“He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not” (Part One)

New York CITY?!; or

It Took a Gay Guy To Teach Nels To Be a Man

(a recap by Will Kaiser)

Title: “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not” [sic]

Airdate: May 5, 1980

Written and directed by Michael Landon

SUMMARY IN A NUTSHELL: 

Almanzo shows his true colors when Pa insists Laura can’t marry till she’s eighteen.

Meanwhile, a little fussbudget named Percival Dalton knocks the Grove on its ass.

RECAP: If we’re still all here and have managed to avoid nuclear annihilation this week, welcome back! I can’t say how glad I am to see you.

WILL: Ducks! There’ve been a lot of ducks this season. 

ROMAN: Someone probably opened a foie gras farm.

AMELIA: They should be loons. This is Minnesota.

WILL: I don’t know if loons can produce foie gras.

In addition to the ducks, Laura and Manly are enjoying a romantic creekside picnic. 

If you’re wondering if last week’s ick factor has worn off, it hasn’t.

AMELIA: Roman, does your new girlfriend know how into Little House we are?

ROMAN: I don’t know.

WILL: . . . You don’t KNOW?

ROMAN: Well, it wasn’t one of the first things I mentioned to her.

(Hm. It is when I meet new people.)

This episode aired on May 5th, 1980 –  two months after “Sweet Sixteen.” And for the first time before a season finale, Little House aired a succession of repeats, in quite a weird order:

(“The King is Dead” was up against It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown on CBS. Ha! Charles M. Schulz vs Milo Stavroupolis? I’d call that a no-contest.)

As a kid, I hated when shows would make this switch to repeats. Hated it! (And to this day, nothing exceeds the ire of American children enduring recycled entertainment.)

The one nice thing about this specific break was that this Season Six finale must have felt like a special, and a truly special one at that. 

Anyways, this is actually the aftermath of a picnic, accompanied by some John-Denverian love music from the Rose. (As everyone knows, the eighties didn’t actually start till we had MTV in 1981, so I have no problem with Rosie’s being stuck in the seventies here.)

As for our lovers, Laura’s hair is down.

Zaldamo looks characteristically confused.

Laura and Manly seem at the point in dating where they no longer have anything to talk about – a dire milestone. 

Pretty soon for that to be happening, guys.

Others have noticed that Dean Butler dampens his gee-whiz-sis! affect at about this point in the series. 

Indeed, Manly is pretty much just muttering here. Not a suggestion of gee-whiz-sis about it.

Laura notes that they’re “all the way out here [at] the lake.” She must mean Willow/Cattail Lake, to the northeast of the Little House. 

Though, the water does seem to be flowing, which would make it more likely Lake Kezia – a sort of bay, you’ll recall, off the shores of Plum Creek near the Old Lar[r]abee Place.

Of course, the Wilder Farm is really much closer to Lake Ellen, named for its most famous drowning victim.

But I believe this is Willow/Cattail, since Laura says “all the way out here,” and the other two options are closer to town than the Little House is. And I think Laura chose it because it’s further away, and would make the outing feel like a “little adventure.”

Anyways, if you pay attention to the dialogue, it seems Manly invited Laura on this picnic to tell her something, but has neglected to do it.

You know, maybe it isn’t a picnic. I’m not sure we’ve seen any food, though Laura seems to be throwing bread to the birds. (I was once attacked by a Canada goose under the misapprehension that I meant harm to its goslings. Large waterfowl are no joke. Make no mistake.)

Since Zaldamo can’t say what he thinks, Laura suggests he write her a note, and he does.

AMELIA: He writes her a NOTE? I would have slapped her.

Good grief (to quote Charles M. Schulz).

Well, Almanzo chooses to write her a note. But he immediately hits a snag.

“Dadburn it!” he says. “The point broke!” (Okay, that was a little gee-whiz-sis.)

Laura reads the aborted message out loud. “Dearest Laura,” she says, “I love you and I want to . . .”

ALL: WHOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Ha! Landon.

By now, David Rose’s original creekside lo-fi has metamorphosed into “Ooey Gooey.”

Laura asks Manly to finish his thought, and he says “sharpen this pencil.” Haw haw, Zaldawmo.

But when Laura forces him, he finally says, “I want you to be my wife” – and she accepts.

DAGNY: Eat your heart out, Jerry Lee Lewis!

WILL: That’s a very Twentieth-Century joke.

