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.”

We’re fifteen episodes in, and it’s finally time for a beloved sitcom tradition… A Christmas episode! Come enjoy the holidays with The Flying Nun and then four more unrelated episodes after that!!! Cut to present day!

The Flying Nun IMDb

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? There are some TV shows that ran way longer than they should have, in my personal opinion, like The Goldbergs or anything by Chuck Lorre (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Moms, Young Sheldon, Two Broke Girls, etc.) and they’ll be remembered for years. For some reason, we as a society have decided to collectively walk away from beloved actress Sally Field’s seminal work. But I say no! Turn back! Rebel against the system and gaze upon the glory that is THE FLYING NUN!!!

The Flying Nun, 1.16: “Wailing in a Winter Wonderland”
It’s Christmastime! Obviously it isn’t, it’s July, but in 1967 in the fictional Convent San Tanco, it most certainly is. And Sister Bertrille runs a Secret Santa, which leads to her drawing the name of the visiting and extremely old Sister Olaf. All Sister Olaf wants to do is return to her home in Norway and have a white Christmas. But she’s too ill, she can’t go home. So in order to give her that gift, Sister Bertrille decides to make it snow. She visits a very irritable man at the U.S. Weather Bureau who talks down to her and mansplains sunny weather that never changes. But he reveals that if you seed the clouds with dry ice, sunny and 80 degrees may yield snow. So one trip to Carlos to borrow blocks of dry ice later, and Bertrille and her friends are chipping dry ice in the kitchen like a very low-rent Breaking Bad. There’s a great gag where Bertrille has to sit on a block of dry ice to dissuade the Reverend Mother from the notion that shenanigans are afoot and starts silently crying. Sure, her butt would be burned off by the dry ice, but still.
The snow plan succeeds, but a rough wind drifts Bertrille away from the convent and into the rest of San Juan, which inexplicably drives the apparent thousands of tourists to the airports seeking to escape the snow to the airports to leave. So this sudden disaster is placed on the shoulders of the, according to Carlos, power-hungry flying Nun acting like God. And suddenly Carlos is acting all high and mighty and positive about the little guy. This is a weird episode, morally speaking. Do play God, don’t play God. Do mess with Carlos, don’t mess with Carlos. Weird gets weirder and we see a dreamy montage of shots of Sally Field set to music obviously sung by someone else about why she needs to disobey the Reverend Mother and keep her feet off the ground. So she drops money onto the vendors and workers in town who are losing money on the tourists not being there, which surely isn’t really a solution. Raining money somehow corrects her decision and the planes soar back in, but Carlos still gets his remaining money stripped from him by his horrible friends. Yet Olaf gets out of bed, so Merry Christmas, I guess?
Episode Rating – 5.9 Sally Fields

The Flying Nun, 1.17: “With a Friend Like Him, Who Needs?”
After that confusing Christmas adventure, this episode is all about libraries. The Convent has a library apparently, and it’s so legendarily unkempt and impossible to find books that they ask for a librarian to be sent in. And speaking of legendary, the only one they can commission is the legendarily clumsy and accident-prone Brother Paul Bernardi. The Reverend Mother schemes to have Brother Paul team up with Sister Bertrille, thinking that “Two wrongs must make a right” and their eccentricities will cancel out. On the sunniest day of the year, the Reverend Mother leaves for a two day conference and idiot Paul leaves a magnifying glass sitting on the pile of shelves he removed from the library. Oh no, what could happen? These things.
– He makes a hole in the wall removing a nail and gets paint from his hands on the expensive parchments he finds.
– He becomes the first person to burn a whole pile of shelves with a magnifying glass.
– He carries the Reverend Mother’s luggage out for her and forgets to give it to her.
– He puts the expensive parchment on the throw-away book pile.
– He becomes deeply depressed.
Enter Swapping Salvador, who takes the old books to swap for new shelves. He’s got the best character name since Money-Back Hernando. Of course he brings the expensive parchments to his landfill to pulp all the books, but the requisite flying scene allows her to rescue the parchments and use the money for good. Somehow they make the library beautiful and former library sciences major Brother Paul is requested by name to work at the Vatican as a Librarian? Okay. It’s not a splendid episode and Paul is somewhat sexist.
Episode Rating – 6.7 Sally Fields

