'All Creatures Great and Small' Recap: Season 6 Episode 4

All Creatures Great and Small airs Sundays at 8:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes and seasons.
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The Aldersons have two pieces of exciting news: they have a new foal, and Jenny was accepted to nursing college; registration is in three weeks. Neither is an unalloyed joy, however. Richard is upset that Jenny will be leaving the farm for London, while Helen slowly realizes that Jenny might never return to the farm and that Jenny is naive and unprepared to live on her own in the city. James worries about Helen herself and how she will fare in the absence of losing Jenny, who’s like a daughter to her.

Amidst all this, the new foal contracts pneumonia. That, at least, has an easy solution: medicine. But then the foal’s mother begins ailing from mastitis, because the foal wasn’t feeding. Now that the foal is recovering, however, it needs strength from its mother’s milk, so she must allow it to feed even though it’s painful. Jenny comforts the horse as she does so, and Richard and Helen become emotional watching her skill with animals. 

James, meanwhile, is trying to prove that he’s useful on a farm beyond his skill with animals. He wants to show Richard that he’s capable of building a solid wall, but the whole family smirks at his efforts. Helen helps him while Richard isn’t watching. 

When Richard commends Helen on the wall, which he assumes she built, she tells him it’s James’ handiwork. He’s impressed. He takes the chance to apologize to Helen for retreating into his grief when her mother died and leaving her to raise Jenny. Helen says caring for Jenny kept her going through her own grief, and now they have a closer relationship than they would have had otherwise. She asks if she can give Richard’s blessing to Jenny on going to London – Jenny has suddenly grown scared of the change, telling Helen that she can’t leave her home. Richard gives his blessing. 

Helen relays it to Jenny, telling her that she and Richard, and the farm, will be fine. And the farm will always be in her blood. Jenny tells Helen she’s as good as a mom to her. And Helen shares that Richard has finally come up with a name for the new foal: Florence, after the famous nurse Florence Nightingale.

Helen has recently unearthed a quilt owned by generations of women in her family, and decided to finally add her own embroidered square to it: a trio of horses together. Watching her work on it, Richard tells her that the patch her mother added doesn’t just feature their Jenny Wren as a wren – Helen is there as the sun.

Mrs. Hall is in many ways the sun at Skeldale, warming the house with her presence. So when she requests leave to go visit her son Edward on the occasion of her granddaughter’s first birthday, Siegfried is unhappy even though he grants it. He’s already lost her once.

He tries to do things around the house himself, to prove he doesn’t need Mrs. Hall, turning back to tinned sardines for meals after he burns an omelet. Mrs. Hall begins to wonder what’s wrong.

But it does leave her some time to learn the rules of croquet and practice with Tristan, who has been invited to a luncheon at his new girlfriend Charlotte’s estate. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know how to play croquet, and fears he will embarrass himself in front of Charlotte’s aristocratic general father. Charlotte tells him she doesn’t need her father to approve of him, and Mrs. Hall assures Tristan that the general and his friends aren’t better people than Tristan even if they’re from a higher class; he needn’t try to fade into the background. 

Tristan is even more embarrassed when Siegfried gives him a bill to be paid by the general for treating Charlotte’s horse; Tristan protests that a social engagement isn’t the proper place to ask for payment. Charlotte sends a chauffeur to pick him up, and he quickly receives a frosty reception from the general and his friend.

There won’t be any croquet after all, given the ground condition, but Tristan agrees to a game of billiards with the general. The rules are completely different from what he’s used to, so Charlotte tries to help him, unseen. Eventually, antagonized by the general’s comments about breeding, he admits that he doesn’t know about the opera or this kind of billiards, hands the general his bill, and storms off.

Charlotte follows and tells Tristan that she loves that Tristan made an impression. The general sees her laughing with Tristan, then interrupts and hands over the money he owes. He explains that he lost Charlotte once, when she fled an arranged marriage to join the auxiliary forces in the war, and now he just wants her to be happy. Teach me the billiards you know next time, he tells Tristan.

Siegfried has been trying to treat a goat while Tristan worries about the general. Miss Stokes brought the animal to Skeldale on a cart, telling Siegfried it was lame only to find it fleeing his attention. He examined the animal and dismissed her claims. 

But then she calls and says it’s still lame, and asks Siegfried to come to her farm, where she has him hide out beneath a cart to watch the goat without it noticing. It eventually shows one hoof is hurting it. It does have an ailment, to Siegfried’s surprise: goats sometimes try to hide an injury to protect themselves. Siegfried apologizes to Miss Stokes – and the goat.

He then uses the goat’s situation to explain to Mrs. Hall that he was worried she wouldn’t come back from visiting Edward again. She reassures him. 

Before Jenny leaves, Helen gives her the family quilt. Jenny asks her to keep it until she knows what she wants to add, once she knows her own place in the world. She gives her old toys to Helen’s children, and asks Helen to come with her to London for a few weeks, to help her get settled. It was Richard’s suggestion.

But Helen can’t leave James alone with the kids. James insists she go; each of them can watch a kid. And Richard finally gets a phone installed, which will not only make James’ life as a vet on call much easier but also allow Richard to speak to Jenny in London every Sunday.