Whisper Country

What the Fuck Country

(a recap by Will Kaiser)

Title: Whisper Country

Airdate: January 16, 1978

Written by John Hawkins

Directed by Michael Landon

SUMMARY IN A NUTSHELL: Deeply weird even by this show’s standards, this one is a strange tale of witch vs bitch.

RECAP: First off, I’m very happy to announce that our daughter Amelia (who longtime readers will recall was a Little House skeptic not so long ago) graduated from college this month. We’re awfully proud of her, and not just for coming around on the show.

We begin with the opening credits.

DAGNY: Why is it “Lindsay Sidney Greenbush”? I suppose they were trying to hide that it was really two kids?

WILL: Well, no, because the article about Little House in the 1974 Fall Preview TV Guide revealed she was played by twins, before the show even aired.

ROMAN: Yeah, but who reads TV Guide?

Dags and I paused the video and spent a good five minutes screaming at Roman about the cultural significance of TV Guide in the Twentieth Century.

Anyways, it’s the rare cloudy day in Groveland. But David Rose still sounds happy. 

And Carl the Flunky and Not-Richard Libertini look pleasant driving past school in the Yellow-Wheeled Buckboard. Who knows where they’re going together.

Perhaps stinging from our comments on his mustache in “Freedom Flight,” Not-Richard is growing his beard back.

The American flag out front appears to be at half-mast, but I’m not sure that’s intentional.

The school vomits all the kids out. 

Mary leads the way, whilst we notice this one was penned by none other than “Fat” John Hawkins. Fat John was last seen contributing the script for the (underwhelming) Season Three finale, “Gold Country.”

The Ing-Gals dash up the shortcut, where Pa loads floursacks from the Mill onto a wagon. I don’t think we’ve ever seen him load from up there, but at least according to Mill signage, the wheat end of the biz is up top whilst the wood is down under. So let’s accept that. (I don’t know how typical this is for a mill. I don’t know how a mill actually works!)

Mary squeals that “the Reverend” has promised her a teaching job, and then suddenly we see Alden himself, jabbering away in the Little House’s firelight.

DAGNY: Who directed this one?

WILL: . . . Why?

DAGNY: It’s Landon, right?

WILL: Yes.

DAGNY: You can tell, from the sudden cut, and from the lighting over Aldi’s nose.

We catch the Rev midthought, as he points out “Miss Beadle” has endorsed Mary for this particular task. Aldi, it’s Mrs. Simms now, okay? You’d think as the keeper of the patriarchy in this town, he’d be sure to get that right.

Perhaps he’s just sore he didn’t get to perform the ceremony.

The Rev quickly sets the stage, saying there’s a nearby backwater community, “Willow Prairie,” that needs a schoolteacher for “a two-month term” at $15 ($450) a month plus room and board. (Seems like the average monthly Midwestern (female) teacher’s salary in this period was more like $25-$30. But of course Mary is a beginner – more on that in a moment.)

Rev. Alden notes this will be “the first school Willow Prairie has ever had.”

Mary is enthusiastic about the prospect. This is also, I think, the first time she’s expressed interest in being a teacher, but I could be wrong about that. Cards and letters please.

Aldi describes Willow Prairie as “a small, isolated community that’s forty miles north and east” of Walnut Grove. (In fact, Willow Prairie is not a real place, though strangely, there is a Willow Creek, Minnesota, that’s a small, isolated community south of Mankato. People there were probably normal, though.) 

Rev. Alden laughs and describes the residents as “wary, standoffish . . . they just don’t much like strangers.”

Charles asks the Reverend to confirm that he does in fact preach there himself. He says yes – once every two months. 

Aldi’s schedule is somewhat mysterious. We know he preaches in Walnut Grove twice a month. Whether those weekends are consecutive or alternating isn’t clear, and a glance at my notes isn’t much help, since we rarely get two Alden stories in a row. 

(We did date both “The Bully Boys” and “The Creeper of Walnut Grove” to September of 1879, but since they’re in different timelines and sixteen stories apart, I don’t know that that signifies anything.) 

Anyways, Charles seems to view Alden’s engagement in Willow Prairie as a testament to the residents’ virtue. And in fact, many fans have harshly criticized the Reverend for concealing what he must surely have known, viz., that Willow Prairie is an evil, evil place. (A spoiler, but come on, you knew that already.)

Aldi then says the only reason he preaches in Willow Prairie is because “the church was willed a farm up there.” 

This actually makes sense. As we’ve noted in the past (though not for a while), the church the real-life Ingallses attended in Walnut Grove, which was founded by their friend the Reverend Edwin “Robert” Alden, was a Congregationalist parish, meaning it would have been locally administered, not overseen by a big-umbrella parent church.

Apparently Alden founded several churches in the Walnut Grove vicinity and beyond, and I suppose it makes sense that if someone he knew from his Minnesota missions left him a building, he might try to turn it into a new self-sustaining parish. I don’t know much about how churches were begun back then, but that seems plausible enough to me.

Aldi then notes that another teacher, a Miss Tipton, fled the town screaming after just four days, driven off by the insane leader of the community, Miss Rachel Peel, who is opposed to public education.

But he laughs and says he had a word with one or two people and sees no reason to think anything of the kind would ever happen again. 

Now, I think Aldi is worthy of reprimand here, but I’d remind you, making boneheaded calls is typical of him. In fact, by my count in at least nine of his 23 stories so far, he’s shown terrible judgment. For instance:

He failed to control a matter as simple as the donation of a churchbell, to the point where the Grovesters nearly rioted.

He made Caroline punish the penitent Mary for firestarting, causing the child to consider a life of crime.

