A Most Precious Gift

The Birds and The Beads; or

Mistress Mary, She-Wolf of Hero Township

(a recap by Will Kaiser)

Title: A Most Precious Gift

Airdate: February 27, 1978

Written by Carole and Michael Raschella 

Directed by Michael Landon

SUMMARY IN A NUTSHELL: Ma becomes pregnant, but quickly spirals into prenatal depression and paranoia. Meanwhile, the Bead has a baby too; and Carrie lays eggs.

RECAP: We open with ducks again. Almost four full seasons passed without a single duck in this town, and now they’re like a Biblical plague.

These are just normal mallards, not the weird genetic mutants we saw in “The Inheritance.” I suppose those all died when their malformed skulls let them down.

The title of this one, we see, is “A Most Precious Gift” – no quotation marks. I have to say, I’m a little surprised. I feel I’m developing a sixth sense about which Little House titles will be in quotes and which won’t.

You can tell this is going to be an ambitious and significant episode, because David Rose immediately gives us an elaborate flute solo that’s as lovely as a summer sunrise.

The camera pans from the ducks to a small bird with three eggs in a nest.

DAGNY: Those eggs look like Whoppers.

I’m sure the readers of this blog, whose recall for details on this show far exceeds my own, will recognize the allusion to a previous episode which begins the same way: “The Lord is My Shepherd,” Part One.

As in that story, we may be dealing with a common house finch again. Hard to tell for sure, as I can’t see its face, and I’m no bird expert.

Presumably Landon contracted with his local finch-and-duck wrangler and wanted to get his full money’s worth before the end of the season.

The finch flies away, because she’s spotted a predator inching its way towards her on the branch. (If you wish, you may imagine the voice of David Attenborough as you read the next couple paragraphs.)

That predator is the Lesser Carrie Ingalls (Glopfacia Awkwardus). It was fairly common in the southwest Minnesota wilderness in the 1870s. 

While this species will climb trees in search of eggs or insects, it builds its own nest in the ground.

This episode was written by the husband-and-wife team Carole and Michael Raschella, who made an accomplished debut earlier this season with “Times of Change.”

Carrie doesn’t eat the eggs, just steals them. She runs to show Pa, and we see we’re in the vicinity of the covered bridge again.

Pa, who’s fishing, gently tells her she shouldn’t have taken them, because now they won’t hatch. I can’t judge Carrie too harshly, because I remember doing the exact same thing when I was six or so.

Carrie offers to put them back, but Pa says they’re no point. Apparently the notion that bird parents will abandon the nest if it’s touched is a myth; but it also seems the eggs must be handled very delicately if the embryos inside are to survive. Since Carrie was running with them, I expect these eggs are pretty well scrambled.

Carrie quickly hatches a plan (I’m sorry, the pun was irresistible) to incubate the eggs under her pillow at home.

Adoring the child in spite of the idiotic things she does, as parents will do, Pa smiles after her.

Then whoa, we cut to a closeup of the Bead’s pregnant belly!

Mrs. Simms is hosting Caroline for tea and talking about how she never expected to get pregnant at her age. (This episode actually aired on Charlotte Stewart’s thirty-seventh birthday!)

The Bead says she has plenty of experience screaming at and beating older children (paraphrase), but she’s worried what it’ll be like to care for a baby.

“Even Luke was practically a young man when I married his father,” she goes on. She doesn’t mention why her stepson Luke Simms, Nellie’s ex-husband, disappeared from school so quickly, but it’s been about three years in Little House Universal Time (LHUT) since he was introduced, so I expect he simply graduated at some point and perhaps has moved away now. (We don’t see him in this story, somewhat disappointingly.)

I’ve known women who’ve had so-called geriatric pregnancies, and, like the Bead, I can’t imagine myself having the energy in middle age to wrangle babies and toddlers. People manage, though.

Caroline says she felt the same way when she was pregnant with Mary, but “when the moment arrived . . . it was beautiful – natural.” (Presumably Carole and Michael Raschella watched “The Lord is My Shepherd” and, seeing how Karen Grassle plays childbirth like having an orgasm, felt they needed to explain that odd choice.)

Caroline says she almost wishes she was the one who was pregnant. The Bead says since they’re “practically the same age” (in reality Grassle was a year younger) she could certainly have more children.

