“Be My Friend”

Creek to Nowhere; or

They Wouldn’t Just Give it to Some Rando Jezebel

(a recap by Will Kaiser)

Title: “Be My Friend” [sic]

Airdate: January 30, 1978

Written and directed by Michael Landon

SUMMARY IN A NUTSHELL: Tortured by her insane dad, a sad girl abandons her baby; but TV’s most meddlesome father/daughter duo intervenes.

RECAP: A double episode today.

AND we return to the proper Season Four theme arrangement again. (Not to overreact, but – yay.)

We open backing away from a lantern that’s surrounded by knives, wooden spoons, and other frightening instruments of domesticity.

This week’s title is “‘Be My Friend.’” (Quotes.)

We see we’re in some modest dwelling – very modest. The floor is just dirt.

DAGNY: Is this Kezia’s house?

There are two places set at the table, and a soiled dish-towel (or something) hangs on the wall. Whether it’s a decoration or for use as a family-style napkin remains to be seen.

DAGNY: No, it’s a curtain over a window.

Really? Seems to me an odd place and size for a window. But maybe.

Muted sobbing rises on the soundtrack as we ascend the ladder and look through what appears to be a vagina-shaped hole in a wall. (Guess who directed this one.)

Actually I think it’s a vagina-shaped gap in some curtains.

Looking into, or rather through, the vagina, we see a young pregnant woman who’s weeping and groaning. (Well, it’s just her belly at first.)

“It’s soon,” the woman says to herself. Then she prays to God for help, as well as for forgiveness for being an unwed mother.

The poor girl weeps and screams in the dark and we cut away. 

This is a disturbing one, folks. Adult themes ahead.

Anyways, shifting gears, the show now gives us some sort of tramp or vagabond wearing animal skins. 

He approaches a house or cabin on an extraordinarily windy day (wind being a portent of disaster on this show).

He goes inside, so I guess perhaps he wasn’t a tramp or vagabond but rather just a guy coming home. One shouldn’t make assumptions like that, I know.

He calls out “Anna!” and upstairs, the pregnant girl says, “Yes, Papa.”

DAGNY: What’s he from? I recognize him from something.

WILL: I’m sure you know him from things, but they’re not THE THING I know him from.

DAGNY: Oh, he’s in The Thing, haw haw.

Yes, Anna’s dad is played by the amazing Donald Moffat! He is one of my favorites, and yes, almost solely because he’s in John Carpenter’s The Thing. 

He gets one of the most famous lines in that movie too. (You can watch the clip to the end this time – it’s funny, not scary.)

Moffat was in Robert Altman’s Popeye, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Housesitter (God, remember that?), Clear and Present Danger, and The Evening Star. I think some of these haven’t aged super-well. Do people still run around talking about how great The Right Stuff is? They used to.

Oh well, here he is listening to Steve Martin sing an Irish song in Housesitter:

On TV, he did Tales of the City, The Six Million Dollar Man and Ironside, all the way back to Bonanza.

DAGNY [reading DONALD MOFFAT’s bio]: Oh yeah, he was on The West Wing. And China Beach! I remember him from both of those. I always liked him in everything. He could be funny, or mean, or whatever.

As we see Moffat making himself at home, David Rose gives us sort of muted hissing brass music that suggests things could not possibly be worse in the home we’re visiting, so it probably isn’t Funny Nice Donald Moffat we’re in for today.

Moffat removes layer after layer of animal furs and hides as his daughter climbs down from the loft. (I mean animal hides, not that he hides from Anna when she’s coming down. Ha!)

He harshly asks what she was doing up there. Dad, when your house only has two rooms, I don’t think either of them are really off-limits.

But Anna changes the subject, asking why he’s home two days early. “The Lord was kind,” he says. “The traps were full.”

It’s pretty obvious from how Anna, who’s wearing a nightgown, keeps her back to him and covers her belly with her hands that he doesn’t know she’s pregnant. (More on this in a bit.)

Moff, whose eyebrows resemble giant white fingernail clippings, or something, sits down at the table and asks for supper, which Anna conveniently has ready. (If he wasn’t going to be back for two days, why would she have made enough for both of them? Seems wasteful.)

The Moff picks up a Bible and prays directly into it, as if recording something for TikTok. 

He thanks God for generously allowing him to turn dead animals into money; then, loudly, he adds, “Help my daughter to cleanse herself and her mind from the evils of the flesh.” So he does know about the baby?

