The Beasts episode Baby explores the idyllic life of the English country vet.  Simon and Eugene discuss.

Synopsis:

Jo and Peter Gilkes have recently moved to the country and are having their cottage renovated by two local workman, Stan Biddick and Arthur Grace.  Jo is a housewife, country-born and six-months pregnant.  She’s been pregnant before, but without success.

Peter splits his time between being a vet and a first-class asshole.  He’s a city boy who’s moved to the country to be James Herriot.  He’s tired of expressing neurotic poodle’s anal glands and wants to get his arm up to his shoulder in a cow’s backside.  That is… when he’s not shouting at his wife.  It’s clear, she’s not as thrilled about moving to the country as he is.

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Jo has just brought the family cat, Muddslinger, to the cottage and he screams and yowls from the moment she brings his basket in the door until she lets him out, when he promptly bolts out the door and keeps running till he’s out of sight.

In the evening, Peter decides the workman aren’t moving fast enough, and starts doing some of the demolition work himself.  He uncovers a large earthen jar bricked up in the 300-year old wall.  Inside, they find the mummified remains of… something.  Peter the vet cannot identify it.  Neither dog nor cat, it looks rather like a pig, but furry.  Or like a lamb, with claws.  He is fascinated by it.  She is horrified by it.  But he won’t take it out and bury it – he wants to show it to his new partner, senior local vet and colorful character, Siegfried Farnum – no, no, sorry, Dick Pummery.

He leaves the mummy at the house when he goes to work the next day, and when the workmen see it, they think it should be gotten rid of.  Jo agrees and takes it out to the fire in the yard and drops it in just as Peter pulls up and shouts her down, rescuing it from the flames.

That night, Dick comes over and does a lot of talking about the somewhat dark history of the cottage and the surrounding land.  The house was previously owned by the Jacksons, a childless couple who tried to run a dog farm.  They never made a go of it though, the dogs kept spontaneously aborting.  Funny that, that’s the same reason the land isn’t used for cattle, either.  Spontaneous abortions.  Must be a germ or something in the soil in the area that causes it.

All this talk of something in the area causing spontaneous abortions makes Jo feel absolutely confident that this is the right place for her to be right now.  No, strike that, it makes her hysterically worried for the safety of her unborn child.  “Not to worry, my dear, couldn’t happen to humans!” says Dick, and that calms her down a lot (read: not at all.)

With the fun and uplifting evening coming to an end, Peter shows Dick the mummy.  He finds it fascinating, too.  They decide to take it back to the practice and do a post-mortem on it.  Jo is thrilled to get it out of the house.

Just one problem, the bag starts to break as Dick makes to leave so, rather than find another bag, Peter sneaks the mummy upstairs and into the nursery, where he locks it in a cabinet.  No need to worry Jo that it’s still in the house.  He’ll take it to work in the morning.  Unless he forgets.  Which he does.

Next day, the workmen and Jo are gossiping about the creature.  Arthur thinks its a thing that hard a purpose.  A dark purpose.  A thing that was made to do dark things.  Made by somebody who’d have been wise in them dark ways.  A thing like that would have been suckled, too, by a human.

All this talk has Jo upset again and she goes into the woods looking for her cat.  She fails to find him but while out, she sees and hears a strange shadow in the woods and runs all the way home in a fright.  

The workmen knock off early and Jo is left at home alone.  She hears sounds and she finds the locked cabinet in the nursery.  She goes downstairs investigating and discovers the earthen jar in the doorway with the door open.  Outside, she hears that sound again.

Peter arrives home. He’s in a right state.  Dick put him to work on some pigs and the pigs got the better of him.  He’s covered in… let’s be charitable and call it “muck” and he’s livid at Dick, who laughed at him!  That’s it, I hate it here! I can’t work with that man! I’ve decided to quit!

This is the best news Jo could hear and she confides to Peter that she hates it here.  He, of course, dismisses that as the pregnancy talking.  But it doesn’t really matter about her, the important thing is he doesn’t want this job anymore and he’s quitting in the morning.

Downstairs, Jo notices that the rocking chair is moving, as if someone was… or is… sitting in it.  At this moment, Dick and his wife Dorothy show up, with booze.  He’s in a festive mood and has come to make amends with Peter.  He’s there to celebrate his baptism of fire – the incident with the pigs.  It happens to all the vets and he passed with flying colors.

Peter, presented with a bottle of booze, doesn’t immediately quit and an evening of drunkenness ensues – for everyone but Jo, of course.  By the end of the evening, Peter and Dick are best friends again and the idea of quitting is long gone and also, Jo has seen the mysterious shadow inside the house.

As Dick and Dorothy leave, Jo overhears a comment that makes her think Peter kept the mummy in the house after all.  When she asks him, he lies and tells her he didn’t.

Later that night, Peter is unconscious in bed and Jo is hearing the sounds of wood being gnawed.  She gets up to investigate and finds the cabinet in the nursery chewed up and destroyed.  She also finds the remnants of the bag and realizes what was in the cabinet.  Not content with just that small, horrifying discovery, she goes downstairs by herself for more.

She hears contented, suckling noises and the sound of the rocking chair.  As she looks at the moving chair, a horrible, black-clad, disfigured woman is suckling the now re-animated creature.  Jo screams in terror and collapses in the empty room.

And so ends another episode of “Well, That never happened on All Creatures Great and Small.”

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