Caroline says Mary growing up makes her feel old, though not presumably as old as women whose doctors classify their pregnancies as geriatric.

Anyways, Dags and I can certainly relate to feeling sad about kids growing up and leaving the nest.

The Bead mentions by way of exposition that Mary will be teaching school whilst she’s on maternity leave. (Not for long!)

That night in the Little House common room, Carrie’s fucking around with Laura’s papers and gets screamed at. But Pa just chuckles and tousles her hair.

Mary asks Ma to help her figure out a new “teacher” hairdo.

OLIVE: I like Mary better after she goes blind.

WILL: Do you? I don’t know if I do.

OLIVE: Yeah. Cuz then Adam’s on the show.

Pa says, “You know, she reminds me of a lovely young girl I knew once, name of Caroline Quiner.”

Caroline’s maiden name was not mentioned in “‘I Remember, I Remember’”; in fact, that story implied all the Quiner kids took their stepfather’s name, Holbrook, by the time Charles met them.

Appreciating the reference, Ma flirts with Pa.

Then Carrie draws on Laura’s homework again, so Pa puts her to bed.

WILL: Is that wall getting worse? It looks like a bomb went off.

Carrie has made a “nest” out of a sock or something and is indeed keeping the eggs under her pillow.

The next morning, we get a chicken’s-eye view of the Little House. I have to say, this show always impresses me at finding new angles to shoot the same old sets from. That can’t be easy.

Caroline has slept in . . . till 5 a.m.! Charles wakes her.

ALEXANDER: Is he gonna cook Carrie’s eggs for her?

When Ma sits up, she gets a sudden touch of vertigo.

Charles suggests she go see Doc, but she waves him off.

Cut to school (so it’s at least September of 1879-G). Mrs. Simms walks up the row, and we see the students attending class today are the Kid with Very Red Hair (Mean One), both Ambiguously Ethnic Kids, Not-Linda Hunt, the Gelfling Boy, the Smallest Nondescript Helen of Them All, Not-Ellen Taylor, Willie, Nellie, the Non-Binary Kid, Laura, Andrew Garvey, Carrie, the Midsommar Kid, the Miniature Midsommar Kid, a few nondescript Helens, and, in a surprise return, H. Quincy Fusspot! 

Young Quincy has not been seen since “The Wolves,” fourteen stories ago. I thought perhaps he was eaten by the dogs, in fact.

The Bead is telling the kids how the U.S. population in 1870 was over 38 million, “not including the Indians.” (Of course.)

The Bead adds that number has since gone up, as Colorado became a state in 1876.

The Bead asks for guesses as to Minnesota’s population, and we see Ol’ Four Eyes – excuse me, I mean Mary – is sitting at the Bead’s desk. Apparently Mary’s going to be the Bead’s Bib Fortuna until she leaves.

Willie guesses 50,000, but the Bead says the answer is more like 400,000. 

More precisely, and quite strangely, the Bead says the population was “four hundred thousand seven hundred and six,” when the figure I found was 439,706. How could she be off by exactly 39,000 people?

Anyways, 439,706 was correct in 1870 – presumably the most recent year for which the Bead has available data. But in reality by 1879 that number had nearly doubled.

The Bead says Walnut Grove has a population of 127. (Don’t worry, I won’t be listing them all.)

“Pretty soon it’s gonna be a hundred and twenty-eight!” jokes Laura.

WILL [as THE BEAD]: “Laura, stand in the corner.”

The Bead dismisses the class for recess, and we see Mary does indeed have her hair done in a new and severe style.

Carrie lingers behind and asks the Bead how babies are made, more or less. The Bead dodges that one, though.

Then Carrie tells her about her bird eggs.

“How long till it hatches?” Carrie slurps, and the Bead, apparently interpreting this as a question about human gestation, says, “Well, about nine months,” even though she’s obviously several months along herself.

“Thank you, Miss Simms!” Carrie slurps.

ROMAN: Oh, that’s right, she’s Mrs. Simms now.

OLIVE: No she isn’t.

Carrie runs out, leaving the Bead to giggle at her idiocy.

Back at the Little House, Caroline is ill and sweating.

She sits down for a breather; but when Charles suddenly appears and catches her slacking, he knows something’s off.

