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\n Welcome back to 1945! Jimmy is suddenly five years old, Tristan is back from Italy, and the Skeldale kitchen is a biohazard.
\n Photo: PBS\n <\/p>\n
Greetings, cozy Yorkshire fans! It is our time once again. I can\u2019t believe I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But a quick sidebar about this episode\u2019s introduction. After yours and my favorite theme song (\u201cDUM dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dummm dummmmm\u201d), it lets us know that it\u2019s May 1945 and \u201cthe war in Europe is coming to a close.\u201d I\u2019m sorry, is it twentieth-century amateur hour over here? Of course the war in Europe is coming to a close if it\u2019s 1945! Re-open the schools! Even if this somehow isn\u2019t 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\u2019s broken leg while singing Gilbert & Sullivan? Maybe it\u2019s for the children watching with their parents. But if that\u2019s the case, clearly no one is making their toddlers watch Ken Burns\u2019s The War, a mistake that I, as a parent, will not be making. They have to learn sometime.<\/p>\n
So yes, Mrs. Hall is gone, and everything is chaos. Bills are being paid late, the practice is a frightening level of untidiness, there\u2019s 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\u2019s wife died. Which was only remedied by the arrival of Mrs. Hall. Mrs. Hall is the oil that keeps everything running! You can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s back and gives Archie painkillers from his bag. Are they in a pill bottle? Oh no, they\u2019re loose pills rolling around in there that he tastes to make sure they\u2019re 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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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: \u201cWhy aren\u2019t Siegfried and Mrs. Hall married yet?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t support Siegfried\/Mrs. Hall, you are welcome to ignore these parts or read some other person\u2019s extremely entertaining recaps.)<\/p>\n