He encouraged Laura to run away from home when Baby Freddie died.

He covered it up when Laura stole Sunday school money to start a pyramid scheme.

He failed to investigate Caroline’s disappearance from the Little House, nearly resulting in her amputating her leg.

He defended the Galender brothers after they sexually assaulted Ma in the street.

He allowed his congregation to literally banish Kezia from Walnut Grove.

He sent Caroline to comfort Ellen Taylor’s grieving mom, even though he knew she blamed Laura for Ellen’s death.

Plus he falsely accused Jonathan Garvey of public drunkenness.

Finally, he sheltered known murderers from the authorities and helped them escape justice.

DAGNY: How old is Mary supposed to be? Fifteen?

And that is the other thing about this setup, I think. Melissa Sue Anderson was fifteen at this point in the series. Mary the character is somewhere between that age and 43, going by our timeline, but the larger point stands: She’s had no higher education, no pedagogical training even from the Bead, and neither has she ever lived away from home, unless you count the time she was dying in Rochester.

This seems a whole lot to expect her to take on; but Pa just shrugs and gives his blessing. And I suppose it is only two months. (But why only two, except of course to ensure Mary will be back for our next exciting adventure in Walnut Grove?)

“We’ll leave first light tomorrow!” Aldi twinkles. Good Lord, Bobby, why the rush?

Whatever the reason, the next thing you know, the Rev’s buggy is arriving at a Ross-ian cabin in the woods, next to a ruined barn.

A handful of children are strewn about the property. Mary beams imbecilically at them as she disembarks and Aldi introduces her.

But the filthy, vacant-eyed children just stare back at her. 

WILL: This is like a Diane Arbus photo essay.

The Rev laughs the kids’ weirdness off too, and brings Mary into the cabin, where an old-ish man in yet another Luke Simms getup is sweeping. 

Alden introduces him as “Mister Caleb Fisher,” who’ll be hosting Mary in his house.

“Not my idea,” he says gruffly. “Church house, church land.” But I don’t understand: If “the church” (i.e., Rev. Alden) owns the house, and this guy is the caretaker he hand-picked and hired, why is he so unfriendly?

Of course, the inexplicably hostile servant is a lovable trope of horror stories – Mr. and Mrs. Dudley in The Haunting of Hill House, Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, Fritz the hunchback in Frankenstein, Torgo in Manos: The Hands of Fate. The list goes on and on. 

When I was in college, my friends and I came up with a concept for a horror film called Bog, Bloody Bog that opened with an old caretaker yelling “You kids stay out of that bog! That bog’s a BLOODY BOG!” That’s about as far as we got, in fact.

Well, Aldi is of course tickled pink that this guy is such an asshole, and he chuckles in an aside to Mary, “I never told you they were very friendly!”

Then Fisher says, “It’s past eight o’clock – want I should ring the bell?” Wait, what? It’s morning? At forty miles away, Willow Prairie would be a full day’s drive from Walnut Grove, meaning Aldi’s horse Jehoshaphat is either incredibly fast or incredibly slow.

And classes start the minute they arrive? Wouldn’t Alden have waited till they returned to announce a schedule? What would have happened if Mary said no?

Anyways, the Rev asks Fisher if he’ll be able to come back to pick up Mary at the end of the schoolday.

“No,” he says. “Got my plowin’ to do.” (In November? By the look of the foliage, it’s late fall, unless the place is afflicted by a curse of God or fallout from a poisonous meteorite, either of which I suppose is possible. The tone of this one is more like “The Colour Out of Space” or some other H.P. Lovecraft thing than even a typical scary Little House like “My Ellen.”)

Without skipping a beat, and in a voice notable for its concentrated bitchiness, Rev. Alden says to Fisher, “That creates a problem.” Clearly these two have a history of some sort.

But Fisher just says his daughter Katie, one of the students, will bring Mary home.

And with that, both he and Alden exit.

And instantly, all the community’s children file into the room. Seriously, I don’t know how Landon directed them to act, but whatever he said, it worked. They couldn’t be weirder – maybe more like the fish people of The Shadow Over Innsmouth than “The Colour Out of Space,” actually.

Or Village of the Damned, in which psychokinetic zombie children overrun a quaint British hamlet.

All the children are also now barefoot (again, in November?), even though the ones we saw outside were wearing shoes.

(Some of you may recall that original co-Executive Producer Ed Friendly and Michael Landon fell out in Season One, among other things because Friendly, who favored a more realistic approach, wanted the kids in Walnut Grove to be dirty and shoe-less.)

Also, at least three of the kids we saw outside are NOT amongst the children in class.

The kids who ARE there appear to be mostly in the eight-to-eleven age range, except for one boy who looks to be twelve or thirteen.

They stare uncomprehendingly at Mary as she introduces herself.

She asks if they’ve brought their own school supplies, though you can see none of the kids is carrying anything.

ROMAN: Is she blind already?

Mary quickly determines these kids cannot read, write, speak, or think.

She then summons one of the girls to the front – a very thin girl with a sort of drowned-rat look and dark pigtails like Laura – and manages to coax her into saying her name: Katie Fisher, daughter of the creepy old caretaker.

Then she calls up a taller blonde girl. 

DAGNY: So that was the Laura and this is the Mary? It’s like a Bizarro Walnut Grove, there’s probably a double of everybody.

But Bizarro Mary won’t say a word.

WILL [as REGAN MacNEILL]: “You’re gonna die up there.”

Suddenly a deep gruff voice howls from off-camera, saying, “Speak up, child!”

And it is then we get our first view of Miss Rachel Peel.

It’s hard to know how to begin describing her. She carries a Bible, and wears a black bonnet, a coal-gray blouse, a mannish leather belt, and a plain black skirt.