The two kiss, with a suggestion of open-mouthedness to it, I think, if you watch closely. (I’m obliged to report on these things, of course.)

That night, D.L. Dawson and the Unknown Grovester patrol the thoroughfare once again. (A sort of proto-police unit?)

Inside, Nels asks Nellie, who’s reading a book, how business has been.

Going over the receipts, he’s dismayed there’s a deficit.

Nellie says when she cooks, the customers leave without paying. (92 percent of them do, according to Nels’s figures. Our Grovesters aren’t all such upstanding goody-goodies after all.)

Then Nels goes to the kitchen and harangues Nellie about how dirty it is. (It’s true we’ve never seen Doc, the local health commissioner, dine at Nellie’s.)

We get a good look at the cover of Nellie’s book then. It’s titled Love Stories, but I can’t make out the author, editor, or anything else on the jacket.

The picture looks a bit like one by Regency-era artist Philip Francis Stephanoff. (Or is it Francis Philip?)

Nellie starts complaining what a stupid gift the restaurant was in the first place. 

In a moment staggering with Freudean weight, Nellie criticizes Nels’s masculinity.

Surprised by this attack, Nels cruelly tells his daughter that without an enormous dowry, a monster like her will never be courted by any man.

Well, Nellie slams down Love Stories and exits just as Harriet arrives.

Nels criticizes Nellie’s management of the restaurant, saying, “She spends twice as much for food as she takes in!”

AMELIA: It’s those foie gras ducks.

Nels and Harriet bicker for a while. Notably, she exclaims “Mrs. Ingalls is just a peasant!” at one point. 

Harriet declares she’s going to hire a professional restaurant consultant to give Nellie’s a complete makeover. (Was that really a thing in the 1880s? I don’t know. I do know you couldn’t go on Queer Eye yet.)

At the Little House, then, we see the family eating dinner with Almanzo.

DAGNY: So his poor sister has to eat alone, huh? Whatsername – Berry Mae.

WILL: Eliza Jane.

DAGNY: Yeah.

Laura apparently prepared this meal herself.

AMELIA: . . . “Berry Mae”?

Pa notices Almanzo seems “off his feed.” (We have Michael Landon the Writer to thank for this apt agriculture metaphor.)

Apparently, Laura told the family that Almanzo had a “big surprise” for everyone, and, smiling a little chicken-crap smile, Pa asks him to tell them all what’s on his mind.

Pa says Boobilious Ma even took off work at Nellie’s for the occasion. (We have not seen Caroline work at Nellie’s since “The Preacher Takes a Wife,” fifteen stories ago.)

Almanzo starts talking about his job at the Feed & Seed, and Pa makes some smug little chicken-crap jokes.

Finally, Almanzo gulps and says, “I wanna marry your daughter.”

With a chicken-crap twinkle in his chicken-crap eye, Pa says, “That does not come as a big surprise to me.”

Almanzo says that despite Pa’s declaration that Laura must wait till she’s eighteen, he thinks they should get married now.

Pa stops twinkling. You may be wondering how long Laura and Almanzo have been together in Little House Universal Time (LHUT). I wondered it myself. It must have been a while, since Pa is comfortable enough with the relationship to welcome a proposal, but it can’t be too long either.

With the helpful guidance of readers, I situated all three previous stories in the spring of 1883 in the M timeline.

Clearly from the opening scene, the weather is very fine, and September is after all our fairest month here in Minnesota, so let’s say summer has come and gone and we’re in the early fall. That’s long enough for Pa to come to terms with it, yet not so long an engagement would appear hasty.

Anyways, Pa rudely silences Laura when she tries joining the conversation.

AMELIA: Pow. And we’re watching this on International Women’s Day.

(We watched this one, both parts, on March 8th – International Women’s Day.)

A solitary French horn sounds. I think in the orchestra, not from a passing fox-hunter or something.

Actually, I wonder if that French horn which opens the main title theme symbolizes the good people of this community, like the Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof.

Pa invites Almanzo to discuss the matter outside, alone.

Ma makes pitiful attempts at smiling cheerfully.

Laura just stares.

Out at the thinkin’/arguin’/sulkin’ fence, Pa lights up. You’d think he’d have rethunk his smoking since the death of his only grandson, but I guess not.

Pa says to Almanzo, “The difference in your ages stopped botherin’ me a long time ago.” (A long time ago? He complained about it last week. More evidence three months have passed and this is September.) 

