Previously on The Flying Nun, Revisited…
“The Flying Nun is a hip sixties woman named Sister Bertrille from New York and she just began working at a convent in exceedingly windy San Juan, Puerto Rico. She weighs ninety pounds and her cornette is shaped in such a way that makes it aerodynamic when countered with a large gust of wind. She sings songs to children like The Sound of Music and there’s a local sleazy rich jerk named Carlos that Sister Bertrille is always running into whenever he’s about to kiss a woman. She usually gets into some sort of scheme that involves using his vast wealth or losing his vast wealth. The Flying Nun has a warm but begrudging friendship with the Reverend Mother. She’s also a good mechanic, and allergic to Hibiscus. She’s good friends with Sister Jacqueline, who narrates the episodes, as well as Sister Sixto. And she’s friendly with birds, whether they talk or have crushes on her.”
After ten episodes of prestige television, we’ve learned and grown alongside these characters. What will episodes eleven through fifteen bring us next? Cut to present day!
Introduction –
In the modern day, no concept, TV show or movie is ever forgotten. Everything, no matter how stupid, has a fanbase of some kind and ends up getting a sequel, a revival, or a recap podcast with people laughing at jokes they made five to thirty years ago. Why has the long forgotten Sally Field sitcom, The Flying Nun, been left behind? It’s like the movie Yesterday, where I’m the only person who remembers that this amazing television show existed. Except I’m not remaking the show and pretending I came up with the idea, which the guy in that movie does. What’s funny is that Richard Curtis took that script from someone else and reworked it and asked for full credit on writing the movie. But I shouldn’t be talking about Yesterday today, I should be talking about The Flying Nun today, tomorrow, and every day after that until I die.
The Flying Nun, 1.11: “It’s an Ill Wind”
Sister Bertrille needs to give her resume to the Reverend Mother before a seminar she’s traveling to, but she decides to have her kids present their lesson to her in person. Unfortunately the Reverend Mother forgets her notes as a result, so how will the Reverend Mother get her notes? Can Bertrille fly all the way there? She thinks not, but Carlos won’t let her use his plane, so she tries to and almost immediately gets lost. Cut to a group of loud businessmen who are clearly criminals. We’re adding to the long list of characters who don’t really belong in this show, including a man in a mustard suit and a guy with glasses who loves a cigar and “Owns a Picasso. Hand-painted.” Before mustard suit can have some enemies “liquidated” Sister Bertrille flies in and he mistakes her for a religious vision. She thinks he has a bad knee when he keeps praying for her, because somehow she doesn’t think he assumes she’s a vision. The conniving mob man doesn’t understand that she can’t fly away again because the wind dies down and he continues to call her “Your Saintliness” and his squad of guys don’t buy it when he starts citing the Golden Rule. “Who do we give North Dakota to?” they ask. This is a funny one.
Oh, and apparently Bertrille is excellent at pool. Let’s add that to our list of Bertrille fun facts. The gangster plot gets more complicated when the envelope with the notes is swapped for the envelope that contained the hit notice for the gangsters. The next day, the conniving gangster’s plane crashes due to Bertrille flying by and everything escalates from there. But before the federal agents can raid the island mustard suit and the others fully convert to Catholicism and turn themselves in while singing “Bringing in the sheets” and all is well. This was an interesting one, lots of farce and fun side characters and a good payoff, but a bit convoluted and we’ve seen this plotline once before with Carlos, though this has more of a cultish spin. Still, good stuff.
Episode Rating – 8.1 Sally Fields
The Flying Nun, 1.12: “Young Man with a Cornette”
This episode, the Reverend Mother decides to go on a cruise after Sister Bertrille goes too far and rescues a cat, and she finally listens to the Doctor and takes a vacation. So many episodes of this show involve the Reverend Mother leaving for a meeting or a trip of some kind, but not this one. This time around, the Reverend Mother is far more flustered than I’ve ever seen her. That unreliable purple car breaks down again and Bertrille can’t fix it, so she hitchhikes the Mother to her cruise, and promises she won’t tell anyone else that she can fly. Not long after, Bertrille is betrayed in honesty by an orphan boy in the Children’s Ward named Charlie who likes to lie and come up with ridiculous fantasies to make his life seem brighter. Because, and this is the darkest this show has gone, his parents died in a car accident when he was a kid and “His self-oriented lifestyle has made him selfish”.
Of course the Sister really wants to help him and make his life better, and he sees her flying and everyone assumes this is another lie and for some reason decides this is one lie too far. But when she can’t tell the truth and validate his claims, he feels betrayed and she decides to fly off to the cruise and beg the Reverend Mother to release her from her promise and allow her to tell the truth. Surely this is the most heartfelt premise we’ve seen of yet. There’s still time for some badly-timed dialogue between two stranded sailors who see her and think they’re dead and a very odd transition in which a shot of Sister Bertrille flying spins in a circle. We don’t see the Reverend Mother release her from her promise, but we do see Bertrille give the sailors rations and one of them says the gem “Heaven must be non-denominational. And somehow Charlie makes his way to the Convent and steals Sister Bertrille’s Cornette so he can try to fly from his favorite big tree. Alas he cannot fly, and she stops him from doing so, as you have to be 90 pounds for some reason and wear the right clothes. But Charlie, being a good kid, insists on telling everyone he was lying the whole time and decides to stop lying. Besides the implication that he’s a selfish kid for being a sad orphan, this was another good one.