(In a nice touch, a broom leans against the wall next to her.)

She gives the impression of being a remarkably ugly woman, but by that I mean no insult to the actor playing her, the wonderfully named Anita Dangler, who was quite normal- and pleasant-looking in other roles.

No, I’d say her ugliness comes mostly from her acting: her slightly hunched posture, and from the expression on her face – her eyelids droop, whilst simultaneously her eyes roll slightly upwards in their sockets, giving her a cross-eyed, almost blind look.

Anita Dangler was in The Goodbye Girl and The Fisher King, and on Barney Miller, Mork & Mindy, Tales From the Darkside (a fairly dumb one with Phyllis Diller), and (yes!) Small Wonder. 

She was in a TV movie called Maneaters are Loose! that looks pretty good.

And she was in a short-lived TV ripoff of TRON called Automan. I only mention that one because we have some friends who just did a Trans-Atlantic cruise, and they mentioned one of the entertainers on the boat, Chuck Wagner, played the lead on the show. (I never watched Automan myself. I was more of a Manimal guy.)

Well, Miss Peel introduces herself, then, and notes Bizarro Mary is Sarah Miller – “daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Miller.”

Despite not having any lines, Sarah receives a credit for some reason, but that’s good, because otherwise I would have missed that she’s played by Michelle Downey, who we’ll see again soon as Mary’s dusty flower girl Susan Goodspeed.

Downey was also on the Merlin Olsen vehicle Father Murphy.

The other kids stare – still idiotically, but slightly more alertly.

DAGNY: That boy in the middle looks like a Munchkin, or maybe a young Popeye.

Miss Peel lurks in the doorway for a bit, then starts strutting about the room. She looks Mary up and down, then huffs, “Fancy raiment!”

DAGNY: “Raiment”?

This was about the point we started laughing at every line that comes out of Miss Peel’s mouth. 

It’s also the first in a long line of comments from these people about Mary’s clothes that are incomprehensible. Possibly that was the intent of the screenwriter; either way, it’s funny.

At this moment, Mary does have her Mario mushroom/Holly Hobbie/Strawberry Shortcake bonnet hanging behind her head; otherwise her “raiment” doesn’t seem any “fancier” than Miss Peel’s own.

Then Miss P snorts and observes that Mary has also brought books.

ROMAN [as MARY]: Yes. It’s a school. . . .

Mary does a quick rundown of her planned curriculum. Miss P insists on knowing if she intends to teach “ciphering,” which confuses Mary, but it really shouldn’t since it’s simply an old-timey term for math. (Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies was famous for his ciphering abilities.)

Miss P suddenly howls, “Cipherin’ and the Lord’s Word is all any man ever needs!” She explains math gives men the ability to understand markets, and that money and religion is all anybody needs to worry about in life. (Sorry, political conservatives, this script is very pointedly attacking your darlings.)

DAGNY: I bet she was actually super-nice. Nice people play the best mean characters, like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz.

WILL: Definitely. She and Katherine MacGregor probably rescued dogs and brought them to orphanages for the kids to play with when the shooting day was over.

Then, to horror music that sounds like it’s augmented by a sizzling frying pan, or something, Miss P exits.

Mary stares after her in bafflement.

DAGNY: This is going to end like “The Lottery,” isn’t it?

After a commercial break, to more horror music, Katie is leading Mary home, but she breaks into a terrified run as they pass Miss Peel’s house.

Mary shouts “Have a nice day!” like a good 1970s person, but Miss P just grimaces to even more sizzling horror music and stares after her.

DAGNY: Oh my God, I bet David Rose was cackling like a witch when he wrote this.

They arrive at the Fisher house, where we see Katie’s mom, like her daughter whippet-thin and dark-haired, stirring a pot on the stove.

Mrs. Fisher, while not exactly unpleasant, is remote, saying she had completely forgotten Mary would be living with them.

Mary says it’s no big deal, but Mrs. F says ominously, “Maybe not to some. My Caleb – he don’t hold with forgettin’.”

Then she suddenly wraps her arm around her belly as if in pain, then grabs the pot handle. It’s not bluntly stated, but many viewers assume from Dee Croxton’s (very good) physical acting that Caleb beats her.

Dee Croxton was also in the Michael Landon/Victor French vehicle Highway to Heaven, the Matthew Labyorteaux vehicle Whiz Kids, and the Dabbs Greer vehicle The Green Mile.

Katie leads Mary past the fireplace and up the ladder to the loft bedroom.

WILL: Bizarro Little House.

Mary manages to get a little conversation and a small smile out of the girl.

WILL: She should be happy, at least this child will obey her, unlike Laura.

Then the door opens downstairs. Mr. Fisher has returned, and Katie freaks out because Mary says she needs five minutes before she can join them for supper. (Katie is Linda McMillan, and this was her sole acting role, it seems.)

When Mary comes down, Fisher stares angrily at her, saying, “Katie told ya her mother was taking up the supper!”

Then he looks at her dress. His eyes bulge out a bit, and he says, “The other dress was good enough. This one is . . . is . . . well, I would not call it a proper dress!”

He actually averts his eyes, as if it’s something obscene to look at.

DAGNY: What’s wrong with it?

WILL: . . . It’s purple? Your guess is as good as mine.

The dress is a light lavender color, which is the only thing I can image he’s upset about. This story is a fan favorite in some quarters, and I myself love it, but it’s so over-the-top it’s hard to take seriously at some points. 

Mary starts to question this, but Mr. Fisher silences her, saying, “Sit! Eat!” And in case you were wondering, no, he doesn’t say it with the effervescent warmth of a Jewish or Italian mother.