AMELIA: Just get her pregnant. Then he’ll be, like, “Oh, fine. . . .”

I’m sorry, our friend Douglas was a very bad influence on Amelia last time. There is a coarse streak in our family, though. Apologies if it bothers you. Once at a bar, Dagny actually entered a contest to see who could be the most shockingly vulgar. She came in second to my ex-sister-in-law, whom you really should meet sometime.

Pa actually makes his case well, and quite sensitively . . . 

. . . but Almanzo simply stares forward, grinding his teeth in anger.

AMELIA: Play it cool here, Manly. . . . 

Manly does not play it cool. 

Insulted, he tells Pa he’s leaving, despite Laura having made a special dessert for him.

Not only that, he makes an extremely douchey speech saying he’s leaving out of spite so Pa will have to pay for the social disruption.

As Pa looks surprised, Almanzo leaves, and Laura and Ma come out.

And Pa does pay for it. 

Seeming simultaneously on the verge of crying, screaming, and attacking, Laura issues a warning shot. (Melissa Gilbert is amazing in this one.)

Once she’s gone in, Pa rounds on Ma, which surprised us.

“You think I’m wrong?” he says.

DAGNY [as MA]: “I’m a woman, I don’t have opinions.”

Actually, Ma says, “It’s not a matter of right or wrong! It’s a matter of folks lovin’, and wantin’ what’s best for the ones they love.” (Grassle drops her Gs a little more than usual here.)

Well, everyone feels terrible. Upstairs, Ma comforts Laura, saying it was a bad night, but Almanzo’s “not going to China” and can always be worked on tomorrow.

AMELIA: Whoa, Ma’s fingernails are long for an 1800s farm wife.

ROMAN: Yeah. And where is Albert?

It’s true that Albert, an Almanzo naysayer from way back, you’ll recall, has had no chance to react to Laura’s blossoming romance, either in “Sweet Sixteen” or in this story.

Laura says they should elope, saying, “Pa will never change!”

“No, he won’t,” Ma says. “No he won’t. He’ll always love you and he’ll always want what’s best for you.” (This script is an intoxicating blend of the banal, the cheesy, and the profound.)

Anyways, this is the best Laura and Ma scene in some considerable time.

“Love is strength,” Ma says. “Use it, and lean on it!”

(See? Poetry.)

Ma also reveals she didn’t agree with Pa’s stodgy “no pedophilia” rule in the first place.

Rich strings well up (the tune sounds a bit like “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” to me) as Ma watches Laura walk out to make peace with Pa.

I find it a lovely little scene. Not everyone does, though.

DAGNY: God, she’s like a Stepford Wife. And on International Women’s Day!

Commercial break.

DAGNY: You know, when I was in Grade Seven, a boy asked me to go to the movies and my mom wouldn’t let me go.

WILL: Well, how old was he, thirty? You’ve told me some stories. . . 

DAGNY: Very funny. No, he was my age, a very little guy. And you know what? I went anyway!

Then we see Zaldumbo driving across the Old Rustic Bridge with some wild turkeys in the background. (Nice. Wild turkeys are a bit of a plague animal here, but I love them.)

But uh oh, here comes Laura in her fire-engine red dress.

“I just was on my way over to your place,” Laura says.

“Well, I was just comin’ to talk to you too,” Manly replies.

WILL: Where is he coming from?

DAGNY: Home?

WILL: Then where is she coming from?

DAGNY: Home.

WILL: IMPOSSIBLE! That bridge is not between their houses!

DAGNY: Oh, who cares.

Then Manly shocks both Laura and the audience by declaring he’s moving away, and he wants to take her with him!

AMELIA: What? Oh, I don’t care for this at all.

Laura starts protesting, but he cuts her off. (Amelia didn’t care for that at all either.)

“Not buts, no ifs – no waiting,” Almanzo says.

WILL [as JUDGE JUDY]: “No shoulda woulda coulda!”

(Is Judge Judy still on? It wouldn’t surprise me. Never mind.)

Then Almanzo says: “It’s your choice . . . your pa or me.” BOOM.

Our panelists had a variety of responses to Almanzo’s challenge here. All of them involved opening our mouths as wide as possible and making a sound. Some were gasps and some were screams, depending on the direction of the airflow, but everybody did one or the other.

It is a shocking moment. Let it sink in.

In fact, I would rank it pretty highly amongst all this season’s shocking moments, and that’s saying something. This is Season Six.

