‘Call the Midwife’ season 5, episode 4 review: Did Trixie cause problems for Tom, Barbara?

On Sunday night’s new episode of “Call the Midwife,” we saw what can be best described as the beginnings and the end of a short relationship between Barbara and Tom, mostly because of the way in which Trixie responded to it … especially when it comes to the way in which the entire relationship was hidden from her in the first place so that she wouldn’t quite know what was happening.

Do we think we may have seen a different ending if everyone was a little more upfront with things beforehand? It’s certainly possible, but in the end, it was probably too awkward regardless. We feel like this may be the end of this for now, but who knows? It could come up in the future.

The other major component of this episode that we want to highlight is the continuation of Thalidomide as a key plot point, which continues t be very effective in showing the varying perspectives of the time. You look at a man like Dr. Turner and know that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone; yet at the same time, people did not understand everything that they were doing at the time, and there were ramifications of that. This is why there were so many gut-wrenching moments not only in this episode, but potentially still to come.

For the most part, though, we found the procedural component this week rather lifeless, and there is still something from season 5 left to be desired. We want to see more significant movement from the core characters than we’re getting, just as we want to see a few twists here and there that we do not see coming. Grade: B-.

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