Anna ignores this diss, so he goes on. 

“She’s her mother’s daughter, Lord,” he says – dude, I expect the Lord knows this – and “infected with the same evil.”

WILL: Infected with evil! Just like The Thing!

But seriously, I told you. He’s essentially a Mr. Peel. 

WILL: It’s weird we would have another Christian-right extremist so soon after Miss Peel. Bible beaters sure must have pissed Landon off in 1978.

Anna, who’s pretty, dark-haired, and of indeterminate age, ignores her dad’s rant and brings the food to the table.

She’s played by Lenora May, an actor I’m not much familiar with, but who has a long resume and continues to act in big projects today. 

In fact, just over the past month, she appeared on the series finale of Young Sheldon, a show I didn’t watch but at least have heard of.

Little House was May’s first film or television gig, but she followed it up with appearances on Wonder Woman, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Duet (my sister Peggy loved that one), Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, Six Feet Under, Ugly Betty, ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Young and The Restless.

She also appeared on the ill-advised attempt to revive Love Boat in the nineties.

She was in the legendary horror film When a Stranger Calls! That one still stands up (or at least, the first and last ten minutes do). 

May plays a babysitter – not the main babysitter, but another one hired by the first babysitter years later. It’s too complicated to explain further, and I couldn’t find a picture of her character. Oh, just forget I brought it up!

Finally, and interestingly, she was cast as a teenager in Jaws 2, but none of her footage made it into the final film after the original director was fired and a new one took the production in a different direction.

It doesn’t take long before the Moff starts interrogating his daughter, saying, “You think of him, don’t you?” and “You want to be with him because of the flesh – you would marry him for the flesh!” 

DAGNY: I remember this one. Didn’t the dad rape her?

WILL: No.

DAGNY: Oh. Her brother, then?

We don’t know at this point who the “him” in this question is. I’ll tell you that for many years, I also remembered this one as having an incest storyline, with the Moff himself being the father. 

But I’ll disabuse you of that terrible notion straight off. (There are dark places even Michael Landon would not go, and thank goodness for that.)

But for now, we don’t have any idea who the Moff means by “him.” 

WILL: This is kind of like Agnes of God, where she thinks Jesus had sex with her. Remember that?

DAGNY: Oh my God, yes. That was so disturbing.

He goes on to tell Anna her own mother married him because she was hot to trot, then abandoned him because her lust was so insatiable. 

WILL: Well, that’s what you get when you marry a Jezebel, dude.

Either in shame, disgust, or actual pain from a contraction, Anna closes her eyes and says, “Please, Papa.”

Then she does have an actual contraction, and her father cries out, “It’s the demon inside of you! He hears me and is filled with anger!”

(Actually, I think maybe he should propose to Miss Peel, given their similar interests and modes of expression.)

Then the Moff grabs Anna’s hand and launches into another crazy ranting prayer, saying because of her wantonness they can’t go back to civilization. While I feel for Anna, I can’t say I disagree we’d all be better off if everyone like her dad headed off to some wasteland never to return. Antarctica seems a good destination. For a start.

Then, grossly, her dad starts pawing at her face and hair. You can see why I assumed what I did.

Still in pain, Anna makes some excuse about getting water, and exits.

She crosses the forest. I think it’s fair to say these winds are stronger than any we’ve seen on the show so far.

WILL: How do they make wind like that? A giant fan?

DAGNY: Nah, they just took a vacuum cleaner and put it in reverse.

Instead of going to the creek, Anna crawls into a rough tent in the woods.

DAGNY: Oh, THAT’s Kezia’s new house.

Eventually, after dark it seems, Anna returns to the cabin, soaking wet.

The Moff stands up and shouts “Where have you been!”, though if he was so damn concerned I don’t see why he didn’t go out looking for her.

Anna says she took shelter in the woods until the storm weakened, and her father says, “It’s the Lord’s way of showing His wrath!”

(I’m pretty sure whatever God may or may not be working on at the moment, He doesn’t call up storms out in the woods to punish pregnant girls. His supposed advocates on Earth do quite enough to punish them, but never mind that.)

Anna gets a weird glazed-over look on her face and says, “It has stopped now.” Is she cracking up? Probably, and who could blame her.

DAGNY: You know what I’m realizing? Donald Moffat was on The West Wing, and Melissa Gilbert’s future husband was on The West Wing!

WILL: Yeah! Thirtysomething Guy.