(Dean Butler is really good in this one, by the way.)

Anyways, Manly demands an answer, but Laura gently tells him where to get off.

“I guess yer pa was right,” Almanzo says with contempt. “You’re still a little girl.” And he drives off.

(I’ll point out here, “you’re still a little girl” is also a pretty gross misrepresentation of what Pa said.)

Strangely, we can see the Burton School for the Blind in the background as he drives away. (Why don’t they just send the blind kids there!)

AMELIA: Oh my God. Almanzo’s such a dickwad. I hate him!

WILL: Dean Butler’s never gonna do an interview with us if you keep this up.

But seriously, I think there was perhaps some design to having eight reruns separating this story from the rest of the season, since they would have acted as a sort of buffer zone separating Zaldickwad from his nicer earlier self. Because he really does immediately start treating Laura like shit in a pretty adult way at this point, and if it’s only a week after “Sweet Sixteen” I think she’d leave his ass if he was this brutal and manipulative early on. But the eight-story buffer suggests the passage of time, and clearly Laura is too fully ensnared to make a clean break now.

But Laura really has grown up now – whether those of us out here in TV Land like it or not.

WILL: You know, she never wears her braids again.

AMELIA: What? That’s more shocking than saying “which is it, yer pa or me.”

WILL: Well, she’s a woman now.

DAGNY: Yeah, it’s very Last Unicorn. [singing] “Now that I’m a womaaaaaaaan/Everything has changed. . . .”

(That story breaks my heart.)

Well, the next thing we see is Doc driving Hippocampus up to the site of the Harriet Oleson Institute for the Advancement of Blind Children, where workmen including Charles and Jonathan Garvey are building a new house.

The workmen also include Mustache Man, the Unknown Grovester, Johnny Cash Fusspot, and D.L. Dawson – and if you think that last one might sneak a peek at Doc when he arrives, you’re right.

Doc dismounts and greets his friends.

ROMAN: Has he come to ask for Laura’s hand?

Jonathan Garvey asks “How ya feelin’?” and Doc says, “Well, I’m feelin’ fine! But I’m supposed to ask you that.”

WILL: You can tell Merlin Olsen liked that joke.

Doc bears a letter for Adam. Why he brought it to the ruins of Adam’s former home instead of where he lives currently is not explained.

(Really, where do Mary and Adam live now? It’s quite weird that they haven’t explained that. Maybe they finally moved into Pink House after all.)

Charles says Mary and Adam are “out back fixin’ some food for the men.” (Out back of where? Out back of what?)

And I don’t know how they’d be fixing food, unless over a campfire, and that seems unlikely. I have a hard enough time gauging the doneness of food on the grill, and I can see, but maybe they’d be better than me at that.

Doc asks Garvey if they’ll be finished before the first snow, and Garvey says no, so that triple-reinforces a September date.

Then Garvey makes another goofy little joke.

ROMAN: Is he, like, flirting with Doc now?

AMELIA: He is single again.

DAGNY: Yeah, they’re both out of their periods of mourning. Let them have this.

“Out back,” then, we see Mary and Adam, who have improvised a sandwich bar over a makeshift table.

WILL [as LUCILLE BENSON]: “Harold do you -”

DAGNY: No.

The letter is from Adam’s father, and has been expected.

But Pa’s (non-chicken crap) smile runs away from his (non-chicken crap) face when he reads it – for Adam’s father is dead.

AMELIA: Pa should have pretended it blew out of his hands into the Creek.

Apparently the note is from one of Giles’s partners at his law firm (established in “The Sound of Children” as Kendall, Chandler & Holmes).

Adam has mixed emotions. There wasn’t much love lost between the two Kendalls for most of their lives, or most of Adam’s, anyways.

But Giles did pledge to fund the restoration of the Institute, indicating a reconciliation did occur at some point. (It was never fully explained.)

Adam and Mary retreat to process the news.

ROMAN: Has Mary lost the ability to speak?

Cut to stock footage of the Number Three train a-comin’. (It’s rollin’ round the bend.)

Voiceover Laura tells us this footage depicts Adam traveling to New York City. 

“Ma sent me with him,” VO Laura adds, almost as an afterthought.

ROMAN: Wait, Laura’s going to New York City? Is this a special episode?

WILL: Yeah, and who paid for the tickets?

At Mr. Kendall’s law office, we see the name of the firm has changed, but I know that happens quite frequently.

