Alamanzy! Alamanzy!; or
It’s a Christmas Miracle, Susan Goodspeed
(a recap by Will Kaiser)
Title: He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
Airdate: May 12, 1980
Written and directed by Michael Landon
SUMMARY IN A NUTSHELL: Journeys end in lovers meeting, and so does Season Six as it draws to a joyous close.
Editor’s warning: This recap contains discussions of pornography as well as some related images. No more graphic than usual, but reader discretion is advised. (Oh, and there’s a picture of Nancy Lee Grahn as a bloody corpse, but it’s obviously fake.) Thank you. – WK
RECAP: You might be wondering what we made of the new Netflix Little House trailer.
In a word:
Oh, I’m just kidding, don’t get upset! I’m sure it will be every bit as good as the original.
Anyways, here it is, the big finish! Let’s go through it and do it.
We begin with a Previously On.
WILL: Oh, look, it’s “the bridge between their houses.”
DAGNY: Oh, shh.
My recap of the recap: Manly insults Laura; Percival arrives; the Ingallses and Adam make an expedition to Sleepy Eye (not realizing Almanzo is hiding out there); Nellie battles then falls for Percival; and Ma schemes whilst brushing her hair.
AMELIA: Say what you will about Laura’s, MA’s hair always looks nice when it’s down.
DAGNY: Yes. Plus it sounds nice when she’s brushing it.
Well, we rejoin our story at the new site of the Garvey Kendall School (formerly the Oleson Institute) in Sleepy Eye.
One wonders how much thought actually went into the naming of this school. After all, now Adam must explain to prospectives that the school is named not after him, but rather for his son and another individual (unrelated to the institution) who died in a hideous accident.
Not to mention, the tragedy was preventable and, as long as we’re on the subject, also nearly killed the entire student body!
These can’t be much-shared factoids by campus recruiters.
The Sleepy Eye streets are very busy, but Mustache Man is the only person I recognize, for the moment, anyways.
Wait, actually I think Garrison Keillor’s Great-Great-Grandfather is also there, manhandling some woman in the street. (Like great-great-grandfather like great-great-grandson.)
Laura comes out, followed by Houston Lamb. He helpfully reminds us of the premise, screaming that he was serious about the two months’ rent in advance.
Houston also notes he’s not the owner, just “the caretaker.”
Inside, there’s a huge gang of kids cleaning up.
WILL [singing]: It’s the hard-knock life! For us!
I’m not sure who all these kids are – I recognize a few, like Andrew Garvey, Not-Linda Hunt, and Not-The Kid from Just the Ten of Us.
(We barely see Andy, who has just one line.)
(The subtitle transcriptionist doesn’t even recognize him, and I can’t say I blame them.)
Perhaps a better question is how these kids got their parents’ permission to join this excursion, seeing Sleepy Eye is nearly a day’s drive from Walnut Grove.
Laura stomps around barking orders whilst Houston Lamb screams at her that the owner, a Mr. Pims (yes, Pims), is on his way to get his money right now!
Laura says they agreed to pay him “next week.” Houston says Pims probably won’t accept that, and Laura yells that they might as well keep working until they find out for sure. (I would argue it makes more sense to stop until they find out. Then again, I don’t have a proper prairie work ethic. I’m from Wisconsin, land of beer, brandy, bowling and fried cheese, and Quittin’ Time comes early in those parts.)
Houston mutters to himself. He is sexist and says “dadgum” a lot, neither of which I suppose is too surprising.
Laura heads back outside, where an AEK and (I think) the Kid With Very Red Hair (Currie One) are cleaning windows.
(Not sure how the latter wound up joining this party, but the more the merrier.)
“Hi, Beth!” comes a doltish voice from the street. Manly.
Laura is surprised to see him, but when she greets him, she mostly just sounds sad.
Zaldamo grins and says, “What’re you doin’ here in Sleepy Eye?”
DAGNY: What a dumbfuck.
Laura tells him what she’s doin’.
He looks at the old courthouse and says, “Needs a little work, huh?”
AMELIA: What a prick.
Manly says he got a job at the General Store, asks about Eliza Jane’s wellbeing, then smirks and says, “How’s yer family?”
WILL: What an ass-munch.
Then Laura and Assmuncho simultaneously say, “How are you doin’?” Whether you find this cute or gaggy depends on your taste for twickling tweeness of this type.
WILL [as MISTY from YELLOWJACKETS]: “No, you hang up first, no, you hang up first!”
The conversation turns even worse when Laura tells Almanzo she’s going to be overseeing operations at the new school for a while.
“I’m surprised yer Pa’d let you out of his sight that long, seein’ as he loves you so much,” he says with deliberate cruelty.
AMELIA: God, he’s such a C-word.
ROMAN: Hey. It’s still International Women’s Day.
Without missing a beat, Laura snaps, “Well, I’ve been out of your sight for longer than that, and you were supposed to have loved me.”
ALL: [murmurs of approval, some applause]
Zaldolto launches into a snide argument, but he’s interrupted by Houston, who appears with Mr. Pims.