DAGNY: Yeah, Thirtysomething Guy. Timothy Busby.

Then we cut to an image of a message in a bottle floating down a stream, accompanied by mysterious music that has strong similarities to Gollum’s theme from the 1977 Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit.

I suppose it’s fairly unlikely David Rose used this as source material; but you never know, do you? Maybe he met the Hobbit composer at a music conference, got him drunk, and stole the tune off him.

David’s music lightens considerably as the bottle floats up to one Laura Ingalls, who’s fishing in Plum Creek.

Laura is accompanied by Bandit, at whom she screams to shut up so she can concentrate.

Did she learn nothing from the death of Jack? After all, she screamed at him then too, and all he was doing was trying to tell her he was dying of foxtails. 

Laura’s in a foul mood today overall. She even screams at the worm!

Then she spots the bottle.

DAGNY: She should open it and that Sting song starts playing from inside.

The note reads “If you find this, be my friend.” And off she and Bandit run, all to “Cutesy-Poo Recess” on a tootlin’ flute in the band.

WILL: I bet you like this one, don’t you.

DAGNY: Oh, yeah. Are you kidding? A girl’s adventure story? Plus we haven’t seen Charles once.

WILL: It’s only been on two minutes!

But she’s soon complaining about how far they’ve gone without finding anything. Now, Plum Creek flows northeasterly (how do streams and rivers decide which direction they flow? It never makes much sense to me), meaning Anna’s house must be somewhere to the southwest of Walnut Grove. I didn’t do a precise analysis, but from the Little House (about two miles northeast of the Greater Groveland metropolis), the creek probably runs for about ten miles, first south, then turning north, before it peters out near Tracy, Minnesota (a town never mentioned on this show).

That night, everybody’s hanging out in the common room. Mary and Ma are doing their Stitch Witchery, using Carrie as prop yarn holder.

Pa is tuning up the old fake fiddle.

And Laura is studying a map of Minnesota in a book.

Ma says there’s no way to tell where the bottle came from (she appears to be darning a sock), and Pa notes there are overlapping streams that cross Plum Creek. (In fact, there’s just one, Willow Creek, that splits off to the south and also eventually trickles to nothing. But his point stands.)

Predictably, Ma pooh-poohs the idea of even looking for the author of the note.

Laura says if only they could reverse the creek, she could send a reply back in the same bottle.

Mary laughs at this, but Laura smacks her down. And indeed, Laura does have personal experience with creekborne messages saving the day.

Then Mary, quite in the spirit of a Walnut Groovy commentator, says wouldn’t it be funny if Nellie was the author of the note?

As sometimes happens with the Ingalls family (but never with the Kaisers), Pa leans too far into the realm of dad jokes then, exclaiming “Then you’d really be up the creek!” and getting blank looks from the Ing-Gals.

DAGNY: You can tell Michael Landon really was the parent of young kids at the time. He’s used to telling dad jokes and getting no reaction.

(“Up the creek” was probably around as a saying by 1878, at least in its more vulgar “Up Shit Creek” form, which apparently made it into a U.S. federal government report (as a direct quotation) in 1868. Beyond that, it’s hard to say when this expression came into use. There are a couple absurd theories having to do with how Lord Nelson’s sailors got from their ships to the hospital and back during the Napoleonic Wars, but those have been pretty well debunked, since there’s no record of the expression in British publications till the mid-Twentieth Century.)

Back at Moff Manor, Dad sleeps whilst Anna sneaks in from outside, and whilst David Rose randomly plunks notes on the piano with one finger.

DAGNY: Is that Laura? Does Donald Moffat become her new old man best friend?

Anna quietly grabs a little sewing box or the like and takes it upstairs.

DAGNY: Is she going to stitch up her vaginal tears after having the baby?

DAGNY: I think stitching up your own vaginal tears would be on par with cutting off your own leg. I’m just saying.

Actually, Anna uses a scissors from the box to cut a lock of hair, which she puts in another bottle with another note.

Then we cut to Laura and Mary walking the creek, Laura spewing nonsense like a geyser.

DAGNY: That’s like quantum physics.

WILL: What! It’s pure gibberish!

DAGNY: No, there’s more to it than that.

“Gollum’s Riddle” plays again as Laura spots another bottle floating.

DAGNY: God, Landon.

WILL: What?

DAGNY: The love lens on Laura.