Kendall’s secretary Miss Bennett has apparently turned to stone out of grief. Which is less common.

Fortunately her replacement comes walking in, and delivers some papers to Kendall’s partner, who’s meeting with Adam and Laura.

This secretary is Dee Croxton, whom we previously met in “Whisper Country,” in which she gave a rather wonderful performance as the long-suffering mother of Mary’s host family.

Anyways, she unfortunately doesn’t have much of a part in this story.

The partner, Mr. Carter, is played by Michael Prince, whom you surely remember as the incompetent attorney who inexplicably told the Ingallses they were inheriting a fortune when Charles’s Uncle Rich – I mean Uncle Ned – died.

Apparently determined not to repeat that mistake, this time the lawyer starts by talking about Kendall’s debts.

“Perhaps your sister-in-law would like to take a look,” Carter says to Adam, passing an accounting file to Laura.

AMELIA: Why would he want a child to look at it?

ROMAN: Because Adam’s blind. 

AMELIA: Oh.

“He liked to live well,” Carter says. “Too well.”

WILL: Well, he did have that speakerphone. I thought that unusual at the time.

Carter says Giles was broke at the end of his life. Michael Prince must have specialized in playing lawyers who tell people an expected inheritance won’t be coming after all. He knows how to sell it.

AMELIA: This is good Tater Tot hotdish, Pops.

WILL: Thank you, child.

AMELIA: Are you gonna put that in?

WILL: Yeah, so the readers will believe we’re really Minnesotans.

Back in the Grove, Carl the Flunky pulls up to the Mercantile to drop off a passenger. 

He’s a small, fussy-looking young man with glasses and a mop of curly hair under his hat. In other words, he’s Percival! But we don’t know that yet.

The little guy makes an immediate impression by telling Carl “the ride was quite comfortable,” then rolling his eyes.

He does give Carl a nice tip, though.

The little guy introduces himself to Nels as “Percival Dalton,” restaurant consultant to the stars.

AMELIA: Is he Richard Dreyfuss?

WILL: Pretty much.

Upstairs, the bathroom explodes. (Others have pointed out the footage is reused from “The Family Tree.”)

Meanwhile, in Nellie’s kitchen, Caroline is frying up some quite delicious-looking potatoes. (My mom does excellent fried potatoes.)

Nellie leads “The Customer” back into the kitchen to prove that Caroline’s really cooking today.

Mrs. Oleson and Nels bring in Percival, who greets Nellie perfunctorily and then starts talking shop with Caroline. (I wish I enjoyed talking about my work. God, how I wish it!)

Mrs. O and Nellie take Percival to show him the guest rooms. 

WILL: Hope they’ve cleaned up that bloody mess.

Nels, who we know is a whiz in the kitchen himself, offers to help Caroline.

DAGNY: The woman he wishes he had.

Ma tells Nels Laura and Adam will be back tomorrow. (The train to New York would take about a week each way. So late September now?)

Nels gossips a little about the Almanzo sitch.

Nels also says he doesn’t have much confidence in little Percival, saying, “Nellie will scare the death out of him in a day. I oughta know.”

DAGNY: Oh, is this where Alanis got the phrase?

Next we see the train barreling through the night.

Onboard, a young steward, or “butcher boy” as they were called (we discussed it in our recap for “To Live With Fear”), serves Laura a sandwich.

ROMAN: Oh my gosh, is that Albert?

ROMAN: Actually, it’s like Albert and Willie had a son.

(This butcher boy is played by Dean D’Annibale. He has no other credits, but since last season we had a Frank D’Annibale who played a Sicilian peasant-type in a couple stories, I expect this is his son, and not Albert and Willie’s.)

Laura tries sharing her sandwich with Adam, but he’s pouting.

WILL: Wait a minute . . . they sent Laura to Gilded Age New York City and didn’t make a big deal out of it?

This seems very strange to me. Laura, you’ll recall, has never even been to Minneapolis. You’re telling me she didn’t put so much as a description of New York in her fuckin’ remembrance book?

Adam says, “We wrote to all the children and told them we’d be together again in September!” (He must mean next September, since Garvey said the school reconstruction wouldn’t be finished by winter even with full funding?)

“Now all we have is the plaque my father sent,” he says grimly. 

WILL: Do they get a kickback every time they mention plaques on this show or something?