He declares he’s taking her to see Doc, immediately. She protests, saying, “You’re wasting money we don’t even have.”

AMELIA: Doesn’t Doc get paid in apples?

In about the laziest technical thing we’ve ever seen on this show, someone on the production team has just put a crude drawing of trees outside the kitchen window.

We skip then to the end of her appointment with Doc Baker, who throws his privacy curtain open.

Caroline says to Doc she didn’t need to come in, because she knows it’s just menopause.

Doc says [at 35 or 36] she’s young for menopause. “Well, it happens,” she replies.

ROMAN [as DOC]: “Well, I find your diagnosis LAME.”

No, actually he says, “I got a lot of patients who think they know more than I do.”

OLIVE: Yeah. THE LIVING ONES!

Doc then shocks Caroline by telling her she’s preggers.

She immediately runs to the Mill to tell Charles, who’s ecstatic. It’s nice – you’d think with how poor they are, this news might be taken another way.

Meanwhile, a strange old man we’ve never seen drives by.

OLIVE: How did they conceive the baby if Carrie’s always in their room?

Some time later, we see Laura and Andrew Garvey discussing the pregnancy.

Andy says he supposes Laura’s ma and pa are hoping for a boy.

“What’s so great about boys anyway?” Laura asks.

“Well, can you fix a barn roof?” says Andy.

“Sure,” Laura says. “Can you have a baby?”

Which is a great answer.

They’ve been working on some project in the Little House yard. Caroline invites Andrew to supper, but he politely declines.

Andy thanks Charles for paying him to do a little handiwork around the house. Pa also paid Peter Lundstrom last week.

WILL: I don’t understand, two stories ago they were incredibly poor. How can they afford to hire people?

DAGNY: They only hire children. 

Charles notes to Caroline what a “fine boy” Andy is, which puts her into a trance or reverie.

That night in bed, Caroline twists her hair, as she often does when she’s anxious about something.

She wakes Pa up to ask him if he wants a boy or a girl.

DAGNY: She’s doing Little Girl Voice. That always makes me want to punch her in the throat.

When Charles says he doesn’t care, Ma says, “Wouldn’t you want to carry on the Ingalls name?” and Pa replies, “Come on, nobody knows the name of Ingalls outside of Walnut Grove.”

WILL: Is that a joke? What about the famous Ingalls Carriage Company???

Caroline presses him (not literally), and he finally says he’d love to have a boy.

Caroline smiles at this, but then she immediately starts twisting her hair and staring vacantly at the ceiling. David accompanies this on a heavenly celeste.

After a break, Laura runs through the countryside yelling for Bandit whilst “Cutesy-Poo Recess” plays on the soundtrack.

She catches him eating out of a food bowl on the ground at the campsite of an old woman.

The woman, who looks a bit like my paternal grandma, wears a kerchief over her hair, a colorful skirt, and long strings of beads; in other words, she is dressed like a Romani – traditionally known in English as a “gypsy,” though that term is considered offensive by the Romani people themselves. (So don’t use it, please.)

She also wears thick “Time Enough at Last” spectacles.

A wagon behind the woman advertises her as “Madam Maria, Cheiromanist” – a rare term that means palm reader. (“Chiromancer” or “chiromantist” would be more usual.)

Laura apologizes, saying Bandit never steals things, though his penchant for stealing is actually well established on this show. That’s why they called him Bandit, for fuck’s sake!

But I suppose she could just be lying to save face.

In accented English (don’t ask me what kind), the old lady introduces herself as Maria – single name only, like Cher – and invites Laura to sit down and shoot the shit.

Madam Maria says she tells fortunes, and Laura exclaims “a soothsayer!” 

“Your vocabulary is excellent,” Madam Maria says. Three episodes ago she didn’t know what persistent meant, but never mind that now.

Laura tells her she has two siblings and asks to have her fortune told. 

WILL [as MADAM MARIA, skeptically]: Ya got cash, kid?

But Maria actually just shrugs off the request and says she wants to eat her breakfast, which appears to be a hearty beef soup.

Laura comments on the wagon’s decoration, and Madam Maria tells her that the stars are five-pointed “pentacles” and that five (not 42) is the number that’s the real answer to life, the universe, and everything. (Actually the stars are technically pentagrams – a pentacle would have a circle around the star.)