Though fully dressed, she charges right into the water to retrieve it. (Good old Laura.)

This time, the note of course includes the lock of Anna’s hair.

DAGNY: Do you think it’s Susie Shubert?

WILL: Why?

DAGNY: Because she has brown hair and is friends with Melissa Gilbert.

The note reads, “Dear Friend, If you find this, my eyes are brown, and this is my hair. Be my friend.” (Seems to me the “if you find this” is unnecessary, since obviously anybody reading it has found it. Not everyone is as economical with word choice as your humble blogger, of course.)

That night, Laura is late for dinner, but that doesn’t stop Carrie from drinking coffee again. She’s becoming quite the Java fiend.

Pa is very angry and sends Laura upstairs. Carrie mutters something that the subtitles translate as “Laura’s gonna get it.”

Pa follows her upstairs, furious. He even threatens to give her “a whippin’” but of course he doesn’t mean that.

But when she tells him about the second bottle, he softens. He is a born meddler himself, so I’m sure on some level he’s proud of her.

Pa says he sympathizes, but says trying to find the source would be hopelessly complicated. He advises her “don’t go near the lake” if she can’t control her desire to help. (What lake? Our map has Willow/Cattail Lake as adjacent to Plum Creek, but to the north of the Little House – the opposite direction from where the bottle came from – so that’s no good.)

(Lake Ellen doesn’t connect with the creek, so that can’t be the one he means either.)

Laura thanks him for being so generous, and especially for not whipping her. He shakes his head and says, “I wasn’t gonna whip you.” 

Then Laura sets the bottle in a bowl of water so it’ll still float! A corny touch, perhaps, but the gesture has the ring of truth about it, and it’s Little House, for heaven’s sakes. I like it.

Meanwhile, we cut back to the agonized Anna in her loft apartment, drafting another note.

After a break, we come back to find the bushes blossoming – suggesting the passage of time? I would put this story, like the last one, in the early spring of 1878-G.

Then we meet a brand-new character – a cow!

You’ll recall that Spot, the Ingallses’ remarkably stupid milk cow who figured in many of these tales, was killed and eaten by feral dogs earlier this season. (God, Little House.)

This replacement’s intelligence has yet to be determined, but apparently there’s nothing wrong with her milk-producing capabilities, since Laura is milking her.

Actually, I spoke too soon! Laura seems to be having some trouble in that regard.

She addresses the cow as “Cow,” so maybe that’s her name.

But she says a prayer and Cow releases her milk. Evidence inconclusive as to the cause-and-effect of this scenario, but that’s fine.

Inside, Ma and Mary are making a grocery list. (Ma notes that Charles “does love his salt,” which is cute.)

Laura asks to go fishing, surprising Ma, who thought she’d want to come along to town since she’s going to be buying materials for dressmaking.

And of course she actually defies Pa and goes back to the creek again, with Bandit.

Now it looks like fall again – this is a run of three stories in a row that appear to take place in cold weather. Very strange for Little House.

Laura eventually gives up, and pitches a stick into the water . . . which as if by magic bumps into the new bottle from Anna. Where does this stock of bottles come from? Anna and the Moff live in a one-room hovel nowhere near town, and they don’t grow on trees.

Then Laura notices a large frog. (A lot of frogs this season. It may be this is the same frog Laura tried and failed to capture in “Apple Boobs.” I see no reason to think it’s not.)

“I’m gonna get that bullfrog for Nellie’s lunchpail!” Laura says (which is hilarious).

But then Laura spots the bottle and forgets the frog.

The note in the bottle this time reads “This is me. Be my friend.” AND the bottle includes a rather improbable photograph of Anna.

WILL: Is that her wallet-size senior class picture?

DAGNY: No, she took it at the photo booth at the mall.

Then we find ourselves inside the mill, looking through a window at (I think) Mustache Man and Carl the Flunky driving by.

At this point, then, there’s a surprisingly obvious cut in the film (watch closely at 27:23), and then Laura and Bandit come running towards us.

Laura begs Pa to take her searching for her mystery “friend.” He asks why it’s so important to her.

DAGNY: I like that. I like that he respects her and wants to hear her justification. That’s a good way to raise a daughter.

Pa, who’s obviously just as curious as Laura, gives in, saying they’ll leave the next morning. (Which must be Sunday? If Ma and Mary were going marketing together today?)

“You’ll have to explain to your ma why you’re missing church,” Pa says. Ha! You see? It is Sunday! I take this as a validation of my whole system.

