'Call the Midwife' Fans Are Mourning the Loss of This Beloved Character in the Season 15 Finale

Warning: spoilers for Call the Midwife season 15 below.

Call the Midwife has kept fans of the BBC series engaged with a colorful cast of memorable characters. Like many long-running shows, however, some cherished players don't last. And after the season 15 finale has aired, viewers who have yet to seen the episode are worried about the fate of Sister Monica Joan.

Does she die?

If you've been tuning into Call the Midwife for sister Monica Joan, you're probably going to want to sit down when reading this. Unfortunately, Judy Parfitt's beloved character has indeed passed away during the show's Season 15 finale.

At the onset of the episode, showrunners hinted that the by the episode's finale that Sister Monica Joan would be meeting her maker. It's revealed early on in the finale that she has stopped taking medication for her chronic kidney ailment, making peace with the fact that she'll be dying.

Following this, she works with funeral director Bernie Mullucks to arrange the particulars of her funeral before her death. The episode also features a poignant scene in which Bernie wheels Sister Monica Joan in the town's marketplace, and up to the Church, so she could take one last look at it.

Afterward, Sister Monica is then depicted on her deathbed, and it doesn't take long for her health condition to worsen severely. As she lies in bed, dying, she's visited by the spirit of her departed friend, Sister Evangelina, who tends to her as she passes away.

Following her death, an emotional funeral service is held for Sister Monica Joan, and her coffin is taken to the Church. Wales Online specifies that the wooden construct holding her body was placed "on a costermonger's cart [in order] to reflect her East End heritage."

Radio Times called the Season 15 finale "a tearjerker of an episode." The outlet writes that while her fate was effectively predicted by Sister Catherine, seeing her take her last breaths on camera was still a distressing experience for longtime viewers of the series.

"When Monica Joan died, her death still came as a shock. Death always does — though perhaps it isn't death that's distressing but the absence of life where once there was such vitality."

Call the Midwife showrunner Heidi Thomas spoke with the outlet about Sister Monica Joan's departure in the series, who liked her passing to that of Queen Elizabeth's.

"With the death of Sister Monica Joan, I was ... inspired by the death of her late Majesty the Queen. As early as the Platinum Jubilee, we all knew the Queen was going to pass away but there was still this visceral sense when she died that we had all lost something," Thomas said.

The showrunner went on to to liken the character's death to the passing of her own grandmother, who lived to be 101 years old.

"There's a different kind of shock that comes in, because you think that when somebody lives that long, they won't ever die."