ROMAN: Yeah. Little House was sponsored by Big Plaque.

Laura starts pestering Adam not to give up. I like their chemistry! They don’t have a lot of scenes together.

“If we don’t have the money to build a new Blind School, then we’re just going to have to find an old place that nobody wants,” Laura says. 

AMELIA: But isn’t the construction already in progress?

DAGNY: They ordered it on credit.

WILL: Cash on the barrel again.

“And where do we find that?” Adam asks.

“By looking,” Laura says firmly.

AMELIA: Isn’t that ableist?

WILL: What?

AMELIA: To say “looking” to a blind man.

Laura says there are probably hundreds of dilapidated old dumps out there aching to be turned into Blind Schools.

DAGNY: I love this dress.

WILL: Yes. Glazed Carrot. It burned in that fire, sadly.

Cheered up, Adam takes the sandwich, but not without joking about hating it.

DAGNY: Egg sandwiches don’t seem a good choice before proper refrigeration was invented.

Back in Walnut Grove, Percival is reporting to Mrs. Oleson, Nels, and a bored Nellie.

Out of the blue, he recommends changing the name of the restaurant to “Caroline’s,” and offering her 50 percent of the profits!

ROMAN: That’s ridiculous.

AMELIA: This whole show is ridiculous!

In the meantime, Percival says, he’ll put Nellie through restaurateur boot camp.

“Mrs. Oleson,” Percival says, “as long as the hotel bears your daughter’s name, the public will stay away in droves.”

WILL: “The public”?

Percival implies that if Nellie responds well to his Jedi training, they might someday call the restaurant “Nellie’s” again. (Also ridiculous.)

Nellie starts bitching, but Mrs. O shuts her down and says okay, we’ll try it.

We get a comic relief ending then, as black smoke from Nellie’s cooking billows from the kitchen yet again.

It’s quite the disaster; David Rose even brings in the slide whistle, usually reserved for moments of extreme terror. (At least, it sounds like a slide whistle to me. Reader Tesla recently wrote that it could be that most magical of instruments, the theramin; and it may well be! Apparently the Rose was an accomplished theraminist himself.)

(Then again, I have no doubt he was also an accomplished slide whistle-ist.)

Cut to a busy street scene in a different town (later revealed to be Sleepy Eye).

Pa, Adam and Laura drive through town, passing a rather nice brick building, I think of the Nineteenth-Century Italianate American style? I don’t know much about architecture (or anything else). Anyways, it’s for rent.

Laura screams for them to stop, saying it’s fated they should have it for a school.

DAGNY: Boy, this blind school changes locations every season.

Pa doubts they can afford such a large, nice building, and he says so.

But Laura jumps down and runs to check it out.

“She’s a go-getter!” Adam says. (An anachronism, but only by about 25 years.)

Inside, the building, apparently an old courthouse, is all spooky and spiderwebby.

She climbs the stairs . . . and is instantly seized by a man! (Slide whistle again.)

The guy is probably of late middle age, with bushy white hair.

ROMAN: Is this Reverend Alden’s long-lost twin?

“Cat got your tongue?” the man shouts. Jeez Louise, that’s the third story in a row where someone’s used that expression. It’s strange.

(Looks like the expression was around by 1883, though its original meaning is disputed.)

Laura quickly recovers her confidence and starts sassing the guy. She even mocks his age.

DAGNY: Oh, come on, Laura. You love old men.

(I know Kezia’s not a man, but close enough.)

Laura snaps, “Everyone looks like a kid when you’re old!” The man asks why she thinks that, and she says her grandfather told her. (I assume she means Gramps Holbrook, given he was a world-famous author known for spouting witty quips!)

Laura introduces herself and gives him a précis of their situation.

The guy says his name is Houston. He’s evidently a man of informality as well as insanity, because when Laura addresses him as “Mr. Houston,” he screams, “No, it’s not ‘Mr. Houston,’ it’s Houston Lamb!”

AMELIA: I like this guy.

I’m sure many of our readers recognize this actor from other things, though they may not remember from what.

He’s Dub Taylor, a wonderful character actor who was in many projects of significance (including this show).

I know him best from Bonnie and Clyde, in which he (spoilers) is involved in luring the title couple to their doom.

Taylor began his career in the 1930s, and was in a zillion Westerns before 1950. (I’m afraid I don’t really know the genre well enough to say which ones were important and which weren’t.)

In many of them, he played a recurring comic-relief character called “Cannonball.”