Pa watches Laura run off, or maybe he’s watching Not-Richard Libertini, who’s fooling around in front of the Post Office with some other guys.

The next day, the two of them go marching up the creek. (Pa and Laura, not Pa and Not-Richard Libertini.)

Pa compliments Laura on being persistent, and she has to ask what it means – which is idiocy, considering she’s at least thirteen now AND was reading Alfred, Lord Tennyson, at age ten.

We then see Anna is spying on them from elsewhere in the woods.

Then they hear a baby crying, and they find one too, in a basket under a bearskin with a note attached. 

OLIVE [passing through]: Oh, is that Albert?

(Quite surprisingly, this script contains no references to the tale of Baby Moses, an obvious inspiration for this story of creeks and abandoned babies in baskets.)

Pa reads, “Please be my friend – please love me – I’m all alone.”

Pa deduces the penpal’s strategy all along was to attract someone to save her baby. Really? If so, why didn’t she ask for help in the messages, or give more information about her whereabouts? While this story is very effective, and semi-believable in the way a fairy tale is, there are some unanswered questions. Presumably Anna had the baby in the tent in the opening scene, but it’s presented in an ambiguous way – very unusual for this show. How did she hide the baby from her dad after it was born? Wouldn’t he hear it crying in the otherwise silent forest? When she spotted Pa and Laura in the woods, how did she know they were looking for her? Or was she just planning to leave the baby in the basket at the first sign of anyone?

Pa scouts around the area, whilst Laura says to the baby (hilariously), “Oh my, you need to have your panties changed, don’t you?”

Changing said “panties,” she discovers the child is a girl.

WILL: Pa should throw her in the river. He doesn’t want another girl.

They take the baby and go, as Anna watches, crying.

DAGNY: How will they feed this baby? Are they going to induce lactation in Laura?

WILL: Well, she can’t nurse her on apples.

WILL: No, they’ll just give her cow’s milk. That’s what they did with Baby Freddie. Of course, it killed him.

After the break, the Moff hassles Anna, who apparently dresses exclusively in nightgowns, about all her “long walks in the woods.”

But Anna, secure in the knowledge her baby is safe, just waves him off.

That night, as Casa dell’Ingalls, Carrie slurps, “Pa, can I see Laura’s baby again?”

But Pa rolls his eyes and tells her to go the eff to sleep. (Paraphrase.)

They’re letting Carrie sleep upstairs so Laura and the baby can be in Ma and Pa’s room.

Ma informs the audience they’re feeding the baby with goat’s milk.

DAGNY: Goat’s milk? Is that better than cow’s milk? And where’d they get it?

WILL: From Fred’s harem.

According to WebMD, it’s no safer than cow’s milk.

Laura chatters to the giggling baby, and Pa says, “Half-Pint, if you go to sleep, she will” – a strange thing for anyone who’s lived with babies to think or say, except as an outrageous irony.

Out in the common room, Ma and Pa have some coffee and look at the photograph. “I’m just wondering if this is a picture of the baby’s mother when she was a little girl,” Pa says. Little girl? Lenora May was 22 when she filmed this one, and looks the same age in the picture.

They have a nice little conversation then, during which Ma suggests the mother abandoned the baby because of outside pressure from someone.

Ma asks what they should do, and Pa says they’ll have to wait and see what God in Heaven has in store.

WILL [as JEAN VALJEAN]: “One day more!”

They’re talking about taking the baby in to see Doc Baker when Laura barges in once more and declares she’s named the baby Grace.

The next day at the Mercantile, Mrs. Oleson is screaming that she caught Willie looking at porn (the ladies’ undergarment section of the catalogue, which did indeed serve as pornography for many young people up to the end of the Twentieth Century, when the internet came along and wrecked everything).

Willie defends himself, saying “I was looking up candy, and I got off a few pages!”

“What does candy have to do with corsets?” Harriet says, and Nels replies, “Well, if nobody ate any candy, then they wouldn’t need any corsets, would they?”

ROMAN [passing through]: Fat-shaming. From Nels, of course.

(We will count this as Fat Joke #15.)

Anyways, Mrs. O is disgusted, but Nels has a fairly sex-positive attitude about the whole thing.

Pa, Laura, and the baby come in. The baby has Hitler-esque hair, I’m sorry to say.