The Flying Nun, 1.18: “Tonio’s Mother”
We have another episode of someone mistaking Sister Bertrille for something she isn’t. This time, Tonio from the town of Esperanza mistakes the flying Sister Bertrille for his dead mother flying out of Heaven, because she’s the spitting image. Unfortunately, Tonio’s father is getting remarried and Tonio doesn’t need to have this mixup confusing him. This episode is sparse of laugh track, for whatever reason. Father Dominic, the spiritual leader of the small town, has experienced prior shenanigans with Sister Bertrille, including a motorcycle, a case of mistaken baby identity, and a botched baptism. This time she’s disrupting the peace in his town and confusing a very bad child actor. The boy who plays Tonio sucks. He can’t act for shit. And suddenly she starts confusing Tonio’s dad while singing songs to Tonio, again you can tell it’s not really Sally Field singing. She’s sang in this before, it’s very confusing. Of course this makes Tonio’s father’s fiance derail the wedding so as not to break Tonio’s perception of life, and Father Dominic insists she not tell Tonio she can fly or it will spread throughout the town and throughout every town from there. Of course that would be bad, she has to keep her secret identity. Tonio may be a child who doesn’t understand, but he’s one of the worst actors who’s ever been in this show, and slowly he destroys his father Luis’s life by insisting on returning his father’s wedding gifts and buying his “mother” earrings. And he hurts Manuela’s feelings, the woman who planned to marry his father, so she wants to leave. What a horrible child Tonio is. In order to fix everything, Sister Bertrille has to pretend to fly back to Heaven, forever traumatizing this idiot child. Episodes out of the Convent vary wildly in quality, and this one could have been beautiful and poignant if an actor had played Tonio. Fuck Tonio.
Episode Rating – 5 Sally Fields

The Flying Nun, 1.19: “A Fish Story”
This time around, the world’s most versatile nun helps Sister Sixto’s uncle catch fish. Why does she do it? Surely she has nun things she’s meant to be doing? I suppose not. We’re in the dark ages of this show, folks. This is barely about the Flying Nun, she just spots the fish for him by flying out with a telescope while pretending to be the patron saint he worships (Uncle Gus is near-sighted) while what’s essentially a backdoor pilot for a fisherman falling in love with a fishmonger and realizing he needs to change his career. Alright, I guess. I’m sure it doesn’t fall that far out of place with episodes about birds in love and lost shipwrecks. Though this one is anchored by a fun performance from Norma Crane, who was in Fiddler On The Roof, a movie I haven’t seen. Eventually, after meditating on whether it’s come time for a new career and realizing he’s in love with Norma’s character, Uncle Gus gives away his boat. But a happy message gets undercut by yet another undercurrent of unlikeable sexism.
Episode Rating – 5.8 Sally Fields

The Flying Nun, 1.20: “The Hot Spell”
It’s heat wave season in the Convent San Tanco. And the big hook for the episode is that Sister Bertrille takes a bunch of old air conditioners from Carlos’s casino. The Reverend Mother tries to take the moral high ground about further indebting the Convent to “a person of questionable moral character” but quickly gives up. The issue this time around is that a gangster plans to take over Carlos’s casino, so he gives the deed of ownership to the Convent San Tanco. That’s right, Sister Bertrille has become a temporary casino owner. Of course, the Reverend Mother wants none of this, being a sensible woman. But Sister Bertrille gets drawn into the nonsense, nonetheless. Worse than that, for the first time in nineteen episodes, we see Sister Bertrille in her pajamas with her hair down. What a shocking sight. More shocking than a gambling Nun? Perhaps not. But we get that too. And she’s terrible at it. But apparently in poker, the presence of ladybugs helps. She sucks, but she manages to completely accidentally bluff her way to the win and fall asleep. Casino Royale, this is not. In the end, the Sister realizes the only way to shake the superstitious gangster is by flying nearby his boat. Yet again, she scares a hardcore criminal with the religious implications of her scientific existence.
Episode Rating – 6.4 Sally Fields

What a time we’ve had together! We’ve learned and grown with Sister Bertrille over the course of five very unlikeable episodes. And my partner in viewing, my good friend Katy, equally despised this batch of stories. Anyway, I’ll see you in a month for the next five episodes! Until then, have fun!