If you recognize Fisher, it’s because the actor, John McLiam, appeared in last season’s “To Live With Fear,” Part Two. He played Mr. Harris, foreman of the railroad-funded project to blast through the mountain, who survived a cave-in with Charles, and learned it’s best not to be racist, against your Chinese coworkers, at least.

McLiam lays it on awful thick in this story.

After supper, Mary helps with the dishes, and then, weirdly, she starts talking about elections and newspapers. (More proof it’s November?)

For whatever reasons, she goes into a lot of detail, mentioning how soldiers were recently sequestered to Florida and Oregon to ensure accurate vote tallying, given the election was so close.

She’s referring to the Presidential election of 1876, a contested race that was, as Roman’s American history teacher instructed him, “one of the most horrible in history.” We went over it in a little more detail in our recap for “The Election.”

Rutherford B. Hayes won, but why she’s talking about this now is beyond me. According to our timeline, we should be in November of 1881 (in the F timeline) – five years after Hayes’s election.

Then she starts blithering about how Pa sometimes plays the fiddle “till the dishes in the cupboards dance.” A very Little House quote, no?

Mrs. Fisher, who has stopped doing the dishes to stare at Mary quite intently, interrupts her to ask, “Who is the President?”

Mary, shocked, rudely blurts “What?” and Mrs. F looks away in embarrassment.

Scowling into his coffee, Mr. Fisher shouts, “U.S. Grant!”, but he sounds a little uncertain.  Actually, in November of 1881, Chester A. Arthur was President, his predecessor James Garfield having just been assassinated two months earlier.

(Strange that Grant and Arthur are both wearing monocles in those pics. I didn’t know we had any monocle-wearing Presidents. I myself have a monocle, but I wear it only rarely.)

But then Mary turns around and says, “Rutherford B. Hayes is President now.”

Oh jeez, he we go again. I don’t have to tell most readers that every eight stories or so, this show decides it wants to go back in time to 1876.

Only this must be 1877, since Mary says Hayes is the President, not President-Elect.

I suppose this means everybody did go back to 1876-G, but there were no stories that year. (That happens sometimes. According to our timeline, 1879-B and 1877- and 1878-F all passed without incident in the Little House TV universe.)

Angered at this correction, Mr. Fisher sends Mary to bed and bitches about her dress one more time.

Only now does Mary begin to realize the deep shit she’s in.

Mary says goodnight to Mrs. Fisher, who looks conflicted for a moment but then resumes a-scrubbin’.

The next day, Mary and Katie walk to school together. Mary notices another caved-in barn, this one larger, and Katie tells her Miss Peel made it collapse with her mind powers, as revenge on somebody named “Mr. Simpkin.”

Since we’re forty miles away from Walnut Grove, I’m going to assume nobody here is related to anybody there, because there are some duplicates of names. In “The Fighter,” Mr. Hanson mentioned a “Mr. Simpkins” (close enough), but it seems he lived more in the immediate Walnut Grove vicinity, since Garvey was supposed to make a delivery to his place. But I suppose he might have moved to Walnut Grove after Miss Peel destroyed his barn.

Then we cut to a young man in the tightest pants we’ve seen so far on this show (maybe even counting Joe Kagan’s boxing singlet) leaping over a fence outside and running towards the school.

DAGNY: Who’s he, a local ballet dancer?

Inside, Mary is now teaching math to a little dunce named Hazel.

Hazel the Little Dunce gets a credit, despite only having one line (“Two”).

She’s Jennifer Brill, who didn’t do any other acting jobs, to the internet’s knowledge at least.

Anyways, Mary is having the children count apples today.

DAGNY: She should stuff ’em in her blouse.

Then she asks a boy the two-plus-two-make-four question, but the Tight Pants Teen Idol appears through the side door to answer “Three.”

He’s handsome but intense in a way that perfectly befits a citizen of Willow Prairie.

Mary’s confused, but his answer is a joke, because the boy, who introduces himself as Joshua Bond, has taken one of the apples and is eating it.

It’s not a bad joke. (“Finally, somebody in this town with a sense of humor,” said Dags.)

But Mary loses it, starts screaming uncontrollably, and throws him out of class.

ROMAN: I don’t get it. At least he’s friendly.

WILL: Friendly, hell, at least he can talk!

DAGNY: No, this is the part Mary’s been looking forward to about teaching. It’s like the time Ma and Pa went on vacation and she got to scream at Laura and Carrie all day long.

Then she slams the door and demands that a kid named “Enoch” (we don’t see who she’s addressing, but let’s be real, it’s Baby Popeye) answer the four-apple problem.

Later, Mary, Mrs. Fisher, and Katie sit at the Fishers’ table gossipping about the invention of the telephone.

WILL: They don’t even have a telephone in Walnut Grove – why is she talking to them about all this stuff?

DAGNY: Well, when she heard they didn’t know the President, she thought she’d wow ’em and zow ’em with all the latest news.

Mary goes into ecstasies, saying by connecting people from within their homes, the new technology will make everyone closer and closer.

WILL: Yeah. Then the internet will make us even closer, to the point where we all hate each other!

Mary’s just gotten to Alexander Graham Bell’s role in the whole affair when Mr. Fisher comes in.

Well, Mrs. Fisher might be wowed and zowed by Mary’s News of the Weird, but Mr. Fisher hisses, “That is a lie!”

Wikipedia describes John McLiam as “noted for his skill at different accents.” That may be so, but the way he talks in this story is nothing like anybody I’ve ever met in Minnesota. It’s more New England-ish to my ear, and would fit right in a production of The Crucible, a story “Whisper Country” resembles in some ways.