Laura heads out to take the baby to Doc’s (passing Mrs. Foster on the porch), and Charles fucks with Harriet by telling her the infant is Laura’s own.

WILL: He should say Willie’s the father.

Then Mrs. O comes to precisely that conclusion, when she sees Laura and Willie playing with the baby in the street.

WILL: Oh she does think that! Ha ha ha! I forgot.

WILL: They should have a whole subplot about how they make Willie and Laura get married. They did date for a while, remember?

A few minutes later, Baby Grace (not that one) is being examined by Freddie’s murderer.

He says she’s doing fine. (…)

Doc notes that in their sexist society, it’s harder to find homes for orphaned girls than boys, and Charles agrees. (As a former adoption agent himself, Pa has experience with this.)

Doc then grabs a map of all the local creeks and tributaries (!) that’s sitting on top of his filing cabinet (!!!)

The map, which includes such nonexistent towns as “Boswell,” “Minta,” and “Ender’s Store,” positions Walnut Grove as the center of the universe, with about a million spidery streams and rivers running out of it.

WILL: [cries with laughter]

DAGNY: You’re not impressed with this map?

WILL: Well, who would map these little offshoots in such detail? And for what purpose? It’s not like they were looking for the Northwest Passage or something.

The map also shows the location of a mine – presumably Carrie’s – and what do you know, it’s located EXACTLY WHERE WE HAVE IT ON OUR MAP!

It shows no lakes, ponds or swamps whatsoever.

Doc says “Boswell” would be the most likely place the bottles could have come from, but since in the real world Plum Creek flows in the opposite direction, that’s actually impossible.

Satisfied with Doc’s opinion, Pa and Laura drive home, bickering the whole way.

That night, in a gorgeously lit scene, Laura stares adoringly at Baby Hitler, accompanied by soothing vibraphones, angelic harps, and the like.

Then she blathers to God, asking to be made the baby’s mother, permanent-like.

Having learned nothing from the time she prayed to God to kill Freddie, and He did, she prays that Pa will never find the real mother.

She closes, rather disturbingly, by saying, “Please bless my family and my baby.” (Italics mine.)

She apparently has forgotten she’s in the same room as Pa, who stares down at her in disbelief.

We then find ourselves in Boswell.

Charles and the Chonkies stop to ask a skinny bellringer where to find the town’s minister. (Charles does most of the talking, not the Chonkies.)

Boswell apparently not being on the Reverend Alden’s roster this season, the bellringer says in a goofy voice that Boswell has its own minister, who is also its fire chief.

Then he says, “That way, he says he can try to keep us burning in our house and in Hell at the same time!” and laughs hysterically.

WILL: Is this Crazytown?

I assume he was supposed to say “keep us FROM burning,” etc., but if there’s a from in there I can’t hear it.

The goofy bellringer is played by Dan McBride, who will return to Little House in a delightful recurring role soon, but we’ll get to that when we get to it.

Charles drives through town, passing a place called “Carnes Leather Goods,” and we see that Boswell, despite being a mere stone’s throw from Walnut Grove and never being mentioned before, is actually an enormous city, at least on the scale of Springfield, Sleepy Eye, Redwood Falls, and Deadwood. (Why are they always going to those other cities if there’s one this size within spitting distance???)

Quite unusually, we see a “well-built” Black man with a jaunty feather in his hat riding through town as well.

Charles arrives at the fire station, complete with a mounted fire extinguisher. I wondered when they were invented, but it seems they’d existed in similar form for at least sixty years.

Charles finds the minister/fire chief, polishing the ladder on the fire engine. (Why?)

DAGNY: He’s also got enormous eyebrows. Did every man over forty look like a Star Trek alien in the 1970s?

The man introduces himself as “Captain Pritchard weekdays, Reverend Pritchard Sundays.” He speaks in a gruff voice, but is friendly.

This actor is named Woodrow Parfrey, which to me sounds like a country house or village in an Agatha Christie mystery.

Parfrey was on every 20th-Century TV show at least twice, including Gunsmoke, The Untouchables, Perry Mason, The Fugitive, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Batman, Hogan’s Heroes, Lost in Space, The Virginian, I Dream of Jeannie, Mayberry R.F.D., That Girl, Adam-12, Mission: Impossible, Bonanza, The Mod Squad, Kung Fu, Ironside, Mannix, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Kojak, and Quincy.

Movie-wise, he was in Dirty Harry and Papillon, plus he played one of the orangutans in the famous “see no evil” scene in the original Planet of the Apes.

