All Creatures Great and Small confronts despair like only a comforting show can

This week’s episode of All Creatures Great And Small — the third episode of the third season, entitled “Surviving Siegfried” — offered something rare for this series: flashbacks.

This adaptation of Alf Wight’s internationally popular memoirs, which he wrote as James Herriot and was published in 1930s England, is set squarely in Darrowby. It is a fictionalized part of Yorkshire Dales, where viewers can spend an hour each week, and their worries are replaced with gentle stories about rural animal care. The series centers on veterinary surgeon James (Nicholas Ralph), who toils under the watchful eye of the persnickety Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West), whom he struggles to please — though not as much as Siegfried’s layabout brother, Tristan (Callum Woodhouse), does.

All of these figures are familiar to readers of Herriot’s books. These figures became a staple of TV’s television set in 1978 when the BBC first serialized adaptation. All Creatures Great And Small. To call the new series a remake of the prior one would be inapt, as both take their own liberties in adapting Herriot’s books. But in Siegfried’s awareness of the traumas of war, the two series do feature remarkable echoes. The same man is beset by the righteous world-weariness that plagues both versions. This would resonate just as strongly four decades ago.

“Surviving Siegfried” transports the viewer to Belgium in 1918, a schism in the series’ typical operations that underscores just how present the First World War remains in the consciousness of characters now facing down the Second. There, a younger version of the typically jovially eccentric Siegfried — played in these segments by Andy Sellers, and now seen as a solemn captain in the Royal Armed Forces around the time of Armistice Day — is tasked with caring for his major’s wounded horse.

“Physically speaking, he’ll make a full recovery,” this younger version of Siegfried remarks of the animal. But there’s another, perhaps even greater wound: “the damage we can’t see.”

Image: PBS Masterpiece

In the show’s present, another war looms, casting a shadow over a series that has previously struck a comforting note of escapism. Siegfried, who shuttles from Darrowby to the farms outlying his car with Jeeps passing by him, was last season’s finale as Mrs. Hall (Anna Madeley), watching a spitfire fly through the skies. Now, Siegfried has been called upon to care for another traumatized horse — River, who will not be ridden — and though the oncoming brutality has not yet touched these particular creatures, its specter dominates the season.

“Are you all right?” Tristan asks the obstinate vet while driving him back to see River. Siegfried has had to be thrown so many times from his horse that he cannot even walk or operate a car.

“That’s a stupid bloody question!” Siegfried snaps. “Of course I’m not! We are all different! We should not be. State of the damn world — there’d be something wrong with us if we were!” The line fits the character and story, but it might well strike a chord for present-day viewers as well. What percentage of people in this world can feel content with the way things are? The gently antic All Creatures Amazing and Small Must balance its comforting role in a complex and difficult 21st century with its understanding of the complexity of the world.

This month marks 43 years since the BBC launched the first televised season. The world was complex and hard. All Creatures Great And Small. The season aired less than a year into Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister (the run of the original series would match up with her 11 years in office to within a year), amid a time of tremendous unrest in the United Kingdom, a nation still reeling from a year of unprecedented strikes, the peak of which would be retrospectively termed the Winter of Discontent.

Image: PBS Masterpiece

That season’s fifth episode, titled “If Wishes Were Horses,” serves as a parallel to, if not the basis for, “Surviving Siegfried.” Again, we see Siegfried (here played by Robert Hardy) caring for a horse, though this time the infection is of the hoof as opposed to River’s spiritual malady. Siegfried seems to be in control of the horse and leaves the surgery feeling happy. “Summer’s morning in an English village,” he beams. “Nothing like it.”

“Not if you’ve got time to appreciate it,” James (Christopher Timothy) agrees.

However, the joy is quickly shattered when two young boys in their community are going to the RAF. “I reckon it’s their duty,” the boys’ father remarks, but Siegfried is visibly shaken. “The politicians have failed,” he mutters as the boys head off to enlist. “Now it’s up to people like them… to pick up the pieces.”

“If Wishes Were Horses” aired in January 1980, just a few weeks after Britain’s steel workers walked off the job for the first time in more than half a century. This strike lasted for 13 weeks. It ended just days prior to the beginning of the third season. All Creatures Great And Small did, the world’s wintertime discontent once more forming a bracing contrast with a gentle series. These characters are said farewell in the finale. The eight years before season four ended with Siegfried and James leaving to enlist. “Nothing’s certain anymore,” Siegfried murmurs toward the end of the episode.

This could also be true for the universe in which the third season is set. All Creatures Great And Small has premiered, as we enter the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and amid a rising tide of global fascism that’s becoming normalized with shocking swiftness. The series premiered in September 2020, less than a year into the pandemic, and while it might be a bit convenient to suggest James Herriot and his comic entourage emerge during these moments of widespread despair to guide us toward something like hope… Well, if the horseshoe fits.

Image: PBS Masterpiece

We learn that Siegfried had to supervise the slaughter of all horses in Belgium. They were considered essentially useless once they finished transporting soldiers into battle. Now called upon by his onetime commanding officer to do the same to River, a racehorse that won’t race (“Good for nought but dog food,” an onlooker grumbles as Siegfried tries to tame the wild thing), Siegfried puts his foot down.

“Surely we don’t need to repeat the mistakes and cruelties of the past!” he begs this man he still calls Major. When the older man gruffly asks how many times he’s willing to be thrown off, Siegfried responds with certainty: “As many as it takes.”

Siegfried is referring to River’s determination, but his general resolve is much greater. He tells River that he is here to help him, but his real job is to get the horse back together. It’s the same task we all wake up to every day: the need to play what little role we can in reassembling a world that feels like it’s breaking so quickly the pieces might crumble in your hands.

“We’ll have to come to terms with it, Siegfried,” James tells his partner in the original series. “There really is no other way.”

“You’re right, of course,” Siegfried agrees. “The human animal is the most wonderfully adaptable of all.” It’s unclear whether Siegfried believes his own words. It’s hard to believe he can say it without crying. But “Surviving Siegfried” ends on something closer to catharsis: River allows himself to be ridden. The major’s horse is saved.

In one flashback segment found toward the middle of “Surviving Siegfried,” we learn that only one horse returned from Belgium: the major’s personal steed. It would be easy to see why the writers decided to call this horse Orpheus. Like Siegfried himself, this creature — so great and yet so small — has walked into hell. His task now is to make a comeback without ever looking back.

All Creatures Great And Small It is now available on PBS Masterpiece.