The Fisher women look down meekly, but Mary snaps back, giving him a bunch of details about where and when the telephone’s function has been demonstrated to date. 

But confronting the ignorant with facts works no better for her than it would for you or I today.

“Stories! Lies!” he puffs.

DAGNY: The legacy media!

On the verge of a tantrum, Mary screams back at him, but he ignores her and asks for supper instead.

“I’ll take it up,” his wife responds. What is this bizarre talk of “taking up” supper? Up where? If it’s a real idiom that exists outside Little House-dom, I can’t find any evidence for it.

Then Fisher starts to harass Mary about sending Joshua Bond home from school, saying if she isn’t careful, the villagers will have Miss Peel deal with her through her sorcery.

Mary loses it then, screaming at Fisher that he and his backwater mutant cronies can go fuck themselves. (Paraphrase.)

Meanwhile, Mrs. Fisher watches this exchange with cool interest, and Katie even lets a smile slip at Screamin’ Sassback Mary telling her daddy off. (Linda McMillan’s not a bad little actor herself.)

The next day, Fisher departs for town (Redwood Falls? If they’re 40 miles northeast of Walnut Grove, they’d be right on top of it) to sell his corn crop.

Mary and Katie take off for school, Mary ignoring Mrs. Fisher’s gulping, embarrassed observation that her purple dress isn’t “proper.”

As they’re crossing the property, Mary notices a white rooster tied to the barn, and she lets it go.

“Miss Ingalls, no!” Katie screams, and runs away yet again.

Later, at school, Mary takes attendance, noting a “Reuben Bracken” is absent. This one has a high number of named characters who never appear onscreen. 

“Does anyone know why?” she asks – a funny question.

Someone says “whoopin’,” which I’m sure you also assumed meant he was beaten so badly by his father that he couldn’t rise from his bed.

But Joshua Bond, who arrives at this moment, clarifies that he’s actually got “whoopin’ cough” – a very serious and contagious ailment until a vaccine for it was developed in the early Twentieth Century. (Of course, these people wouldn’t take the vaccine if there was one.)

Joshua politely asks if he can return to school, but then he grins madly and starts talking about the various folk remedies favored in Willow Prairie.

WILL: This is a weird performance. He might as well be crossing his eyes.

DAGNY: Yeah. But there’s something John Junior-ish about him. He’s like Inbred John Junior.

Joshua says the best treatment for “the whoopers” is “coal oil” (kerosene) and sugar – indeed a popular medication in the olden days, prescribed not just by witches but by legitimate doctors too. It was sometimes taken internally, or sometimes rubbed onto the chest like Vicks Vaporub.

Then Joshua tries to hand Mary a little baggie on a string, saying it will prevent her from catching the disease in the first place. But Mary says it smells horrible and won’t take it.

WILL: Is that tannis root?

Bugging his eyes crazily, Joshua says Miss Peel is the local prescriber, adding that she can also make people get sick if she wishes.

He sits down, still grinning like a madman.

Joshua is played by Mark Neely, who was on Night Court, Designing Women, and Just the Ten of Us, and who was in Night of the Demons 2, in which, hilariously, he’s paired with fellow Little House alum Rachel Longaker (Gelfing Ginny from “Little Women”) as religious proselytizers who stumble into a haunted house. 

You can watch their first scene yourself here. (It’s not gory until the final two seconds or so.)

Neely’s character winds up a severed head in a toilet.

Anyways, he’s not the same Mark Neely who’s a sportscaster for ESPN.

Neely, who seems a pleasant person in real life, gave an interview with Melissa Sue Anderson’s fan club a while back (they’re their own Little House sub-cult, aren’t they?), in which he shared fond memories of Anderson, Landon, and the rest of the gang.

When Mary returns home, Fisher is waiting for her, and when she admits she untied the rooster, he has a full-fledged nervous breakdown, screaming that was magic to bring good luck, and her fucking it up caused the corn prices in town to fail.

Literally the only thing I can find about a tied-up chicken being good luck is this article mentioning they play a role in Indonesian cremation ceremonies. Hard to imagine that having much influence on Minnesota hillbillies who don’t even know what year it is.

Well, Fisher screams and screams again, right in Mary’s face.

DAGNY: Nothing compares to Little House when it comes to torturing characters.

Fisher drops in some additional pieces of folk wisdom, including that “dried spiders cure the ague” and “wolf droppings cure the colic.”

WILL: Wolf droppings for colic! Can you imagine doing that with little Roman?

(Dags and I weren’t together yet when Roman was a baby, but by all accounts he was a holy terror. His impossible personality then didn’t much foreshadow the placid – if sarcastic – demeanor you all know from these recaps.)

I couldn’t find anything online about medicinal uses for wolf shit, but I did find an advertisement for dried spiders at a website specializing in traditional Chinese medicine. If emulsified into a tea or broth, the site promises, the spider powder will improve circulation, and has specific curative powers that include “dispelling wind, detumescence, detoxification and dispersing knots” and treating “fox hernia, apoplexy, mouth pain, children’s slow shock, mouth silence, chancre, laryngocele, chancre, ear pain, carbuncle swelling, toxin, sores, hemorrhoids, anal prolapse, [and] snakebite.” Nothing about ague (fever), though.

Meanwhile, Mrs. F is cooking dinner.

ROMAN: Is she cooking those beans one by one?

Mr. F wraps up by saying, “And I’d take it kindly if you’d wear a proper dress for supper!”

DAGNY [laughing]: They gotta be putting us on, right?

He storms out, and his wife turns to Mary and says, not unkindly, that she has time to wash up before supper.

The next day after school, Joshua lingers behind, asking Mary for help with ciphering.

