I wrote a fic! (and also have Call the Midwife thoughts)

Really, nothing but Call the Midwife thoughts, these days. gabolange and I talked on the phone last weekend for over two hours, and probably an hour and 45 minutes of that was CtM. It's nutso. Active fangirling! Who knew we still had it in us!

So season 6 has now concluded. And partly--thank god? This is the first show I've actively fangirled during a currently airing season in a looooong time, and it was stupidly stressful. I would say that Tumblr is the worst, but actually, I think the UK media tabloids are the actual worst, and then Tumblr just magnifies it. So much crazy sensationalized spoiler stuff leaked to the press so far in advance of the episodes!!! And if some intern at Radio Times didn't get fired at some point, there is no justice in the world.

If my feelings about the experience of watching in real time were largely negative, my feelings about the series itself were mixed. I think, looking back, I will think of season 6 like I think of season 3: some good stuff happened, sure, but it was super transitional, and I kind of hated the main plotline for my faves.

The good: Phyllis Fucking Crane. She is the best friend and colleague anyone could want, and she was basically perfect in this season. Possibly a little too perfect, and I'm sure someone somewhere is calling her a Mary Sue because of it (or they would be if this fandom knew how to fandom), but I loved her.

I also quite loved, in a heartbreaking way, Cynthia's plotline. I have not always been terribly impressed by Bryony Hannah's acting, but she was excellent with this material, and the show did a really lovely job handling the difficulty of severe mental illness, particularly in the context of that time and place. And I especially appreciated that Sister Julienne's best intentions weren't good enough. This is a little note that comes up now and then in Sister Julienne's character that I rather love, especially because it's subtle: she has a hard time when things aren't as she thinks they should be, and her first reaction is to pretend that everything is going to be fine rather than actually dealing with change. We saw that back in season 2 when Sister Bernadette was leaving the order, and we saw it again here.

And there were lovely little character moments for many people. I adored Trixie in the final episode. I like Valerie and am interested to see where they go with her. I appreciated that Delia got to do one or two things that weren't connected to being Patsy's girlfriend. And there were a number of strong cases of the week, as well as individually strong episodes.

The bad: Whyyyyyyyyy did Sister Ursula ever exist? There was absolutely no point to that, and it wasted a lot of time that could have been better spent. And in general, the pacing of the season was not strong. They tried to do too much, had too many characters and too many plots, and it just generally felt rushed and cobbled together sometimes. The revolving door of characters didn't help, either, and I know they can't help it when actors have other commitments and can't film, but having Trixie, Patsy, AND Cynthia only doing part of the season, plus bringing in Sister Ursula and Valerie as new characters who were only in a few eps--it was a lot. Yet somehow despite all of this, some of the regulars who were there all season still didn't quite have that much to do: namely Barbara and Tom, who were just sort of floating around in the background until their wedding. The writing for the whole season needed a good beta read.

The Turners: They get their own category because ugh, I don't know. I was never thrilled about the baby plot. And then I thought I had made my peace with it because at least it was well done, and we were getting a lot of them having good screen time and being adorable and all that. And then Shelagh had a baby, and my logical brain was going, "okay, that's well done, and Laura Main, whose acting I also don't always love, is acting the hell out of this, and whatever," while my lizard brain was going, "nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!" And then all of fandom was going nuts about how much they loved it because baaaaabbbbiiiiieeeessssss, or something, and I spent about two days wanting to stab things, and gabolange and I had a legitimate fight about this. (We made up, don't worry.)

And at the end of the day, there's no actual reasonable argument for why I hated the baby plot so much. Partly it's that I identify possibly a little too much with Shelagh in some ways, and I have a deep, personal squick about pregnancy and giving birth, and it just freaked me out a little bit, and this is why we shouldn't identify with our characters, clearly. Partly it's that one of the things that I've always loved best about Shelagh is that she is the most interesting character on the show, with by far the best long plot arc, and this felt like such a lazy, uninteresting thing to do. I also vaguely resent that we got so much adorkable shippy stuff only because of pregnancy, and this isn't something we got before that? But all of this is a massively unpopular fannish opinion, and I think the main thing for me to do at this point is just to accept that there's a baby Turner now, probably never rewatch any of this, and hope they go back to letting Shelagh be interesting for her choices and her agency and stuff that she is actually doing, rather than because a fetus is growing inside her.

Interestingly, I dealt with my feelings about the Turner plot by writing a story that jumped the queue of several things I'd already been working on, and isn't actually about my own feelings by the time it all got transformed, but it was therapeutic nonetheless. And, um, I wrote a fic. For real, with beta and all that jazz--first time in a very long time. It feels good!

In case anyone is interested: Over the Hills and Far Away, gen, Timothy and Shelagh on family and change, post 6.08.

And because this thing is totally a team endeavor, gabolange also just published a fic that does some season 6 fixing, and it's excellent: Mercy of the Fallen, four conversations that should have happened during 6.04 (Patrick and Timothy, Trixie and Tom, Delia and Shelagh, Shelagh and Patrick)

Of course, gabolange has also been writing me the season 2 Sister Bernadette and Doctor Turner are sneaking around AU, first two parts here and here. In case I'm not the only one who needs really hot and slightly OOC nun sex fic in their lives.

Crossposted from DW, where there are comments. Comment here or there.