Call the Midwife’s 2013 Christmas special is on PBS tonight, who else is watching? 
Or already watched in on the BBC?
I’m taping it (or DVR’ing it, I should say) and will watch it later tonight. Too much going on while it airs and I like to watch when all is quiet.
Thanks for the reminder. I had taken it off the DVR because no new episodes, so I would have missed this special.
Wow, that was amazing. I was not expecting Timothy to get polio; I though he was just sneaking booze with his friend. :eek: I wasn’t expecting Nonnatus House to be demolished before series 3 was up either. That’s going to make things pretty different when the new series proper starts.
I watched it! DVR’d it and watched it later in the evening.
Yes, I was surprised at Timothy, too. I thought there would be a polio scare, but they’d find that he overdosed on meds stolen from Dad’s case. So, was he stealing the meds to treat his own symptoms? Seems kind of odd considering the time. But then they made a point to show him sharing a drink with the other boy who was diagnosed with polio. I was confused. Glad he’s not stuck on the iron lung, though.
…and I’m glad Sr. Bernadette / Sheila finally embraced her bridehood & accepted the sisters as her sisters.
Was anyone else curious about how an iron lung works? Or did you know?
I didn’t. Went to Wiki.
I watched on a certain popular video-sharing website, and paused the video when Timothy got the bottle out of his father’s case. It looked to me like the bottle was intentionally set down with the label towards the camera, but the video wasn’t high-quality enough to see what it said. I think it may have said Dispril, which is a brand of aspirin.
Remember the wedding was just a day or two away, and he wouldn’t have wanted them to put it off just because he wasn’t feeling quite well. I don’t think we were supposed to believe he was worried about polio, just an ordinary winter cold. As a doctor’s kid, he would have known that some drugs can bring down a fever and mask little aches and pains.
As for the rest: there were a couple bits of the script that weren’t up to the show’s usual standards. The first bomb disposal guy’s lines were such cliches they were unintentionally comical, and I thought it was a bit unfair that when Trixie finally gets a situation with some drama to it, they gave her such clunky lines. But overall it was one of the better episodes, and left me wondering what’s going to happen in season 3.
Totally agree. It felt really clumsy, like they were crowbarring in some drama, but it just felt like melodrama.
I didn’t get the pills thing either. All I can figure out after watching it was that he was taking aspirin to make sure he felt good for the wedding, but based on some of the things he said during the episode, I was thinking he was taking something to make himself appear sick, in order to intentionally postpone the wedding. Badly done.
My take on the Timmy situation was that he felt unwell, didn’t want to miss the wedding, and was taking aspirin so he wouldn’t miss out on anything. I was cringing when I saw him hand the boy his drink, as I expected him to pass on polio to this boy and then have it spread to all the kids in the center (which we know aren’t vaccinated because this info was so kindly given to us at the beginning of the show).
Am I the only one that finds all these ‘Specials’ less than special? Not just Midwife, but in general. I’m hard pressed to think of a special that met the quality of the regular series episodes. They’re crowded bridges leading to the next series. Still, it was the best thing I watched Sunday night (not counting the rerun of Dowton Abbey’ since I’d seen it twice before).