Call the Midwife starts its sixth season with a story so intense and well crafted one can only admire the courage it must have taken to write, act and produce this masterpiece.
Time has progressed from the immediate post war 1950's to 1961, when the first stirrings of feminism and a faint hint of sexual revolution wafts through the house where midwife/nurses share a roof with midwife/nuns and tensions develop over the secular embrace of nascent feminism, a movement and set of ideas which didn't even have a name at the time, and the buttoned down response of the nuns to any hint of sexuality among women.
There is a subplot about a lesbian love affair, in which the emphasis is entirely on the emotional and this has the effect of only heightening the implied erotic part of the relationship. I cannot think of a more wrenching portrayal of the love of one woman for another than this.
But, most important is the appearance of the first baby born to a mother who took thalidomide and the turmoil this causes among the midwives and nurses who have no training to prepare them for the deformity in the infant they deliver and struggle to decide how to tell the parents what they've got.
Most artful of all is the epilogue, given as the usual voice over spoken by a character who is not clearly identified, but this one summarizes the forces stirring in the lives of these humble midwives and doctors serving the folk of London's East End with the only tools they have in 1961: a dollop of very rudimentary science but a huge scoop of simple presence and sympathy. The voice over tells us that in 1961 science was thought to be an unmitigated blessing, the beacon of light and hope in a new age of better lives, but the explanation for the misfortune of what happened to the one couple arose out of the realization they were not just a random misfortune but the heralding of a scandal which rocked Britain and the world of science, and the word, "thalidomide" is never actually spoken, but you know what she is talking about, this wise voice.
And that experience brought with it the news that while science might lead to untold wonders and progress, it could also bring grief and disaster.
This episode is written with such restraint it becomes almost magical, as you see and know so much more than the characters in their particular moment can possibly know. It puts the viewer in a position of a god, looking down on the lives of these people, struggling with forces they cannot possibly yet connect to bigger tides which will carry them along--environmental toxins, including thalidomide and others which would poison whole rivers and landscapes, the emergence of women from the repression of restricted lives, in which women dared not even speak the word "vagina" and did not seek medical care for problems, "down below" out of shame, to the emergence of women like Trixie who began to consider, then to believe that women did not need to be ashamed of their bodies or of their sexuality. Everyone, from doctors to nurses to pregnant women still smoked--the evils of tobacco were still vigorously denied by the manufacturers and in every scene we see things we want to scream out warnings against--don't smoke when you're pregnant; don't smoke at all;don't take thalidomide; don't be ashamed of exercising and improving your bodies; don't consider female anatomy shameful or embarrassing.
And the characters!
Still, by far the most complex and engaging person, one of the most astonishing characters I've ever run across, is the head nun, who is deeply conservative, but so thoroughly decent and thoughtful, that she can see when she might be clinging to beliefs which need to be reconsidered and possibly amended.
When she upbraids Trixie for allowing herself to be photographed in her leotard, leading an exercise class, which scandalizes the older nuns, Trixie replies that a new generation of woman is emerging, and maybe this new generation will be a better generation in its openness to new ideas. Trixie tells the tale of a woman in the exercise class who had a prolapsed uterus and fled the class in shame and hid in a toilet and could not even name the part which was affected because those parts down below were "unmentionable." That was the result of the severe modesty of the generation for which the head nun spoke.
And the head nun realizes Trixie is right.
It's all done with such civility you almost miss the deep passion behind it, but you feel it somehow.
This series is not as easy or as fun to watch as Downton Abbey, but it's not meant to be escapism. It's meant to open your eyes, to make you feel and it somehow shakes you into realizing, as you watch these people who were doing the best they could, muddling through when they could not see what we can now see, that we too, today, are likely doing the same thing and someday people looking back at us will say, well, they were doing the best they could given what they knew then, and what they didn't know.
This is the power of "period pieces," stories told in times when even the most sophisticated and powerful people did not know what an adolescent knows today: Smoking is bad for you; certain drugs taken during pregnancy can cause horrible deformities; women should not apologize for wanting to vote, or to work or to learn more about their own bodies or to exercise; doctors ought to wash their hands before doing surgery on patients; insulin can treat diabetes; vaccines can protect against polio, which is caused by a virus.
"Call the Midwife" will never be as popular as "Downton," but its rewards are far greater.
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