Charles shows Pritchard the picture of Anna, and he immediately identifies both her and her father, Nathaniel Mears.

Reverend/Captain Pritchard tells Charles the Mearses skipped town over six months ago.

He mentions Anna had a boyfriend, Bobbie Harris, but Nathaniel flipped out over the relationship.

WILL: Chuck is very lucky stumbling upon this gossipy minister.

DAGNY: Yeah, he’s worse than Doc Baker for confidentiality.

Charles tells Reverend/Captain the whole story, and they head over to the smithy, where Bobbie and his father work, together.

When they get there, Pritchard greets Bobbie’s father, a sort of Dumb-Abel-looking man with a lisp whom he addresses as “Clark.” (Clark Harris is played by John Craig, who was on Rawhide, My Three Sons, and the Victor French vehicle Carter Country.)

Bobbie himself appears.

OLIVE [passing through again, and stopping this time]: Oh my God! Who is THAT?

Bobbie is indeed a handsome young man with huge eyes and even huge-er hair. He’s played by Michael Mullins, perhaps best known for an early sexploitation comedy called The Pom Pom Girls, which came out in 1976. (Tagline: “Some girls do it. Some girls don’t.”)

Also pictured in the above photo is fellow Pom Pom Girls star Lisa Reeves, aka John Sanderson’s paramour Miss Lawrence from “Times of Change.”

Bobbie quickly tells Charles he proposed marriage to Anna, but the Moff threatened to kill him and then immediately left town with Anna.

He adds he loves her and would do anything to find her.

OLIVE: He is without question the hottest guy I’ve ever seen on this show.

WILL: Who was Number One on your list before?

OLIVE: Adam.

WILL: Oh, well, his stories are coming up very soon.

OLIVE: I know, I can’t wait.

Reverend/Captain surmises Anna only left town to protect Bobbie from her father’s violence. Then he gets right to the point and asks about their sexual relationship.

WILL: This would be a very awkward conversation to have.

Indeed, Bobbie is stunned to learn about the baby.

DAGNY [as BOBBIE]: “. . . That SLUT!”

But no, he in fact insists that they go searching for Anna at once.

WILL: He has hair to rival Landon’s.

DAGNY: I was just thinking that.

OLIVE: Or Albert’s.

He says he’ll be ready to go in a moment, then excuses himself to tell his father what’s happened.

WILL [as CLARK HARRIS]: “WHAAAAAAAAT???!!!”

Then we cut to Charles and Bobbie searching the forest, accompanied by weird but effective “walking bass” music from the Rose.

DAGNY: This cinematography is beautiful. It’s like that Robert Altman movie with the Leonard Cohen song.

WILL: McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

DAGNY: Yeah. Some of the shots are that good.

After a break, we see an unshaven Charles and Bobbie talking about how they’ve searched five days to no avail. That seems like a lot. Did they not start out from where they found the baby? It couldn’t have been that far away from the cabin.

Bobbie assures Charles that even if they don’t find Anna, he’ll take good care of the baby.

DAGNY: Who does Bobbie look like? He’s very familiar.

WILL: An Osmond?

OLIVE: Timothée Chalamet.

I’ve only used AI image generation for Walnut Groovy one other time, but today I did ask DeepAI to create a picture of “Donny Osmond crossed with Timothée Chalumet.” The results are not un-Michael-Mullins-like!

Little do the two of them know they’re right on top of the Mears cabin! And the Moff, who’s stalking the woods with a gun, spots them!

Blowing a gasket, the Moff rushes back to the cabin. He starts screaming at Anna about lying about all her “long walks,” saying that Bobbie’s come for her.

WILL: “Him and some little handsome orange-skinned meddler!”

The Moff has a full-on nervous breakdown then; and when Anna swears to God that she did nothing to summon her boyfriend, he screams “DON’T SAY THAT!” and hurls the lantern at her!

Anna tries to put the fire out, but the Moff seizes her. 

Then she says they have to escape, but he shouts, “If we be sinners, we shall burn in the fires of Hell!” (A fine Peel-ian quote.)

So then, she knocks him over, and, as often seems to happen in fiction, he hits his head on the fireplace fender and is knocked unconscious.

WILL: I think there’s a Poirot novel where the resolution is that there wasn’t a murder, he just hit his head on the fireplace fender. I can’t remember which one. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Actually I do remember, but I’m not going to tell you and spoil the fun. – WK]

DAGNY: Or oh my God, it’s like Toranaga-sama’s son on Shōgun.