She adds, “Like five days, five centuries, the fifth son, the fifth child,” as if these examples obviously prove her point instead of just being random nouns like toadstool or shopping cart.

Laura then says, “My mother’s expecting her fifth baby right now.” As others have noted, this is actually the first reference we’ve had to the late Charles Frederick “Freddie” Ingalls since he died, even though there have been some obvious times it might have come up, like when a goat also named Fred was terrorizing the populace.

“My sympathies,” Madam Maria says, confusing Laura, until she adds, “For the one that didn’t live.”

This shocks Laura, but it shouldn’t. Like any good con artist, Madam M simply listened and used the information she was given: that Laura’s pregnant mother has had five pregnancies but Laura now only has two siblings.

Perhaps worried that Madam Maria also knows she’s personally responsible for Freddie’s death, Laura says, “Well, I’d best be going.”

Madam Maria tells Laura to watch for Cheiromancy Fest ’79, which will be hitting Walnut Grove soon.

Then she wows her again by saying she foresaw that Bandit would steal her breakfast. Come on, Laura, you didn’t just fall off the turnip-wagon.

That night at the house, Pa tucks Carrie, her eggs, and Bandit into bed.

The Bead has either had her baby, or just sloughed off her tedious paper-grading duties to Mary.

OLIVE: Mary looks like such an old wench in this episode. That hairstyle ages her fifty years.

Meanwhile, the fortuneteller is Laura’s Obsession Of The Week.

And Ma brushes her hot, hot hair.

The next day, Ma and Laura go to see Madam Maria. Ma is really showing; she must be five months along or so. This means there must have been a big time gap between Ma’s hair-twisting scene and Laura’s initial contact with the fortuneteller; but let’s wait till the baby is born and then we can work backwards to date this one.

Ma’s also wearing Boo Berry.

Madam Maria greets Ma by name. (See? Good listener.)

Laura then hears the school bell ringing and runs off. They can’t be far from the urban center, then – possibly near the Wasteland Area Where Mary Picks Up Men?

Maria deduces Ma wants her fortune read.

She invites her into the wagon.

ALEXANDER: Don’t do it, Ma! She’ll harvest your organs!

DAGNY: Yeah, or bake you in an oven.

Inside, Caroline passes through beaded curtains like those in Rhoda’s apartment on Mary Tyler Moore.

The old gal asks Ma to sit down, then stares into a crystal ball. (Classic.)

Maria is played by Lili Valenty, a Polish-born actor who was actually 77 at the time this was filmed!

She was on Bonanza several times, and she appeared in the movie Spartacus (in which she played “Old Crone,” nice).

Anyways, Madam Maria begins: “The roots of your family are planted far from here.”

“Yes, Wisconsin!” says Ma. One might argue that one state over is not that “far from here,” but then again it is 400 miles from Walnut Grove to Concord. I’ll accept it.

“You may expect a visit of one of its female members following the birth of your baby,” Madam M goes on.

“Is it my mother?” Ma asks, totally convinced.

But Maria can’t see that. (It could also be Caroline’s sister Eliza Ann, who you’ll remember is now married to Charles’s brother Peter and living in the Big Woods; or it could be her twice-over-sister-in-law Polly, Pa’s sister who married Ma’s brother Henry.)

Caroline’s mother Charlotte Quiner Holbrook of course will visit down the road – in her coffin, ha ha ha!

Then Madam Maria says she’ll tell her about the baby. She asks to hold Ma’s wedding ring.

Oddly, there’s no music during this sequence. (Asleep at the wheel, David?)

Madam M suspends the ring on a chain, dangles it in front of Caroline’s belly, and predicts the baby will be a boy.

DAGNY: This is an old wives’ tale.

WILL: Oh, it’s a real practice?

DAGNY: Yeah. Sometimes they do it with the woman’s hair.

She’s right, of course.

Ma becomes skeptical then, and Maria, annoyed, asks her to cough up ten cents – $3 in today’s money. That’s rather cheap compared to 2024 rates. Looks like the fortuneteller at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival charges forty bucks.

DAGNY: Is that a Lululemon purse?

While Ma is fishing in her purse, Madam Maria looks in her egg basket and says, “It is said that round eggs produce daughters, long eggs produce sons.” 