He follows her into the yard and makes a clumsy pass at her.

WILL: It’s Of Mice and Men.

For this, he receives a hard slap in the face, but thankfully he doesn’t break her neck.

Suddenly a familiar voice booms out, “Joshua! You devil’s disciple!”

It’s Miss P, who happens to be passing in a buggy.

“When your pa hears,” she howls, “he’ll rip your soul clean!”

I’m not sure what this means, exactly, but it is rather frightening. Stephen King loves this type of religious-woman caricature, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Margaret White in Carrie was an influence on Rachel Peel.

[Helpful reader GroovyFan – aw – sent in the obvious correction that Miss Peel says Mr. Bond will whip his son’s soul clean. I have no idea how I missed that! I guess I probably see Miss P as such a force of Lovecraftian evil that she’d have the power to make people rip souls if she wanted to. Thank you, GroovyFan!]

Well, Joshua flees in terror – and his tight pants literally split as he goes!

WILL: How funny is that?

DAGNY: Yeah, I bet Landon split his own pants laughing when he saw the dailies.

When he’s gone, Miss P howls, “Jezebel!”

Mary stares back, and Miss P adds, “Flauntin’ your flesh in Temptation’s raiment!” (which got us all giggling).

Like a cherry on top of a sundae, then, she finishes off with “You will burn! Oh! You will burn!”

Now, who was Jezebel? One of the famous “Bad Girls of the Bible,” she was a Phoenician royal who may or may not have existed in the 800s B.C.(E.). 

For all her reputation for sexual debauchery, her chief offense seems to have been not giving up her native religion, Baalism, when she married King Ahab, a Yahwist (the Yahwists were sort of proto-Jewish) from northern Israel.

One can’t really blame her for not wanting to convert, though it sounds like she also had Yahwist ministers and prophets assassinated, for which one can blame her.

In an incident that we’ll see has an interesting resonance with this story, the Yahwist prophet Elijah challenged Jezebel to a sort of sorcerer’s duel to see which of their gods could light the barbecue under the brisket they all hoped to have for lunch.

Jezebel’s priests wailed and screamed to no avail, but when Elijah gave the word, the fire puffed up like flipping a switch, or rained down, depending on your minister’s flair for the dramatic.

Time went by, and it doesn’t sound like Jezebel caused too much trouble apart from having some business rivals executed. 

But King Ahab died in a war, and eventually some other guy overthrew her son. He had Jezebel thrown out a window, where she was stomped on by a horse and then eaten by dogs.

In her final moments, Jezebel reportedly dressed up in queenly finery and sexy makeup, though what she intended with this display is up for debate. (Some historians feel the whole story is anti-Baalist propaganda, and there isn’t definitive proof she existed outside the Bible story.)

Anyways, by medieval times her name had come to be associated with sexual decadence, probably because of the makeup thing (?).

Well, enough of that. Later, we see Mary brushing Katie’s hair before bed, which is nice, considering all the heavy stuff they’ve put her through in just 28 minutes.

But the reprieve doesn’t last long. Joshua Bond’s father arrives, demanding to see Mary, and she climbs downstairs.

DAGNY There’s no way she would receive him in her nightie. It wouldn’t be appropriate anywhere at this time, but certainly not in THIS town. For God’s sake, they don’t let her wear a purple dress! 

ROMAN: Maybe she really is a Jezebel.

Mr. Bond – first name Jacob, according to the credits – looks like Gordon Lightfoot circa 1978, and speaks with what’s surely the oddest accent we’ve had so far on this show.

“Miz Peel knowed,” he begins. He looks Mary up and down and says, “She come tol’ me, an’ she was right. You a Jezebel an’ wuss!” 

(Aspiring young teachers, take note: If your community already thinks you’re a harlot, don’t come to a parent-teacher conference in your jammies.)

He goes on – and I’m sorry, but he’s very quotable.

MR. BOND: You like t’killed my boy! He come home struck down sick. Woulda died too, ’f Miz Peel hadn’ known come t’my house!

WILL: Did he take the script and just cut out every third word from his dialogue?

Mary tries to interrupt, but he says, “You cast no spell o’ me! You should be down o’ your knees prayin’, girl, i’ thanks that Miz Peel able t’pull my boy Joshua through! . . . He come home his eyes ’most swollen shut. You did somethin’ t’him. You ever do it ’gain, you be the most sorry person ever leave these parts! You unnerstan’!”

Panting and shuddering, he exits. The actor delivering this remarkable performance has the almost equally remarkable name of Sandy McPeak. He was in Patton, was a regular on Days of Our Lives for a while, and appeared on everything from Bonanza to Murder, She Wrote.

Mr. Fisher follows him, and Mrs. Fisher – again holding her stomach in pain – says she’s going to keep Katie home from school tomorrow, since she (Katie) isn’t feeling well (which is obviously untrue).

DAGNY: Why wouldn’t Mary just leave at this point? But I suppose she can’t. She really has no way to summon help, does she?

No, she doesn’t. Not until Aldi comes back in two months.

Well, the next day, Mary walks sadly to school, alone, to David Rose’s dark moody accompaniment on the piano.

WILL: Is that snow? Frost?

DAGNY: It actually looks kind of green. 

ROMAN: They probably just wanted it to look like a weird horror world that she’s wandered into.

But when she enters, she finds an empty room – she’s being shunned by the whole community. (There are obvious shades of The Scarlet Letter throughout this one as well.)

DAGNY: What a Landon shot! The cross.

Back in Walnut Grove, Ma is looking through a textiles catalog.

She tells Pa she borrowed it from Alice Garvey, but we can see from the cover it’s Mrs. West’s Squatter’s Store Mail Order Catalogue, of which she was previously shown to own a copy herself. (Of course, that could have been an older edition.)

