A Brief Disclaimer
Well, if you’ve been keeping up, you know I haven’t published one of these in over a year. Apologies for that. My track record for finishing this project on time is less than stellar. But we’re in the homestretch now. I won’t let you down. I am nothing if not true to my word. I will watch and write about the last sixteen episodes of The Flying Nun, even if it kills me. And it may.

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. Her real name is Elsie, and she comes from a family of doctors. 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.”

It’s midway through season three and things are heating up! Or, more accurately, they’re much the same…

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? I’ve been trying to figure out how you could rework this, bring it back to the public eye and revamp it for modern generations. The answer is obvious. You go full horror. You barely need to change a thing. Each episode is from the perspective of a different character. You start with Carlos. She drops in from out of nowhere every episode and ruins his day of creepily seducing women. When he does everything he can to get rid of her, she makes things even more difficult. She drops into towns out of nowhere making small children think their deceased mothers are still alive. She’s a menace! She’s a creature of chaos! In this world, God is vengeful, and she is his angel of death. At least that’s how I interpret it all.

The Flying Nun, 3.11: “Bertrille and the Silent Flicks”
Let’s get back to it! I’m feeling energized and eager to return to the Convent, for something new, something interesting, something- what? The Convent needs repairs and they’re trying to raise money again? Oh. Right. Never mind then. It’s rummage sale time! Or, as Sister Sixto incorrectly says, a rubbish sale! But they don’t have anything great to sell. Sister Bertrille quips, if it were a rubbish sale, they’d do great! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Also, thank you to whoever put this show back on Tubi so I didn’t have to go to WatchMojo.

When rummaging through rummage, Sister Bertrille finds a magazine about the filmography of a silent film actress named Gloria Davenport, who very coincidentally happens to be the Mother General, helping run the rummage sale. And equally coincidentally, Leonardo, a man who works for Carlos, is obsessed with Gloria Davenport. He’s quite horny, But the Mother General wants to keep all of that behind her. It is an interesting character note that the Mother General was frightened by the sound of her voice when they started making “talkies”.

A plan is hatched to make money for the Convent by screening one of her most famous films. The Sisters watch it in advance and start laughing. I don’t know why. Because it’s boring? But horny Leonardo has sold out the theater for the screening, and they have to figure out how to avoid embarrassing the Mother General. Carlos devises a way to get the Mother General out of town, but horny Leonardo gets her a private plane and Sister Bertrille has to fly to stop them while an audience confusingly laughs at a film that doesn’t seem at all funny. Sister Bertrille explains the problem to Leonardo, and he tries to help stall by messing with the car and driving slowly, but unfortunately the Mother General is an ace mechanic and a speed demon.

She still makes it back in time, only to realize her movie was unintentionally funny. Sister Bertrille argues it’s a generational gap and the exaggerated movements make it campy. I mean, I guess? I don’t see it, certainly. But of course I’m not part of the hip 60’s countercultural movement. I don’t know about this one. There wasn’t much juice to it. It’s another somewhat interesting idea that doesn’t really belong in a sitcom about a flying Nun. It reminds me of the episode of Frasier where Frasier and Niles realize their former theater director stunk. It’s just random.
Episode Rating – 5.9 Sally Fields

The Flying Nun, 3.12: “A Ticket for Bertrille”
Oh boy. Marcello’s back. But it sounds like this is his last episode. There’s a religious cop named Officer Juarez who refuses to give Sister Bertrille a ticket even though she ran a red light, ran the time limit on a two hour meter, and parked next to a fire hydrant. She insists on being ticketed because she doesn’t want bad acting Marcello to think power makes you exempt from the law. Marcello starts to think if he becomes a Priest he can control the police. They don’t teach ACAB at the Convent San Tanco. Poor Officer Juarez though. This feeds into my pitch of Sister Bertrille being a life ruining menace.