Pims is a well-dressed and handsome if slightly ratlike little fellow with a thin mustache and a gap in his teeth.
He’s played by Robert Wexler, who was on Days for a little while, and who according to his resume once played a “nerd” (whatever that is) in an eighties sitcom I remember called Sledge Hammer! (That exclamation point was in the title, I’m not surprised or excited he was on the show.)
Laura stalls Pims, whilst Zal-douche-o watches with smug interest.
Laura pleads, saying the blind kids will be arriving any day now.
Pims Mr.-Potters a bit, but seems softenable, I think.
Houston tells Laura I told ya so, but gives her a twinkle anyways.
Laura says goodbye to Manly as Mustache Man and Not-Peter Schickele drive past.
At the General Store, then, Almanzo sees his boss, a Mr. Crowley, putting up a Help Wanted sign.
(There’s also an advertisement for Pocahontas Remedies – a brand frequently used in old Westerns.)
(Also I did not miss the Alamo Tourist sighting, thank you.)
Almanzo asks Crowley what happened to “Tony,” and Crowley says, “He hurt himself carrying some ice up to McGinney’s.”
Mr. Crowley is Alvy Moore, who was a regular on Green Acres. (I watched that in syndication when I was really little, but I’m afraid I don’t remember his character.)
He was in a zillion other things besides, including The Mickey Mouse Club, Wagon Train, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Virginian, Death Valley Days, Dick Van Dyke, How the West Was Won, My Mother the Car (Dags and I were just talking about that one), The Wonderful World of Disney, The Waltons, Days, Fantasy Island, Evening Shade, and Frasier.
Moore was also the voice of Grandpa Little on The Littles. (!)
Moviewise, he was in The Wild One, the 1950s War of the Worlds and Herbie Rides Again.
He was in something called Riot in Cell Block 11, which costarred Milo Stavroupolis himself, Leo Gordon.
He was in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and There’s No Business Like Show Business. (I wonder if he met Little House makeup maestro Whitey Snyder on the set of those?)
Finally, Alvy Moore was in A Boy and His Dog, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi oddity, still sort of controversial, that happens to be my dad’s favorite movie.
He also produced it, and adapted the screenplay from a Harlan Ellison book. (Alvy Moore did, I mean, not my dad.)
Anyways, Almanzo says he’ll take the job, even though it means working sixteen-hour days.
Crowley says okay. He isn’t the most interesting bit part we’ve ever had, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.
Then we see Glazed-Carrot Laura driving the Chonkywagon whilst Voiceover Laura blathers on the soundtrack.
Apparently she’s headed to back to Groveland, since next we see her sitting with her parents at Nellie’s, I mean Caroline’s.
They’re going over their savings, and they’re $20 short of the $80 ($2,600) Pims wants.
Nellie approaches with a dessert tray, shadowed by Percival.
Pa declines the pie, but Percival encourages him to try it. “You might be surprised,” he says.
AMELIA: He should have said, “You might be sur-PIES-ed.”
ROMAN [nodding]: Missed opportunity.
Pa tastes it and says it’s delicious, and Nellie very pleasantly offers everyone a piece.
AMELIA: So Nellie’s just nice now?
WILL: Yes. This is the episode where everyone changes and turns boring.
Nellie goes back into the kitchen, and Ma says Percival’s training has changed her personality.
Pa dismisses this as “temporary insanity,” though, which Ma finds quite funny.
“You’ll never guess who I saw in Sleepy Eye,” Laura says.
“Oh, I couldn’t guess,” Ma says with mock sincerity. (You’ll recall last time she schemed to set up a rendezvous between Laura and Manly in Sleepy E.)
Then, when Laura says it was Almanzo, she turns to Pa and says shamelessly, “What a small world it is.”
Laura says don’t worry, she and Almanzo are all-dunzo.
She also nicely reports Almanzo insulted Pa when she saw him.
“Just because you had one argument, that doesn’t mean it’s over,” Ma says.
DAGNY: He moved eight hours away to escape from you. That means it’s over.
ROMAN: Yeah. Ma’s got stalker mentality about breakups.
Laura says it was as much her fault as Almanzo’s, and who gives a shit anyways (paraphrase), which makes Pa chuckle.
AMELIA: I love when Charles laughs at anything.
The Ingallses leave, Charles saying a nice goodnight to Nellie.
Percival says he’s going to bed, telling her to be sure to clean up.
“I will, Perciville,” she says. (I’m sure you will agree Alison Arngrim’s pronunciation of Percival is a little different than everyone else’s, so I’ll style it that way.)
And, as Perciville climbs the stairs, Nellie whispers, “My prince.”
Back in Sleepy Eye, a man drives two mules past a row of shops. One, we can see, is called “Jenner Millinery.”
(One of the shops, I mean, not one of the mules.)
Other brands represented include “Ace Saloon” and “B and K Livery.”
Almanzo is unloading blocks of ice from a wagon when he’s approached by a foxy saloon girl. (There’s ragtime piano in the background, so we know she’s aligned with the Devil.)
ROMAN: Oh my God, is that Parker Posey?
It isn’t, but she really is similar.