He was in the Frank Capra movies You Can’t Take It With You and (the Michael Landon favorite) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

He was in Them!, about an attack by giant ants. (Not to be confused with the Irene Tedrow vehicle Empire of the Ants, which is about the same thing.)

Taylor was in the 1954 version of A Star is Born, the one that featured the by-then-ex-Mrs. David Rose Judy Garland. (Talk about a Laura-and-Almanzo story.)

On TV, he did I Love Lucy, Rin Tin Tin, Dennis the Menace, The Twilight Zone, Hazel, My Favorite Martian, The Virginian, Death Valley Days, The Wild Wild West, Andy Griffith, The High Chaparral, Gunsmoke, The Mod Squad, Bonanza, The Magical World of Disney, How the West Was Won, Father Murphy, The Cosby Show, Designing Women, and Law & Order.

He was in the Cliff Emmich vehicle Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

He did the Oliver Reed/Karen Black/Bette Davis/Burgess Meredith horror film Burnt Offerings, a favorite of Roman’s when he was a kid. (He even read the novel.)

He voiced a mole called “Digger” in The Rescuers (a favorite of mine when I was a kid).

He was in the Wild West-themed Back to the Future, Part III.

He was in Kenny Rogers’s The Gambler Returns. (Jesus Christ, how many Kenny Rogers as The Gambler movies were there?)

Finally, Dub Taylor was in a famous Pace Picante Sauce commercial in which he delivered the immortal line “That stuff’s made in New York City!”

Laura asks what the rent is, and Lamb says $100 a month. (About $3,200 today.)

Laura says that’s a ridiculously high price, but Lamb says that’s the figure he’s “a-wantin’.”

They negotiate a little, and she talks him down to $40 a month ($1,300).

Having wrapped the fierce pug of a man around her little finger, she departs, saying they’ll be back to fix up the place in the coming weeks.

When she’s gone, Lamb rants that she’s “a feisty little thing – just plum pure perfect feisty!”

It’s a great line; I do love the over-the-top style of Western characters at times.

Laura runs outside and reports to the confused Pa and Adam.

When Pa asks where the rent money will come from, she quotes him: “The Lord will provide.”

They drive off . . . only little do they know Almanzo Wilder is observing them from the shadows.

WILL: Ooh, just like the Chamberlain in The Dark Crystal.

That night (?) at the Little House, the Ingallses and Kendalls confab after dinner.

ROMAN [emphatically]: DOES MARY EVEN SPEAK ANYMORE???

(Actually, Mary did have exactly three lines during the “sandwich-bar” scene.)

The treatment of this once-central character isn’t quite “Let Meg tell you” – but it’s close. She’s had nothing of substance to do since coming out of her extended mad scene.

They’ve been budgeting, and Pa and Adam declare they can’t afford to reopen the school, even with the cheap rent.

Adam says it would take a miracle – and there’s a knock at the door. (I’m sure you see where this is going.)

It’s Nels, who tells them of Percival’s proposal. (Nobody reacts when he says the restaurant would be renamed “Caroline’s,” which seems odd to me.)

Ma says she doesn’t have the time . . . only then Nels tells her she can keep half the profits.

He hands her a sheet with some Percival Perjections.

Ma takes Pa outside (through the back door – weird) and says she has enough confidence in herself to make the venture succeed, and that means they can afford to reopen the Institute.

DAGNY: How much money have they put into this Blind School over the years?

AMELIA: Yeah, they should make the blind kids all work in the restaurant.

Pa asks what happens when Nellie takes over again, and Ma quotes him again: “The Lord will provide.” (I don’t know if Charles has ever said “The Lord will provide” on this show, but I’m not sure he hasn’t. The Groovy records turn up nothing.)

All right, so, financially saved once again! But you don’t care about that storyline as much as you do the other, do you? Me neither. 

The next day (?) at Nellie’s, we see Mustache Man painting Caroline’s on the front of the restaurant. (Had to redo the whole thing, I suppose.)

And in the kitchen, Percival is teaching Nellie to cook. (I’ll do Steve Tracy’s bio with Part Two.)

I’m not sure how long they’ve been at this, but since when he asks Nellie to crack two eggs she smashes them together in her hands, I bet it’s been a while. 

Then we get an iconic scene, as Nellie begins spitting a series of mean jokes about Percival’s height.

AMELIA: THAT’s the bitch we know and love.