WILL: Yeah. That was in a koi pond, though.

Not knowing if her dad’s alive or dead, Ann drags him outside – kind of improbable, since she looks like a mere slip of a thing and Donald Moffat was over 6’1”.

Out in the forest, Charles and Bobbie spot the smoke. I should mention, they’re not riding the Chonkies, just standard-issue Bunny-model saddle horses.

Strangely, David Rose doesn’t really up the urgency, just continues the plodding walking-bass line.

No matter, the heroes find the place.

WILL: It burned to the ground already? That was fast.

DAGNY: It was that curtain.

Anna and Bobbie embrace, and Charles announces that sadly, Donald Moffat will live.

Anna recognizes Charles from Baby Giveaway Day, and cries, “You! You’re the man that . . .”

Charles rises proudly and says, “Yeah,” which got laughter and applause in our gallery.

DAGNY [as CHARLES, smugly]: “Yeah. I’m Charles Ingalls.”

Charles tells her the baby is fine, and Anna says she was able to successfully hide her pregnancy from the dumb Moff.

Charles dismisses the kids.

DAGNY: I’m surprised she doesn’t ride sidesaddle. She just had a baby, for God’s sake.

When the Moff wakes up, Charles lectures him about his idiocy.

But the Moff won’t hear it, preferring to back into the smoldering ruin than listen to reason.

With more disgust than sympathy, Charles says, “I’ll pray for you,” and leaves.

DAGNY: Charles wears some interesting pants.
OLIVE: They’re plenty tight.
DAGNY: No, I mean in the closer shots you can see the pattern. From a distance they look like they’re common-people pants, but sometimes you can see they’re made of expensive fabric. I’ve been noticing this lately.

And the camera backs away from the Moff, leaving him alone with his prayers.

DAGNY: This is quite the shot. It’s like reverse Evil Dead.

Later, Caroline and Anna shoot the shit in the common room.

Tortured by guilt, Anna starts choking an apology for her sinful ways, but Caroline says, “I think our Lord put it best . . .”

WILL [as CAROLINE]: “Popcorn is fine, if you get married.”

But in fact, she references Jesus’ famous catchphrase, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” (John 8:7.)

Upstairs, poor Laura cries as she gets Baby Hitler ready to leave.

The tears even look real for once.

WILL: She hasn’t looked this unhappy since she was asking Red Buttons for his magic powders.

Laura gnashes her gopher fangs sadly, but basically does a good job with the handoff.

Anna thanks her and says, “Your pa was nice enough to give me a picture of you.”

WILL: A picture of her? What do they mean, one Carrie drew? They couldn’t afford a photograph in a million years.

DAGNY: Yeah, and if they did, they wouldn’t just give it to some rando Jezebel.

Anna says she’ll keep the name Grace and make sure the baby always remembers her “other mommy.”

WILL: That was a very special Little House.

DAGNY: That was a very special Little House.

Then as Laura’s face fades into the rippling creek, Voiceover Laura says, “I knew I’d never see my Grace again.”

WILL: Why? They live six miles away.

She goes on: “I pray someday I’ll have a babe of my own, my very own.”

WILL [as VOICEOVER LAURA]: “Her name will be Rose. She’ll be insane. She’ll be a Libertarian and write all my books. But I’ll take the credit, ha ha ha!”

And we close, strangely, on the first bottle floating down the creek towards Laura and Bandit again. Like, huh, what? Never before have we hit a time bubble DURING a story!

Oh well. Bum-Bum-Ba-Dum!

STYLE WATCH: Laura wears a bonnie new pinafore in the final scene. I think.

Charles appears to go commando again.

THE VERDICT: A very good if very dark fairy tale with disturbing undertones, this one is not really for kids, despite the superficially 7+ “Laura finds a baby!” cover story. (It has a lot of fairy tale elements, actually: the maiden kept prisoner by an evil ogre, the baby lost in the forest, the questing heroes saving her at the end. All it would need is Laura to get the messages from that frog instead of a bottle!)

There is a subtext to be found here about women’s personal (and bodily) autonomy that must have been interesting then, and still is. It’s all superbly done, and the cast is excellent across the board.

Thanks for hanging with me, reader. Next week our run of good stories comes to an end! I’ll see ya then.

UP NEXT: The Inheritance