Caroline departs, as David gives us Slavic motifs in the score.

AMELIA: This sounds like the music from Clue.

Well, those of you hoping for an encore of Mrs. Oleson’s performance of “(I Dream of) Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” last time are in luck, because she’s singing it again as we cut to the Mercantile.

But she chokes on dust and cuts herself off as Caroline comes in.

Mrs. O says she can’t believe both Caroline and the Bead are still going about their daily routines. So I guess that means the Bead’s baby has not been born yet. She must be ready to pop, though, if she’s four months or so ahead of Ma.

Mrs. Oleson starts sorting Ma’s eggs, then, and Caroline, obviously lying, suddenly says she forgot to keep eggs out for Charles’s breakfast.

She spends much time examining and selecting the eggs.

WILL: She’s like Hercule Poirot.

Presumably Ma misunderstood Madam Maria’s point about the eggs, thinking sex is determined by eating round or oblong eggs. What she meant, I believe, is that male birds hatch out of long ones and females out of round. (Which is apparently true.)

That night at dinner, Ma gives a dramatic summary of her appointment with the soothsayer.

Pa scoffs and says mildly, “Can’t imagine you spending hard-earned money for that.”

Later, Carrie takes a ring – I don’t know where she got it – and dangles it from a thread over the bird eggs. You’re telling me she kept them all this time? I really can’t believe she’d have the attention span. But I suppose the Bead did tell her it would take nine months. . . .

Then we cut to school, where Mistress Mary, She-Wolf of Hero Township, is handing out papers she’s graded.

“Don’t get too excited,” she says. “They weren’t very good.”

DAGNY: God, what a bitch!

Willie complains that he shouldn’t be penalized simply because he has poor handwriting, and Mary instantly hands out a sadistic punishment: writing “I will not argue with the teacher” 50 times.

Then the Bead goes into labor!

OLIVE: Her water should break and the whole front row gets sprayed.

And the next thing you know, Alice Garvey is driving out to give Caroline the news that the Bead had a boy: Matthew Adam Simms.

Caroline does not respond with the joy Alice expected.

That night, Pa jokes that the Bead’s baby is “almost big enough to sign up for class!”

He asks if Ma wants to go see the new arrival in the morning, but she says irritably, “I don’t know yet, Charles.”

Then the girls start blathering about whether all babies have blue eyes (they don’t), and Ma suddenly says, “Can’t we talk about something else besides that . . . that baby?” and rushes outside crying.

The girls are alarmed, but Pa says getting ready to have a baby is stressful.

WILL: She probably has pica. She should eat some ashes from Charles’s pipe.

He goes outside, where he finds Caroline sobbing in the barn.

“It isn’t fair!” she snarls through tears. “She doesn’t need a son! She already has Luke!”

As he did earlier, Charles says it should make no difference to them what sex the child is.

Really seeming like she’s losing her marbles, Caroline accuses Charles of lying about not caring, then suddenly starts reassuring him she’s sure they will have a boy. We haven’t seen her go this bonkers since she almost cut off her you-know-what.

Rather than hugging her, Pa just holds her shoulders oddly.

Ma collects herself then, chirps “Your supper’s getting cold!” and abruptly goes inside.

Pa stares after her, bewildered.

After a commercial break, we see Ma standing at Freddie’s grave!

This raises a number of questions. 

First, the dates. Freddie’s tombstone says he was born on November 1, 1875, and died on August 27, 1876. Charles Frederick (or Frederic) Ingalls was a real person, of course, and these are the true dates of his birth and death. 

(I’ve recently learned that Laura Ingalls Wilder spelled his name as Freddy, not “Freddie” . . . but I’m not going to go back and change all the mentions now. Sorry, Bonnetheads.)

In the Little House TV Universe, however, we had dated both birth and death to 1878 in the A timeline.

Well, this can be easily reconciled, I think. Regular readers know this show occasionally hits a time bubble and “resets” the date to 1876. 

This has never before happened retroactively, but there’s a first time for everything, so what seemed to be 1878 in Season One has now become 1876.

This of course creates a new cycle of stories (covering everything from “The Lord is My Shepherd” to “For My Lady” in Season Two) in between the A and B timelines. We shall call this new timeline “A2.”

Someday I’ll reveal the entire timeline to you, my dear readers, and you’ll be agog at how amazing it is.