Episode Rating – 7.4 Sally Fields
The Flying Nun, 1.13: “The Patron of Santa Thomasina”
Sister Bertrille and Sister Jacqueline ride into a small town on donkeys while singing a song I don’t recognize. There’s an odd menace to this episode I don’t understand. They are invited to this small town by a mysterious man who apparently is the leader of a group of bandits that pillage the village. A village that doesn’t have running water and electricity and operates more like a town from the past, like the town from The Three Amigos. But they don’t really have the budget to show the bandits I think, so it looks more like a movie like The Village where they’re under siege by mysterious nigh-invisible forces. I haven’t seen that movie. I won’t have much to say about the episode, because it touches on political and religious issues I really don’t have the authority to speak on. Nor does this show, for that matter. When Bertrille flies to the evil village and comes back, she lands in plain view of the distraught Santa Thomasinans who believe her to be their patron saint, and her presence emboldens them to go to war. Once again this nun who believes so vehemently in the scientific reasoning behind her powers has been mistaken for a religious messiah of some variety.
Sister Jacqueline’s suggestion of how to prove that they shouldn’t go to battle? Let the villain Pedro shoot her and they’ll see she’s mortal. Dark, Sister Jacqueline. Dark. The enemy bandits are revealed to be essentially the same kind of village, and this has always been a misunderstanding. They both claim to be Santa Thomasina, and are equally unprepared for battle, yet one side has a guy who just has a trumpet and that’s cool. Sister Bertrille solves this wacky battle at the fork in the wood with the legend of King Solomon. Even though slicing a statue with a sword would not work. The resolution is somewhat white saviory unfortunately, and the towns which are now called East Santa Thomasina and West Santa Thomasina are still very clearly in argument, much like Germany or Korea. I’m not gonna lie, this was a rough one. No Convent and no Reverend Mother plus a shaky grasp of politics = Not a very fun time.
Episode Rating – 4.9 Sally Fields
The Flying Nun, 1.14: “If You Want to Fly, Keep Your Cornette Dry”
We begin with a nice aerial shot of the Convent, which implies already a far better episode than the last. Sister Bertrille is tasked with rewarding the best behaved first grader at the convent with a trip. Yet of course she can’t pick just one, she decides to allow all of them to go on a trip to Carlos’s friend’s plantation, and his urge to have sex with another random woman and avoid seeing the Sister, as well as one of the first graders accidentally drawing on their map with crayon, Sister Bertrille and Sister Sixto get lost in their terrible purple clown car filled with first graders get lost and stop in a grove of palm trees. Cue a wacky montage of games and play, immediately followed by a terrible storm. It’s interesting to me that they could fit a bunch of food, multiple balls and bats and children all in that car that breaks down again the second they try to leave. They need to go back to Money Back Hernando and get a different car. After the picnic, the rainstorm prevents Sister Bertrille from flying.
Carlos is called by Jacqueline and the Reverend Mother, and his guilt overcomes him and he has to try and save her. “She always interrupts me. Even when she’s not here, she interrupts me.” Meanwhile, Sister Bertrille breaks into another Sound of Music style number with the children to distract them from the hungry growls of nearby animals. Of course they’re all sitting by a fire and it looks like Lord of the Flies and all that singing would only put them in more danger, nor does it sound like any of them are actually singing. Sister Bertrille’s audio was clearly recorded after the fact. Also, Carlos can fly a plane. He finds them and they are rescued, but his plane freezes up and he winds up in danger. Or not quite, he flies to another woman’s plantation and canoodles with someone else. He acts like a child despite making everyone worried over nothing.
Episode Rating – 7.7 Sally Fields
The Flying Nun, 1.15: “The Dig In”
Sister Jacqueline’s begins with “No day of Sister Bertrille’s could be called ordinary” and then Bertrille walks into a cave and into a mine, before struggling with a mysterious man, which causes a cave in. Cut to titles! What a cold open! Guess we’re in for a bottle episode here. The mysterious man yells at her and says she won’t live very long, but I beg to differ, there’s at least two more seasons of this to go. This is classic writing 101. Take a character with exceptional abilities and trap them somewhere where they can’t use them. Like that episode of Doctor Who with the landmine. Pity for her, she’s stuck with the most pessimistic man in the world. He accidentally hits himself with a rock and gets a giant bloody lump on his head. Eventually Sister Bertrille goes into his bag and realizes he’s an escaped convent. Once again, it feels like whoever made this show knew I wanted to do these posts in batches of five. The stakes have been exponentially raised this time around. It’s life or death. The former prisoner, Bill Watkins, is a scoundrel with a smooth gravelly voice (Sounds like a contradiction but it’s not) and the generic handsomeness that all men in the 60’s had.
The laugh track is mostly nonexistent this week, purely to emphasize the stakes. We get some excellent Sally Field acting when she tries to fly on a minor draft and Bill thinks she’s crazy and she breaks down crying. He tries to cheer her up by doing a card trick without cards. They have cute chemistry, these two. And their personalities compliment one another nicely. She tries to get out by building a fire and giving her air to fly, which works inexplicably, much to Bill’s shock and chagrin. She gets a rope and lets him out. I know I make it seem like I’m being sarcastic and I don’t love this show, but it was genuinely well-written, this episode, and in the end they drive off together. What a great ending!
Episode Rating – 9.7 Sally Fields (My friend Katy said this is a 10)
What a time we’ve had together! We’ve learned and grown with Sister Bertrille. And I personally enjoyed this more because I had a friend watching with me! Anyway, I’ll see you in a month for the next five episodes! Until then, have fun!
Too Many Servings Of John 