He ignores her, so she finally explodes. Reading between the lines, she was insulted that her parents think she’s unbetrothable without a business attached to her.

Nellie starts smashing all the eggs, splattering them both. 

WILL: Those are expensive! She’s breaking white ones as well as brown.

Then Nellie shouts, “There, Quasimodo!”

(I’m not sure why she says that. Quasimodo was deformed/disabled, not a little person, right? Or is Nellie implying she just “rang his bell”? Evidence inconclusive.)

Well, Percival takes the bowl of broken eggs and dumps it over Nellie’s head.

He pops off a little zinger afterward.

Then he says, “Why your mother ever built this place for you, I’ll never know! You certainly can’t cook and you certainly have no right to be dealing with the public. And as pretty as you are, you don’t need a restaurant to catch a husband in the first place!”

DAGNY: International. Women’s. Day.

Well, you know what happens next. He storms out, Caroline arrives, and Nellie beams through the dripping eggs and says, “He said I was pretty!”

I think we could debate the significance of Nellie’s entire personality changing when she falls in love/“gets” a man, or the plausibility of characters who do nothing but verbally abuse each other falling in love, but it’s late in the recap for that. Anyways, Arngrim here is a pleasure to watch, as always.

DAGNY: This is like There’s Something About Mary.

WILL: How?

DAGNY: Her hair.

WILL: Oh my God . . .

After a break, we see Willie running to the privy from school.

ROMAN: David Rose will never tire of writing running-to-the-privy music.

Hilariously, he even drops his suspenders on his way there in eager anticipation.

In the Oleson residence, Harriet is screaming at Percival.

But Percival shouts her down.

DAGNY: It takes a gay guy to teach Nels to be a man.

Egg-covered Nellie bursts in. She apologizes and begs Percival to stay and teach her.

Well, Percival agrees to stay on, but marches out in a huff.

In fact, everybody leaves except Nels, who stays behind to relive That Time Percival Yelled At Harriet in his head immediately.

And now we see Laura sniveling in bed as Ma there-theres her.

She’s brokenhearted that Manly hasn’t come back for her.

Melissa Gilbert does some pretty good crying acting here.

Laura tries to claim she hated Almanzo all along, but Ma teases her into admitting the truth.

They have a nice heart-to-heart. Grassle is good here too. In fact, all the principals are superb in this one. Well, except for You Know Who.

Ma tells a story from the past about how before they got married, Pa once “left the Big Woods” and was gone a month because he was pissed at her. 

(Charles and Caroline Ingalls were already married by the time they got to the Big Woods in real life. They got married where they grew up, in Concord, Wisconsin, a place we’ve seen a couple times on this show. It’s in a different part of the state than the Big Woods.)

Ma gives Laura the ol’ if-he-flies-away-he-was-never-yours-to-begin-with song and dance.

Then Ma says, “I was talking to Miss Wilder this afternoon, and she gave you permission to go to Sleepy Eye for two weeks” to help prepare the Institute.

AMELIA: She had to go back to school after becoming a teacher? That’s ridiculous.

ROMAN: This whole show is ridiculous!

To “Ooey Gooey” again, Laura snuggles into bed.

Downstairs, Pa is smoking in bed, a thing we’ve never seen, and which is quite dangerous. Don’t do it!

He’s all steamed up – not in a popcorn way – complaining about Almanzo doing all the things Caroline told us he did himself as a youngling.

Ma reveals that Eliza Jane blabbed that Almanzo’s living in Sleepy Eye, which is why she’s sending Laura there.

“Caroline, I don’t understand you,” Pa says.

“I know,” Ma replies, and then abruptly the screen fades to black. Bum-Bum-Ba-Dum.

AMELIA: What the hell was that ending?

It is strange – there’s something about the rhythm of it at the end that makes it seem like somebody just pulled the plug. No Continued Next Week title – nothin’. Maybe they ran out of film.

STYLE WATCH: Perhaps stinging from Walnut Groovy’s assessment of asses, Adam has put on new trousers.

His shirt’s new too, I think.

Giles Kendall’s partner Mr. Carter has a very masculine sword arrangement on his wall. (They look to be of a different type than the “Toledo steel” Nels used to kill Mrs. Oleson in “The Monster of Walnut Grove.”)

Charles appears to go commando again.

THE VERDICT: Coming next time. Join us for the season finale!

UP NEXT: “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not” (Part Two)