Then we hear horses. Pa winks and says, “That’s Dr. Baker looking for a free cup of coffee.” Ha!

But no, it’s Mary, who bursts in and throws herself into Ma’s lap, weeping.

DAGNY: So she did find a way home! How? No way any of those freaks would have taken her.

WILL: I don’t know. I suppose maybe Mustache Man passed through delivering a package?

We then cut to Mary and Pa out in a strange rocky place we’ve never seen before.

Mary breaks down some of what happened for Pa.

WILL [as PA, wearily]: “You didn’t try to seduce somebody, did you?”

She tells him the people think Miss Peel is a witch who can burn down barns with her thoughts. The barn we saw wasn’t burned, though, it was collapsed. But I suppose the phrase “burned barn” will come quickly to Mary’s lips the rest of her days. At least, until “burned blind school/baby battering ram” surpasses it.

Pa says it’s good Mary’s done with that job, adding, “Sometimes I think bigots are just there, like the mountains.”

WILL: Actually in Minnesota, we probably have more bigots than mountains. 

ROMAN: Yeah. Because we don’t have any mountains.

Then Mary says she wants to go back and confront the terrible people of Whisper Prairie. 

DAGNY: That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.

WILL: Yeah. Count your blessings you got out alive!

But Pa says he’s proud of her and will take her back himself.

ROMAN: Oh, is Pa going to punch Miss Peel’s lights out?

DAGNY: Yeah, it’d be fun to see Pa beat up a woman, just this one time.

Mary makes Pa promise not to interfere when she confronts Miss P. “She’s gonna be sorry she got my dander up!” she says.

WILL: Miss Peel should fly over. [as MISS PEEL, howling:] “Oh, I AM, am I?”

Commercial. And here we go, the final battle!

So, Pa and Mary arrive back in Whisper Prairie. And BY THE WAY, despite being traded away two stories ago (which their absence last week confirming this), we see THE ORIGINAL CHONKIES seem to be pulling the Ingallswagon again.

Two logical possibilities explain this. First, perhaps the Goofy Old Gent With the Ear Trumpet who traded for them had poor luck in Sunny California and returned to Minnesota. (Two years have passed in Little House Universal Time, after all.)

Nicely, then, he traded the horses back, with gratitude.

Or, alternatively, the GOG was murdered on the way to Cali, and the killer brought the Chonkies back to Walnut Grove and attempted to sell them . . . only to be revealed and foiled by Charles, who recognized them! (An untelevised adventure?)

They arrive just as Miss Peel is conducting Sunday services. (They drove through the night?)

She clutches a Bible to her chest, and howls, “Today’s lesson . . . THE LORD’S WORD! . . . ”

ALL: [laughter]

Miss Peel continues, “. . . is given to us in His Ten Commandments.” 

Mary and Pa enter the church as she’s ticking off the first three.

DAGNY: She should have worn a push-up bra and shown cleavage. Show ’em what a real Jezebel looks like.

Miss Peel turns around and tells them they’re not welcome. 

But Mary sasses her, and says they’re gonna have a chat right here in front of everybody.

“I got nothin’ to say to you!” Miss Peel howls, then adds more quietly, “Jezebel.”

WILL: Does she think Pa can’t hear her if she whispers?

WILL: You know, it’s a real irony that of all characters she’d accuse MARY INGALLS of being a Jezebel. Miss Princess Persian-Cat Stick-Up-Her-Ass herself? If it were the BEAD, now . . .

DAGNY: Well, she is relatively experienced sexually.

WILL: Oh, nonsense. What, with John Junior?

ROMAN: John is the real Jezebel.

Sorry, now where was I? Oh yes – Miss Peel had said she had nothing to say to Mary. Mary’s lip trembles with rage, and she hisses, “Oh, but you have.”

Then she demands Miss P explain her point of view in front of everyone.

Meanwhile, Miss P is rocking on her feet, squirming, huffing, puffing, pooching her mouth out like an orangutan, licking her lips nervously, and the like.

Since she isn’t saying anything, Mary turns to the gallery and pushes through the next few Commandments, as if it’s the annual Founder’s Day Commandment-Off contest, or something.

When she gets to the Seventh Commandment, Miss P howls, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you!”

In disgust, Mary points out that isn’t a Commandment, but rather the Golden Rule, shared by Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. (Some dispute this as the Golden Rule’s origin.)

She cites the Gospel of Matthew as her source.

“You’re wrong!” Miss Peel howls. “It’s the Seventh Commandment, you little fool!” 

Why Miss Peel would know the first three Commandments but not the rest of them is not explained; nor why her imperfect command of scripture would explain her mad zealotry. I was raised among religious extremists myself – not quite this crazy, but I did have first cousins who were raised in a traditionalist sect and had to wear long skirts and sleeves. (They probably couldn’t wear purple, either.)

Today they live as they please and don’t speak to their dad; good for them, but it’s a pity he had to wreck their family in the first place for nothing.

Anyways, I can tell you many of the zealots I knew growing up had watertight knowledge of the Good Book. Ministers in particular are trained to talk circles around mere mortals, and dazzle us with their Biblical citations.

Accuracy of recall itself doesn’t make them right. There are a lot of genuinely learned Miss Peels out there.

Interestingly, it seems different religious traditions in fact number the Commandments differently, a thing I didn’t know. Some consider “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” to be the Seventh, whereas others favor “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” The numbering Mary cites in this scene is in fact the one preferred by Congregationalists.

Mary says they can easily settle this dispute by looking up the verses in the Bible itself.

