The
first of an eventual many Favorite Characters posts for Call the Midwife; that show sure knows how to pick ‘em. When the show started, Trixie was my least
favorite of the non-nun midwives (not because I disliked her – I just liked the
others better,) but as I’ve gotten to know her and she’s grown over the
seasons, I’ve come to realize her awesomeness.
Quite frankly, I love her to bits.
Some Trixie-related spoilers.
Surface
impressions first. Very posh, very
modern, very fun-loving. She’s always
good for the latest fashions or music, she likes going out and having a good
time, and she likes getting the lowdown on the local gossip. She’s well aware that plenty of men find her
attractive and enjoys that fact. Looking
at her, you wouldn’t necessarily think she’d handle the blood and messiness of
midwifery all that well, but Trixie is a tough cookie who doesn’t blanch
easily. And as much as she likes enjoying
herself, she also takes her work very seriously and is incredibly devoted to
the women of Poplar.
So
yeah, even the “surface impressions” already show a fairly complex
character. Years of TV archetypes prime
us to assume that trendy, vivacious Trixie is frivolous, or a “princess” type,
but she’s not. She has many facets, all
of which are honest parts of her, and none of which negate any others. She can like looking glamorous in her free
time and not mind getting her hands
and everything else dirty when she’s working.
She can like dancing and dishing and
handle high-pressure medical situations in a collected manner. I like that.
And let’s be real – Trixie is a pretty awesome midwife. Her professional demeanor is somehow chipper
and down-to-business, cool and warm, at the same time. She’s delivered babies on ships, she’s
delivered babies in the middle of storms with no electricity, and she’s put an
inverted uterus back in place with the patient lying on her kitchen floor and
no doctor present. Every time she meets
an intense scenario with that gorgeous aplomb, I love her a little more.
As time
goes on and we learn more about Trixie, even more of her many facets become
visible. She had already greatly
improved in my estimation as a character by the time the series 3 Christmas
special rolled around, but I think that’s the episode that turned my like into
love. With many local residents
evacuated due to the discovery of an unexploded bomb, she realizes that one of
her fellow evacuees suffers from shell shock/PTSD and is really
struggling. Her calm, soothing,
nonjudgmental care for the man is gorgeous, and her memories of her father’s
experiences with shell shock are heartbreaking.
When she admits her childhood role of doing whatever she could think of
to make her father feel happy, you see where some of her tendency to use her
bright, bubbly personality as a deflection came from. This splendid character moment tells us
something important about Trixie, it explains how she’s so empathetic to the
young man in the evacuation at a time when mental health struggles weren’t
viewed very compassionately, and it lays the groundwork for developments in
season 4, when she starts leaning on alcohol as an anesthetic for her private heartbreak. Trixie has seen alcoholism bring her hurting
father down even further, and as she starts to see those same signs in herself,
she’s able to find the strength to look for help. It’s great to see her working so diligently
at her sobriety in season 5, as well as gradually opening up to her friends and
coworkers about it.
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