All Creatures Great and Small Season-Premiere Recap: A Horse in Every Room

All Creatures Great and Small
Gathering the Flock
Season 6 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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Greetings, cozy Yorkshire fans! It is our time once again. I can’t believe I’ve been writing these recaps for six seasons, but I hope we get ten more. If you watched this premiere episode and felt like you must have forgotten last season, it is definitely not just you. We have all been the victims of a time jump. Jimmy is a child now! When we last saw him, it was his first birthday, and now he’s traipsing after James and looking like a real five-year-old. Also, James and Helen are living at the farmhouse, Tristan is serving in the army in Italy, and Mrs. Hall is gone.

But a quick sidebar about this episode’s introduction. After yours and my favorite theme song (“DUM dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dummm dummmmm”), it lets us know that it’s May 1945 and “the war in Europe is coming to a close.” I’m sorry, is it twentieth-century amateur hour over here? Of course the war in Europe is coming to a close if it’s 1945! Re-open the schools! Even if this somehow isn’t common knowledge anymore, are you really spelling out the end of World War II to a group of people voluntarily watching men in tweed jackets fix a sheep’s broken leg while singing Gilbert & Sullivan? Maybe it’s for the children watching with their parents. But if that’s the case, clearly no one is making their toddlers watch Ken Burns’s The War, a mistake that I, as a parent, will not be making. They have to learn sometime.

So yes, Mrs. Hall is gone, and everything is chaos. Bills are being paid late, the practice is a frightening level of untidiness, there’s a miniature horse in the study, and Siegfried is passed out on the sofa with some loose woman under a trench coat beside him. (Fine, she seems very nice, but all women who are not Mrs. Hall are dead to me.) Tristan returns home and greets James while Siegfried shuffles the woman out the window. This is not sustainable, Siegfried. James and Tristan agree, and James learns that the last time it was this bad was after Siegfried’s wife died. Which was only remedied by the arrival of Mrs. Hall. Mrs. Hall is the oil that keeps everything running! You can’t remove her or everything becomes jammed and you get loose sprockets rolling off into corners! Which is a metaphor, but Siegfried does probably also have some sprockets rolling around. 

We need Mrs. Hall back, but we also need to talk about the case of the week, which is a border collie with arthritis. She herds Farmer Archie’s sheep and is training her replacement, but after she has a fall into some barbed wire, James diagnoses arthritis in her legs. Farmer Archie seems inclined to put her down, but Siegfried goes behind James’s back and gives Archie painkillers from his bag. Are they in a pill bottle? Oh no, they’re loose pills rolling around in there that he tastes to make sure they’re the right ones. Siegfried, what is this, the bottom of my purse? I know loose pills in your bag are unacceptable because my friends have told me so in horrified tones! 

These pills work, but then the collie gets in a fight with a stray dog while protecting her sheep (and she succeeds because she is a Very Good Dog) and has to be brought in for surgery. It seems she will get to retire as a pet after all, because Archie realizes the error of his ways toward the animals who have worked for him for a decade.

So, Mrs. Hall. She is in Sunderland. Yes, my American friends, of course I will tell you where that is, for I mapped it. It’s an hour and forty-five-minute drive northeast from the Dales, right on the coast, and its Antiquarian Society has a 4.8 average review. The hotels are all suspiciously cheap, perhaps because it is currently January. Mrs. Hall is in Sunderland because Edward, his wife, and his daughter are in Sunderland. Apparently she just left Skeldale all of a sudden to take care of Edward after his war injury. I technically do not object to this based on the rules of what is right and decent, but I do object based on my own rule: “Why aren’t Siegfried and Mrs. Hall married yet?”

James and Tristan travel to Sunderland to gently suggest she come back, which of course devolves into Tristan blurting out how horrible everything is and how she has to come back and fix it. Being Mrs. Hall, she agrees to come for a few days after Tristan tells her that Siegfried is worse than he was when she first met him. James and Tristan have, of course, not told Siegfried about any of this. He has no idea that the love of his life and the beating heart of his home is about to return to it. (If you don’t support Siegfried/Mrs. Hall, you are welcome to ignore these parts or read some other person’s extremely entertaining recaps.) 