“Don’t have to!” Miss Peel howls. “I know!”

“Do you, Miss Peel!” Mary screams back.

“I can!” Miss Peel howls (which doesn’t make much sense). “I LIVE by the Good Book!”

“Thousands and thousands of words in the Bible . . .” Mary muses, then suddenly screams, “READ US SOME OF THOSE WORDS YOU LIVE BY!”

Helpfully, then, she points out Exodus 20 as the place to find the Commandments.

“I don’t have to read you anything!” Miss Peel howls.

Mary then screams that Miss P obviously can’t read a word.

WILL: What is Pa doing during all this?

ROMAN: He went out for a smoke.

Mary screams and screams. “READ IT! JUST READ IT!”

Miss P spins on her axis like Stevie Nicks, and even makes a Stevie-ish witchy gesture, howling, “The Devil is not welcome here!”

Mary then calmly walks up the aisle, saying Miss Peel’s efforts to suppress education have just one end goal: to preserve her control over the public. (More resonance with today.)

It’s clear from the faces of the women in the audience that Mary’s message is landing.

She then accuses Miss P of breaking the Ninth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor.

“I did not!” Miss Peel howls. 

“You did!” Mary screams back. “You told every parent of every child in school I was a Jezebel!”

“You are!” Miss Peel howls. “A sinful stench in the nostrils of the righteous!”

“Soap and water,” Mary hisses back.

I’m sorry to be quoting the dialogue at such length, but it really is a rich and hilarious ham dinner being laid out for us here. Too good to leave anything out.

Actually, it has the air of a John Waters movie.

As a last resort, Miss Peel suddenly raises the Bible over her head and looks to the heavens, or at least the ceiling. Whether she’s trying to summon an angel, a demon, or a storm is unclear, but she’s definitely trying to summon something.

Joshua Bond’s eyes bug out in his head.

WILL: Is this gonna be like Raiders of the Lost Ark, where God makes everybody’s face melt off?

“Are you gonna call down the lightning?” Mary screams. “Do it, Miss Peel, do it!”

WILL: This is operatic!

In the crowd, Mr. Fisher squeezes his eyes shut to brace for whatever’s going to happen.

Mary taunts her then.

DAGNY: This is her solution? Humiliating this illiterate woman in front of her people? I mean, she’s evil, but still . . .

WILL: Miss Peel should whip out a machete.

ROMAN: I wouldn’t be surprised!

Mary then calls Joshua Bond as a witness, warning him to lie would be breaking the Ninth Commandment.

DAGNY: He already broke his pants.

Joshua, who, rapiness aside, hasn’t really seemed a bad sort in this story, stands up and says he was to blame for the incident with Mary.

Mr. Bond jumps and says, “You were sick, boy! Yo’ eyes ’most swoll’ shut!”

Joshua says that was because Miss Peel rubbed some horrible substance into his eyes. When his father responds that’s probably what cured him, Joshua says actually it was because his mom washed Miss P’s crap out of his eyes with water.

Mrs. Bond, played by another Highway to Heaven/Father Murphy alum, Nancy Pearlberg, rises to confirm this, adding she’s on Team Mary.

Miss Peel has fallen silent by this point, and Mary stares her down.

WILL: [as MARY:] “Here’s another Commandment. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ PREPARE THE BONFIRE!”

But actually, Mary then cites Psalm 133, saying her idea of God is “love and understanding,” and Mrs. Fisher then cries out, “Amen to that!”

DAGNY: It’s a revolt of the women! 

ROMAN: Yeah, it’s Women Talking!

(I hate to point this out, but I also wouldn’t call what Mrs. Fisher’s wearing a proper dress.)

Mary says school will resume the next day.

“Again, amen!” Mrs. Fisher shouts. Jokes aside, I find her evolution in this one quite moving, personally. It’s my favorite part of the story.

Then she rises, ignoring a dirty look from her husband, and sings “Jesus Loves Me” (a hymn dating to 1862 – kind of a modern selection for these people, but whatever). 

The villagers all join in singing (Pa too), and Mary reaches out and takes the blubbering Miss Peel’s hand, indicating forgiveness is possible, even for witches. 

Whew! Bum-Bum-Ba-Dum!

WILL: They should start the credits, then the film breaks and Miss Peel reappears.

DAGNY: Yeah, cursing Mary and predicting she’ll go blind.

ROMAN: Yeah, and her baby will burn to death!

STYLE WATCH: Charles appears to go commando again.

Miss Peel wears a bonnet of the deepest black we’ve seen on the series so far. (No doubt dyed with the blood of ravens, or something.)

THE VERDICT: 

WILL: You know, Melissa Sue Anderson hates that episode, because she feels her acting was too over-the-top, but I don’t think so.

ROMAN: No. She wasn’t any hammier than she usually is.

Perhaps the craziest Little House so far, its heart is in the right place, but the presentation is so extreme it feels like a punch in the face. The horror atmosphere is fun, but campy to the point where it almost doesn’t feel like Little House anymore. (Even the title is never explained – a rare thing indeed for this show.)

Plus, it’s a nice fantasy that exposing Miss Peel as ignorant would cause her followers to reject her, but it’s just that: a fantasy. As I write this here in the U.S., we’re getting ready for a Presidential election. Everyone knows one of the candidates can’t read, but that hasn’t stopped people from worshipping him and pretending it has something to do with God, even though Bertie Wooster could mop the floor with him in a Scripture Knowledge competition.

Then again, the good women of our world may save us in this situation, too. I pray they do!

Anyways, Anderson, who’s had a bit of an uneven season so far, really shines. And Dee Croxton and Linda McMillan kind of steal the show as Ellen and Katie Fisher.

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