Part Three
While suffering from Postpartum Depression and Ralph's sudden departure, Meggie feels lost and alone. A new baby that never seems to stop crying and a husband--who never loved her--that she desperately wants to leave. The Muellers, the family Meggie has been living with, send Meggie off to a remote island where she can heal and improve her health as well as think about her future and where she and her daughter are to go.
Meanwhile, Ralph is struggling more than ever with his conflicting love for Meggie. He is torn between the God he has loved for so long and the young woman who has captured his heart. When he confesses to his mentor, Cardinal Vittorio, of his struggle, Vittorio responds with a unlikely answer. You must choose. He urges Ralph to go to Meggie, love her and be loved by her.
Ralph finds Meggie and the two of them give into their intense and pent up passions. During the next several days, Meggie and Ralph embark on an affair filled with intensity and absolute love that they have both craved for years. Meggie wonders why such a loving God would prohibit people from being able to love and why they must be made to choose. Ralph wonders the same, but he knows better than to continue to question Church doctrine. After their affair, Ralph returns to Rome finally content in his newfound love.
After she returns to the Muellers and her daughter, Meggie knows that she must leave her husband. Although she has only Drogheda and her mother to return to. Meggie is now stronger than ever when she discovers she is pregnant with Ralph's child. This miracle gives Meggie hope for a better life and she has a final confrontation with Luke. She leaves him with her inheritance to squander away and doesn't look back.
Meggie returns to the family sheep station, surprising everyone but her mother. Claiming that Luke no longer needs her and looking happier than she has in years, Fee wonders if Cardinal Ralph has anything to do with it. Meggie gives birth to a beautiful son, Dane and dotes on him in ways that she never did with her firstborn, Luke's child.
Fee knows that Dane is Ralph's son and questions her daughter about it. Enraged at her mother's insolence, Meggie threatens Fee. She demands that Fee never tell a soul and promising her that if she does, that she will be as merciful to her mother as her mother always was to her. The subject of Dane's father is immediately dropped and never spoken of again.
Part Four
19 years later, Ralph returns for a surprise visit to Drogheda. He meets Meggie's two children, headstrong Justine who aspires to be an actress and handsome, quiet Dane. Ralph and Meggie are reunited once again and rekindle their long love. While at Drogheda, Ralph begins to notice some disturbing behavior between Meggie and her children. Meggie dotes, adores and spoils Dane, denying him nothing, while she is always at odds with Justine, giving no care to her dreams or her future. Scarily similar to how her own mother treated her.
When Dane reveals that he wants to become a priest (instead of running Drogheda) Meggie is heartbroken at the thought of her beloved son leaving. Eventually she accepts Dane's decision to join the Church after Ralph promises to personally guide her son. Justine leaves Australia and moves to England to pursue her acting career. While there she meets a kindly German politician, Rainer Hartheim who begins to show interest in her. Justine knowing the family's track record with unsuccessful relationships, keeps him at a distance. However, Rainer believes that Justine's fear of love is much more personal.
Soon Dane becomes a priest and becomes closer to Ralph, who is still unaware that he is Dane's father. Dane has been raised to believe that he is Luke's son, but never knowing Luke O'Neill, he looks to Ralph to become that father figure he always wanted. While on vacation with Justine and Rainer, Dane is killed in a swimming accident. Overwhelmed by grief, Meggie tells Ralph that he was Dane's father and holds him and Justine responsible for her beloved son's death.
When everything seems to fall apart, it's Fee of all people who finally breaks the icy barrier that she put between her and daughter. Knowing her neglect of Meggie and favoritism to her oldest son is what pushed Meggie towards Ralph's love, to marry Luke just to runaway and end up just up like her mother, ignoring a daughter in lieu of a worthier son. Meggie knows that she has become that one thing she never wanted to be, a mother who chose one child over another.
Meggie forgives her mother and asks her daughter's forgiveness, forging strong relationships between all three of them. After she lovingly sends Justine off to continue her acting career (and her newfound relationship with Rainer), Meggie and Ralph have a moment of pure happiness together, where Ralph retells her the story he told her many years ago when she was a small child, the legend of the Thorn Birds.
**There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.... Or so says the legend.**
My parents and older sister got me into this miniseries and it's been a favorite since. While the whole storyline is completely sappy and melodramatic, it's hard not to admire Ralph for his virtue and his struggle between the Church and his heart, to love the Cleary's for all their faults, to loathe Luke O'Neill for his deception and wonder how Meggie could so easily turn out just like her mother. However, those are tropes that make a good story or at the very least a good romance.