Because everyone sees Juarez ticketing the Sister and they all turn against him. He was going to propose to his girlfriend that night, only for his girlfriend to turn on him for ticketing a nun. And then the Mayor, who is apparently a great guy (As a child he painted the church steeple from the bottom up and had to wait three days for the paint to dry) and up for reelection and incredibly tanned, is being attacked by the media for this fiasco as well. While people from all over send in money to pay the ticket. Yet Sister Bertrille still insists on pleading guilty and showing the law in effect so bad acting Marcello can see justice. And she brings him to court with her.

This is the dumbest she’s ever been. I understand her logic. And I don’t want to be in support of a Mayor, a Judge, and a cop. They even admit that Juarez got the job because he’s the Mayor’s nephew and the Judge is in the Mayor’s pocket. But Sister Bertrille… boy, she’s loathsome in this one. There’s a side plot about Carlos’s casino getting robbed and Bertrille being put in a cell with the woman they think was involved. She initially thinks the Sister is an undercover cop, but when they’re out on recess the wind takes her away and they think she’s escaped. And then Rosita trusts her enough to reveal where the money is. At the bottom of a well. And then her being planted by the police becomes the cover story. It’s all quite outrageous. An amusing farce, but such an annoying plotline for Sister Bertrille. She’s a menace!

Oh, and throughout the episode we see her playing Monopoly with the other Sisters only so they can do a “Get out of jail free” joke at the end. That sinks it for me.
Episode Rating – 5.2 Sally Fields

The Flying Nun, 3.13: “The New Carlos”
Well, it sounds like the haplessness will only be getting worse from here. I’m not past the first three minutes and already Sister Bertrille has buried Carlos’s fancy car in cement and put so much weight on his exercise machine that he’s thrown out his back. This woman is an absolute menace to society!!! To her credit she does try to stay away from him this episode, which of course drives him crazy. She starts a big brother style group for the San Tanco orphans called the San Tanco Dads. She makes buttons for the group later. It’s an unfortunate group name when it comes to putting acronyms on buttons.

Sister Bertrille also has an attractive cousin in town, who, as always, makes Carlos lose sight of the woman he’s currently obsessed with. But soon, all he really cares about is being ghosted. He believes he’s despicable and that the Sisters hate him and he must become a better man. They did this already though. They had him become a better person after believing he’d seen a religious vision. I will say, his new, plainer wardrobe, is quite attractive. Nice blue suit. The driving cap’s a bit much though.

I should note that the tone of this blog post may be affected by the fruit flies flying through my apartment. I’ve been swatting at them with my zapper. This is bad television obviously, but the writing may suffer. I’ve killed at least twenty fruit flies today so far. My roommate and I think they’re coming through the vents from the upstairs apartment. Anyway, Carlos proposes to Sister Bertrille’s cousin, only for her to turn him down because she’s looking for a “hot swinging Latin guy”, not a “stodgy establishment type”. Very funny. And then it just ends with Carlos having a horny skinny dip with one of his girlfriends. This is incredibly repetitive. Carlos is pretty ripped for the 60’s though.
Episode Rating – 6.1 Sally Fields

The Flying Nun, 3.14: “Dear Aggie”
I still don’t know why Sister Jacqueline narrates this show. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t really add anything to the show. And the Convent has a cat all of a sudden. Also the Reverend Mother has some rad sunglasses. They find the cat with multiple kittens, which Sister Jacqueline insists will lead to trouble. By the way, they aren’t even trying to hide the ropes they use to make her fly anymore.

You know how all the old episodes of The Simpsons spiral so wildly out of control that it’s almost impossible to figure out how you got to the end from the start? This episode isn’t about kittens. When trying to put an ad for them in the classifieds, Sister Bertrille meets Rickie Malinas, sports writer and “Dear Aggie”, help columnist. He somehow gets beaten up by all the people who hate his advice despite going by a pseudonym. Maybe they explained it. I don’t care. He asks Sister Bertrille to take over. I cannot think of a worse person in the town of San Juan to write an advice column. The piece of advice that gets her the job is telling an alcoholic who accidentally proposed to three women to tell his wife what he did, since she doesn’t like him being drunk at home. That way he gets drunk at home and proposes to his wife. Which is terrible advice. How about “You have a problem, get help”?