Second:

WILL: I don’t believe he would have such an expensive tombstone. It would have been made of wood, like they used for Charles’s mom.

DAGNY: I don’t know, I can see it.

WILL: Well, where’d they get the stone?

DAGNY: Charles probably saved it when he was working in the mines.

That happened after Freddie’s death, of course.

Third, I came away from “The Lord is My Shepherd” with the distinct impression that Freddie had been buried in Mankato, where he died – likely in a pauper’s grave. Dagny found this unbelievable at the time; and yet, there is no suggestion in the famous “In Heaven, child” scene that they brought Freddie’s remains home with them, and there’s no funeral scene or anything else to imply he was buried in Groveland.

But clearly I was wrong, for here he is.

Anyways, Caroline says to God, “It’s hard to know where to begin. . . . My mind’s been so unsettled. . . . When You took our son four years ago, I accepted it without question, even though it hurt more than we could have imagined.”

(I accept it without question too – at least the “four years ago” part, which lines up just about right with our timeline.)

“That baby meant so much to us,” she goes on, “especially to his pa.” 

This is true.

“Loving Charles the way I do,” Ma says, breaking down, “I can’t bear the thought of failing him. I’ve searched my heart for how I may have offended You, and I’ve tried to put it right. If it’s not enough, punish me, but don’t let Charles suffer for what I’ve done.”

Caroline’s vision of a wrathful God punishing her for her sins isn’t really in line with the picture of Him that’s been presented on this show so far. Certainly it’s a far cry from the gentle, loving deity described by Ernest Borgnine in “Shepherd,” who answers Laura’s guilt with kindness and mercy.

But Caroline has always been a little more hardcore about religion than the rest of her family, as her non-stop complaining about people working on the Sabbath will attest.

Anyways, Karen Grassle is terrific in this scene.

Well, then we cut to the church, where parishioners are gathering.

Laura, Mary and Carrie notice the Bead’s there with her baby, and they rush to meet him.

Everybody’s crowded around her, with the Olesons, Carl the Flunky, Not-Richard Libertini, and (I think) the Alamo Tourist from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure amongst them.

Adam Simms is also there, and he shouts for Charles to come see the baby.

“I’ll be along in a minute, Charles,” Caroline says to him. Watching the group from afar, she frets and frets.

The Bead then brings the baby over to Caroline, who steels herself for the encounter.

A smart cookie as ever, the Bead remarks she had expected to see Caroline before now.

Caroline apologizes, and then thaws a bit when she sees the baby. She takes him in her arms.

They head in then, Caroline obviously still struggling internally.

Then we cut to Caroline in the barn at night, wiping the dust off a bassinet. 

Charles enters quietly, pleased to see Ma smiling and rocking the bassinet.

She looks up, and says, “Remember when you made this?”

“Yeah, sure I do,” he replies. (Well, I don’t. It isn’t the same one he made for Freddie.)

Caroline says sometimes she feels like Freddie’s missing from the dinner table.

WILL: Yeah, just like Banquo in Macbeth.

“Now that place will be filled,” she says, “by our son.”

And the smile runs away from Charles’s face.

Pa finally cracks and says, “Why do you have to keep saying that all the time?”

“Because I want a boy,” Caroline says Britishly. “For you!” (It’s the first appearance of British Caroline we’ve had in a while.)

She actually sounds like Tallulah Bankhead, who wasn’t British either, though you’d never know it from her speech.

Charles says that kind of thinking is making her ill. 

OLIVE: Yeah. She did this to herself. I have no sympathy.

“You made this cradle for our son!” says Ma.

“Caroline, I made the cradle for our child,” Pa fires back. I’m realizing how rarely it is they actually argue about anything. It creates an uncomfortable feeling for the viewer, not that different from how real children feel when their parents fight.

Caroline brings up what he said about Andrew Garvey, which must be surprising to Charles, since that conversation was months ago by this point.

Charles shouts back at her that that’s crazy talk.

“You don’t understand,” Caroline says. And indeed, I think men rarely do understand the burden their dreams and expectations put on women, whether they intend it or not.

Finally, Charles says, “We had a son and he died! It’s over.”

WILL: Wow, this is just like Don’t Look Now.

