus, symbolically taking God as her husband and even donning a donated wedding dress to do so. Nancy will move into Miss Higgins’ home with her daughter Colette until the wedding, while Catherine will go to the mother house to take her vows.

But before these happy events occur, there is a disaster: a home for young expectant mothers who will be giving up their babies for adoption has been destroyed in a fire. Four of the girls living there are returning to Poplar, two who have already given birth and two still waiting to do so. They are briefly put up in Nonnatus House while the nurses and Dr. Turner scramble for more permanent housing and care.

Among them is Paula Cunningham, the now 14-year-old girl whose family is very religious and thus signed over custody – and any thought – of their daughter until she gives birth. She has been “attending” school via correspondence, and she may have both a bladder infection and anemia. Dr. Turner sends her to the maternity home, leaving her beloved hamsters under Sister Monica Joan’s care at Nonnatus.

Sister Veronica visits the Cunninghams to ask if they will take in Paula under the circumstances, but her mother refuses. Paula’s father does visit her at the maternity home, just as he did at her previous care home – without his hard-line wife’s knowledge. But hearing the cries of women giving birth at the maternity home frightens Paula for her own labor. Dr. Turner suggests moving her to the mother house until she gives birth – it is an orphanage, after all.

So Paula joins Catherine and Sister Julienne as they go to the mother house for Catherine’s vows, with Rosalind along to attend to Paula. Rosalind will sleep on a cot in Paula’s room until hospital arrangements can be made. She teaches Paula about birth in the meantime. The hamsters come with Paula, too.

Back in Poplar, the mother of one of the women displaced by the fire visits her at Nonnatus and is captivated by her grandson’s face. She accepts both her daughter and grandson into her home, rather than putting him up for adoption. That leaves the two other displaced women to accept the last open spots at another care home.

But there’s still a pregnant woman around Nonnatus, as Violet, Miss Higgins, and Nurse Crane discover while fitting Nancy for her wedding dress. Nancy wanted to keep it a secret until after the wedding, and thinks she’s around seven months in. Violet says she can help hide the pregnancy with the wedding dress, and they all promise not to tell anyone – Nancy worries that she will disappoint the religious sister midwives, just as she did the strict nuns who took care of her all those years ago when she had Colette out of wedlock.

Roger now wants to tell Colette about the pregnancy before the wedding, so Miss Higgins helps him and Nancy arrange a meeting. The announcement is botched, but Colette is still excited.

Reggie has made a vase for Nancy as a wedding present, but it doesn’t make it to the kiln before he leaves school and so has to be shipped. While carrying it home from the post office, he is accosted by teasing boys. He tries to flee to Nonnatus House but trips on the steps, shattering the vase. Geoffrey shoos the cruel boys away and helps Reggie inside; he’s there to help with Nancy’s bachelorette night.

But Geoffrey also comes in handy with the vase, bringing it to someone who knows the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with molten precious metal that makes the cracks both evident and beautiful.

The wedding is nearly derailed when Nancy complains of stomach issues. Nurse Crane wonders if she’s further into her pregnancy than she thinks. Indeed, she soon goes into labor. Nurse Crane packs her into an ambulance with Roger following behind, but the labor proceeds quickly. Crane stops the ambulance and Roger gets in as she delivers another girl.

The baby is only a few weeks early and is healthy. Her birth leads Colette to start calling Roger “daddy” instead of “uncle.”

Sister Veronica had guessed that Nancy was pregnant but said nothing. Now she heads to the mother house for Catherine’s vows – unexpectedly with Dr. Turner, because Paula has also gone into labor. Sister Monica Joan also joins them despite originally planning not to, so that she can help prepare Catherine while Sister Julienne and Rosalind deliver Paula’s baby.

Paula’s dad wanted to keep visiting her but wasn’t told that she was moved to the mother house, since she is not in his custody, to his anger. He even argued with his wife that they could take Paula in. Once Paula gives birth to a boy through her fear, she can only cry when put on the phone with her father. Her mother hears.

Catherine was supposed to go through her vows with another postulant, but the other woman dropped out at the last minute. It is the first time only one postulant has taken vows to the order – it is shrinking. And that’s not the order’s only problem, as the former Poplar resident Sister Hilda tells Sister Julienne: the order is also running out of money as the National Health Service becomes increasingly wary of working with a religious order. The order is selling property and looking into missionary work abroad.

Sister Julienne wonders if it will survive through Catherine’s lifetime – and worries if Catherine is making the right choice when she sees her dancing on the beach and delighting in the company of her sister Helen, who has come to attend her vows despite their father’s disapproval of Catherine’s choice. Nevertheless, Helen tells Catherine that he gave her the train fare to get there – he wanted one member of the family there.

Catherine goes through with her vows, with Helen watching, smiling. Paula’s father comes to visit her and discuss the adoption – and brings along Paula’s mother, to everyone’s surprise. Her mother gives the baby a mitten and keeps the other for Paula, and apologizes to her. Paula and her hamsters eventually return home to her parents.

And Nancy and Roger get married – with a new baby in tow.