The issue, surprisingly, is that Sister Bertrille outsources some of her advice. Carlos’s employee chooses to buy his girlfriend a $3 piece of jewelry. So the girlfriend writes in to Dear Aggie, while Carlos tells him to take her out on his yacht, only for Sister Bertrille to take Carlos’s advice and tell her to invite her mother on the boat so nothing untoward occurs. And then the whole thing spirals further because Carlos finds out what’s happening, and insists Bertrille fix it. But he also lends his employee his house for the evening because the guy only has a tiny apartment, and Sister Bertrille misunderstands the whole scenario and thinks Carlos was setting the woman up for a playboy thing. In the end, the girlfriend figures out what went wrong, but Carlos gets punched by her brother and Sister Bertrille still thinks she was in the right in the end and that Carlos needs to apologize to her. That’s another upsetting final line from Bertrille.
Episode Rating – 3.4 Sally Fields for a complete lack of basic self-awareness

The Flying Nun, 3.15: “My Sister, the Doctor”
Jennifer’s back! And maybe the show should be about her. Sister Bertrille is nagging her poor sister about how she never relaxes and has like five jobs or something. Oh, I’m getting ahead of myself, the episode starts with Sister Bertrille flying into a tree and breaking her leg. I don’t know how she did it, she just lightly slapped into a tree. It certainly didn’t seem that bad. But this is low budget 60’s TV of course.

This episode is mostly Sister Bertrille free. It’s primarily about Jennifer on vacation trying to not be a Doctor. She stays at the Convent and everyone has a malady that needs fixing. There’s lots of Carlos and Jennifer together as well. They’re great together. Although early in the episode he offers to have her stay in the West Wing of his house and she, I assume in referencing that he wanted to date her at one point, says “I know you Carlos, your West Wing is much closer to your East Wing” or something like that. I don’t know what that’s meant to mean.

There’s a party at the Convent for the Bishop while Sister Bertrille is laid up in hospital and Jennifer tries to go the whole party without being grilled about her job or asked to do Doctor things. But for some reason everyone at the party wants to know about what Jennifer does for a living and every time they ask, Carlos comes up with a fake job that the other person seems to know everything else. The Mayor, played by a different guy than episode twelve, learns Jennifer does ceramics and knows all the specific ins and outs of the profession. A Contessa knows everything about bookkeeping. And the Bishop wants Jennifer to play a symphony on the piano, as she’s apparently a classical pianist. It’s a wonderful farce.

In the end, the three people who all talked to Jennifer about her jobs are somehow sitting at the same table, and, as I predicted, she ends up having to be a Doctor after all. There’s a heavily pregnant woman at the party who goes into labor and needs a Doctor to deliver the baby. I saw her and knew it was coming. What I didn’t predict was that Carlos had to distract the three idiots who try to stop her from delivering the baby because she’s an “imposter”. In the end, Sister Bertrille still manages to screw her sister over, despite Sally Field clearly going on vacation herself, because she prescribes her sister three weeks of rest but convinces the Doctors at the hospital that she’s a vet, so everyone asks her questions anyway.

It’s a very odd choice to base a whole episode of television on the comedic conceits of A) People always nagging Doctors with questions, and B) People at parties being insufferable. I wonder if they were trying to set up a spinoff or something? Hard to say. But honestly, it was quite fun. Especially since Sister Bertrille’s antics have become so tiresome lately. Not Sally Field, to be clear. She’s still delightful.
Episode Rating – 8.4 Sally Fields

Two more batches of episodes to go and then nobody will ever talk about The Flying Nun ever again! I assume.