'Call the Midwife' Recap: Season 15 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.

Sister Catherine has acceded to Sister Monica Joan’s desire to accept death and stop taking the diuretics keeping her from it. She will simply help the more than 90-year-old nun have a good death, along with Nurse Crane, one of the only other midwives currently living at Nonnatus House as it prepares for closure.

Sister Monica Joan calls for an undertaker so that she can plan her funeral. Bernie Mullucks arrives to talk her through the details, then takes her for a jaunt through Poplar in a wheelchair, to the delight of Sister Catherine and Fred. As they move through the market, vendors greet her and offer gifts: she delivered many of their children. Sister Monica Joan will be buried at the mother house, but wants a funeral in a Poplar church.

At this time of endings there are also new beginnings. Cyril and Rosalind are getting married, with a cake made by Beryl and Geoffrey, even though Beryl is on retreat and so cannot attend the wedding. Joyce, Nurse Crane, and Miss Higgins greet Rosalind with breakfast in bed, while Mrs. Wallace prepares Caribbean food for Cyril and Violet irons his shirt. 

While the wedding takes place, a priest offers confession and last rites to Sister Monica Joan while Sisters Catherine and Julienne, having returned to Poplar from the mother house, anxiously wait. Cyril and Rosalind visit Sister Monica Joan in her bed after the ceremony, and the nun guesses that Rosalind is pregnant. She gives the new couple a well-loved teddy bear for their coming child.

Nurse Crane sends an exhausted Sister Catherine to bed, taking the night watch over Sister Monica Joan. As the end approaches, she goes to fetch Sisters Catherine and Julienne. When no one is in the room with her, Sister Monica Joan sees the departed Sister Evangelina beckon to her. She joins Evangelina and other sisters she once knew, leaving her body behind. 

Nurse Crane and Sister Catherine return and pray over the body. Timothy later certifies the death while his father watches.

This stalwart of Nonnatus House passes just as Dr. Turner’s maternity clinic prepares to close. One last mother gives birth there: Belinda Mullucks, who tried to hide her pregnancy from her parents while at university. Her family is at first upset, especially since she won’t talk about the father, but her mother Rhoda eventually accepts it and tells Belinda that everything will be okay.

Rhoda has asked to be discharged early from the hospital after her gall bladder removal so that she can help out with Belinda and her other children. Her son Percy at least comes up with one way to ease some pressure, suggesting that the Mullucks try to get a new-fangled motorized wheelchair for their daughter Susan. It’s a success.

Belinda is the only patient in the maternity clinic when she arrives with Rhoda. The Turners let Rhoda cut the umbilical cord when Belinda gives birth to a daughter.

Just as Sister Monica Joan wanted to try a gin and tonic before she died – and was supplied one by the secular Nonnatus residents – Beryl is sampling life outside religious orders. Geoffrey takes her to a cocktail bar and dances with her. But she has begun menopause, meaning it is too late for her to have a child of her own, so she decides to return to Nonnatus House as Sister Veronica. She will still be able to care for and hold babies in her work there, even if they aren’t her own.

Geoffrey is saddened by her departure, but she promises to continue to make preserves and partake in the other tasks they have always done together at Nonnatus House. This is not the end of their friendship.

But others are leaving Nonnatus House. Obviously, Rosalind has moved out to live with Cyril. Trixie is moving to the Lady Emily clinic – and when her mother-in-law suddenly dies, freeing up family funds, she uses them to buy a majority stake in it. 

Joyce has applied for a job at St. Cuthbert’s hospital. Unfortunately, her interview is scheduled for the day of Sister Monica Joan’s funeral. Nurse Crane tells her to go; she will still be able to make the end of the funeral, and Sister Monica Joan, who devoted her life to midwifery, would be happy about the interview. Joyce gets the job, thanks in part to a glowing recommendation from the hospital’s Sister Marcus, with whom she previously worked. 

The hospital has new opportunities and technology, as is evident when Dr. Turner, Nurse Crane, and Timothy attend a demonstration of an ultrasound there – on Rosalind, no less.

Nurse Crane will stay on as a district nurse under Dr. Turner, and Miss Higgins will continue to work for him, even as the maternity clinic closes. The religious sisters – Julienne, Veronica, and Catherine – have decided to turn Nonnatus into a house of prayer and charity for a time while they consider missionary opportunities that will take them overseas for at least a year. 

For Sister Monica Joan’s funeral, she requests that her coffin be rolled through Poplar from Nonnatus to the church, and that Fred, Cyril, Dr. Turner, Timothy, Geoffrey, and Reggie be pallbearers. When the duty is explained to him, Reggie is honored to accept. 

Sister Julienne reads a prayer of Sister Monica Joan’s choosing before her coffin departs from Nonnatus. Sister Catherine offers a eulogy at the church.

At this moment of great change, the midwives commemorate the passing of an era with a tea party and browse through old photos and the lives they – and Nonnatus – have contained over the previous 15 years.