Then, shockingly, Charles says, “God, you’re as bad as Carrie with her dead eggs trying to give birth to birds” and walks out.

I was simply stunned by this comment; we all gasped, in fact. If you’re reading this, please take my advice and never say anything remotely like it to a pregnant woman. Especially if you’re married to her!

The line is also shocking because Charles uses the Lord’s name in vain – something that would be particularly offensive to commandment-following Caroline.

WILL: What a scene.

Then we see some hatchlings in a nest.

This is apparently in the barn at the Old Sanderson Place (barn swallows?), where Jonathan Garvey looks up at the nest and smiles.

OLIVE: Bae.

The barn must have been rebuilt since it burned down in “The High Cost of Being Right.”

Charles appears, but when Garvey points out the birds, Charles, who has had quite enough talk about birds and eggs, winces.

Charles says he and Caroline are having some problems, and asks if the girls could come stay with the Garveys for a little while. 

Garvey says of course. Such a good guy.

After a break, the girls arrive, toting the carpetbag.

The first thing Garvey does is tell Carrie her eggs will never hatch. Nice!

Garvey is an established expert on the natural world, of course.

But in fact, he has a subtle plan. He tells Carrie the reason they won’t hatch is because bird’s nests “need to be up high.” Then he mentions he’s got “an empty nest” in his barn.

WILL [as JONATHAN GARVEY]: “Mind you, not the popular sitcom starring Granville Whipple.”

Garvey says with Carrie’s permission, he’ll transplant the eggs into it. Very clever, Garvey.

When Charles gets home, he finds Caroline having an orgasm in bed. This can only mean one thing – she’s having the baby!

OLIVE: Come on. She has a fresh face of glowy dewy makeup, and a blowout, for crying out loud.

When Charles says he’ll get Doc, Caroline shouts “No!” Which is understandable.

Charles says he’ll stay.

That night, we see all the kids having a slumber party at the Garveys’.

OLIVE: Laura should wake up and Andy and Mary are making out.

ROMAN: She would be so pissed.

Carrie wakes up, and, taking advantage of there being no rules, as kids often do when they stay at their friends’ homes, actually goes out to the barn in the middle of the night to check on the eggs.

WILL: Is she gonna burn it down again?

ROMAN: Nah. Mary would, though.

Back at the Little House, Caroline’s labor continues, with Charles himself acting as midwife.

Back in the Barn of Garve, Carrie finds the baby birds and slurps, “I’m a mommy!”

At the Little House again, the baby is born.

Pa nervously tells Ma the baby is a healthy girl, and hands her over.

The spell broken at last, Ma stares adoringly at the baby and says she feels wonderful.

WILL: Charles must have dosed her with laudanum. That’s what he should have done the minute she started having problems, in fact.

Pa tells her they now have a situation, because the only names Ma selected were Graham and Nathaniel.

WILL: It makes sense she would want to name the baby after that insane guy who kept his daughter prisoner.

The two exchange smiles and loving words. Voiceover Laura takes the reins at this point, telling us she didn’t realize the extent of Ma’s prenatal depression until later, and that they named the baby Grace.

Apparently Nathaniel not fitting, they thought another random name from “‘Be My Friend’” would do just as well.

Either that, or Laura, who came up with Grace Mears’s name herself, lobbied to use the name again. 

Yeah, probably that. Bum-Bum-Ba-Dum!

Oh, I forgot, I said I was going to work backwards to date this story. Well, since Ma explicitly tells us we’re in 1880 at the end, we’ll go with that. Assuming the Bead’s pregnancy was only about a month ahead of Caroline’s (instead of three or four as I originally thought), we could date the early part of this story to April (an unusual time of year for birds to lay eggs, but whatever). If there was a gap of five months between Ma learning she’s pregnant and Laura meeting Madam Maria, that would mean the little Beadling was born in September and Baby Grace in October.

I can live with that. See you next time. 

STYLE WATCH: Charles appears to go commando again.

THE VERDICT:

AMELIA: I wanted to like that one, but it was a little boring.

I’m not sure I agree. The fortuneteller is a red herring, but this one features searing dialogue and top-notch performances from Grassle and Landon. (Merlin Olsen, too.) The scene where Ma and Pa argue is stunning.

UP NEXT: I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away, Part One (yeah, yeah, yeah!)