Mrs. Hall arrives at Skeldale and rings the bell. That is your home! You do not have to ring the bell! Why does my family keep getting pulled apart! She polishes up the brass sign a little with her handkerchief, and I become the human version of the sobbing emoji. James is the only one there, and he shows her around. The kitchen is so bad. The cupboard is so bad. Everywhere is so bad. There are one million tins of sardines in the cupboard. Why, Siegfried? I mean, I know why, but why?

Siegfried returns to a clean kitchen. He is bewildered, and then he sees Mrs. Hall. “I was in the pantry,” she tells him. “All this time?” He asks. How can you not love them? They’re extremely awkward around each other, but in the kind of way where Siegfried tells her that one of his pet rats is named Gerald because he has a little mustache. A Gerald callback! Never come back, Gerald. Unless it’s rat Gerald, he can stay.

Mrs. Hall immediately fixes everything. All the rooms are tidy, and she mediates an argument between Siegfried and James about the arthritic dog by telling them to both go see it because two heads are better than one. Siegfried says he has read an article about a two-headed snake that bit itself to death. See! Oil! Sprockets! Later, she and Siegfried play Scrabble and we find out he didn’t attend Edward’s wedding. He says they tried other housekeepers, but none were good enough. But then Siegfried ruins things very Siegfriedly by saying that Mrs. Hall, by fixing everything, robbed them of their autonomy, and now they know how to do things themselves. Do you, Siegfried! Do you! Because there was a miniature pony in your study twenty-four hours ago. She mentions James having a different opinion, and when Siegfried asks if she sees him as a problem to be solved, Mrs. Hall replies, “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.” 

Well now I do have some feedback for Mrs. Hall. If she gave me that response, I would immediately turn and walk into the sea. If someone asks whether you think they are a problem as a person, you say “NOPE, that is not what I meant at all,” then clarify what you did mean. Perhaps their behavior is problematic! Perhaps you are concerned that they need help. All of this does apply to Siegfried, whose temper is also getting out of control. He storms out, but only to go dancing (not towards the sea). 

The next day, the loose woman from earlier (Susan) is in the kitchen with Mrs. Hall. Siegfried learns that they know each other from church. He then snaps at Mrs. Hall when she tries to help him. He asks Susan to leave. Unfortunately, Mrs. Hall is left with the snapping and no follow-up, because this is when Tristan comes in with one injured dog, and the vets all have to search for the other injured dog up in the hills (the one guarding the sheep). While searching, James tells Siegfried he’s been erratic, short-tempered, and forgetful. Siegfried doesn’t want to talk about feelings, but then explodes with “She left us! What was I supposed to do, pretend to be happy? Pretend to be fine?” AHHHHHHHH. IT’S ALL HAPPENING. James tells him that if he keeps pushing people away, eventually they will go away. “Well, thanks a lot! That’s very bloody incisive!” It’s moments like this that keep us all comin’ back. 

While the men are out looking for dogs and sheep, Mrs. Hall packs up and leaves for the train station. Siegfried realizes the error of his ways and has a full-on “run to the departure station to stop the lady from leaving” moment, where he leaps before two (stopped) trains and, after shouting “Mrs. Hall!” finally gets her attention with “AUDREY.” My heart. It has stopped. “I tried to find a replacement. It would never work, because they’re not you.” WHAT IS THIS EVEN? Agghhhhhhh! It’s so good! I thought all good things were beyond our reach in these dark times, but here we have it! Siegfried tells her she can take her time deciding whether to come back, then immediately asks for an answer. Mrs. Hall looks around the train station at everyone hugging and asks what’s got into everyone. “Oh, that, the war’s ended,” Siegfried tells her. 

He! Ignored! The End! Of a World War! Because Mrs Hall staying was more important to him. Have any of us ever even understood love before? She hugs him. Everyone is back. The war is over. Let’s cure some animals.