This foxy saloon girl is Nancy Lee Grahn, who went on to have a very distinguished TV career. Most notably, she still has a regular role on General Hospital today!
Plus she had regular or recurring parts on One Life to Live, Santa Barbara (I remember that one), Murder One, Melrose Place and 7th Heaven.
Additionally, she acted on Knight Rider, Murder, She Wrote, Perry Mason and Babylon 5, and she was in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest.
(That last one, considered by Stephen King to be the finest of the C of the C series, has a corn-marketing-and-distribution subplot that will have some viewers fondly recalling “Money Crop.” . . .)
Anyways, Foxy shamelessly rubs her back up against the ice, then asks Almanzo to dry her off.
WILL: Wow, she entrapped him, just like what happened to Garrison Keillor!
DAGNY: Uh-huh. . . .
Almanzo politely (if stupidly) obliges her, only to turn and see Laura driving by in the Chonkywagon. (How is Pa managing without the Chonkies?)
Seeing nothing wrong with helpful prostitute-de-icing, Almanzo Zaldumbly shouts, “Hi, Laura!”
Laura just grits her fangs and drives on.
“What time ya get through workin’?” Foxy asks, but Almanzo just replies, “Never, ma’am. Excuse me.”
DAGNY: Saloon girls can never get laid on this show.
WILL: Yeah. It’s like a reverse Deadwood.
At the Garvey Kendall School, right around the corner, Laura is greeted by Houston, Adam, and Mary.
Adam announces that “Hester-Sue’s bringin’ some of the children from the train station!” (I hardly need point out the timing of this is preposterous. Last time, we calculated with more care than usual, or with at least as much care as usual, that “‘He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not'” began near the end of summer, 1883.)
(Since then, Adam and Laura took a trip to New York and back, which would have taken about three weeks.)
(So, in late September, the duo set out to find a suitable school building in Sleepy Eye, which now that I think about it is a pretty faraway place to start looking.)
(Almost two weeks have passed since then.)
(Now, while they were on the way home from NYC, Adam said to Laura, “We wrote to all the children and told them we’d be together again in September!”)
(But since they were already well into September by that point, that didn’t make much sense.)
(And even if it did, Jonathan Garvey told Doc the reconstruction of the Walnut Grove Blind School wouldn’t be complete before winter. They wouldn’t have kids move in before putting in floors, stairs, etc.)
(I guess it’s possible Adam sent emergency telegrams to the parents telling them to send the kids to Sleepy Eye at once. But why would he? And would the parents just up and send them? I suppose it’s probably like our kids, where you get sick of them pretty quickly when they’re back from school, so maybe they would.)
Houston says Mr. Pims wants his money, but Laura says Pims can sit and spin (paraphrase) because she’s only got $60.
But Houston starts a-gigglin’ and tells her Mr. Pims has decided to lower the rent. Sixty will be enough. (See, I told you he was softenable.)
Then Hester-Sue and all the blind kids (six in all) appear literally out of nowhere, emerging from the shadows in front of the row of buildings.
Laura rushes to hug her, and as they’re arriving, Hester-Sue shocks us by giving us the kids’ names!
Naming six background characters at once is unprecedented on this show, or at least unknown since the days of Mr. Ames.
First, Susan Goodspeed. We’re obviously acquainted with Sue.
Then “Nathan Pollard and Little Alex.”
Nathan is the Sharp-Dressed Blind Kid (though not dressed so sharply today).
And Little Alex is Not-Little Eli.
Then “Michelle.” That must be Pigtail Annie.
(Actually, Sue Goodspeed’s real-life first name is Michelle, so this might have been something that should have been edited out.)
And then she says what sounds to me like “Richland Downing,” but which the transcriptionist caught as “Rich Lindowney.” Your guess is as good as ours.
Since there are only two boys, it’s got to be a girl. Maybe Richellynne Downey? (This makes the moment even weirder, since of course Sue Goodspeed’s real-life last name is also Downey!)
As for who Richellynne is, I think it’s Blind School Princess Leia. I can see her as a Richellynne.
(Incidentally, it’s funny that both Walnut Grove schools – Beadlemania and Blind – had unusually tall girls with Princess Leia hairstyles in them. Isn’t it?)
That leaves only blonde Janice.
“And Carla.”
In the midst of this roll call, Mary smiles and says aside to Adam, “Our children are back!”
AMELIA [as ADAM]: “Well, not the baby.”
Adam takes them inside the new school and describes everything for them.
WILL: Laura looks younger than Sue Goodspeed there.
ROMAN: Yeah. Is Sue a clone of Mary?
Hester-Sue’s beautiful face beams.
AMELIA: Is she going to sing again?
Sue Goodspeed, who always has to make things about herself somehow, says after the fire she never thought they’d be reunited.
Sue suggests they thank God together. (Kissing up to the Big Guy, very “Sue.”)
Sue leads the prayer herself, naturally.
Houston respectfully removes his hat.
Sue goes on and on.
WILL: Well, obviously she prepared this in advance.
Houston looks to be quite affected, but it may just be rheumy eyes.
David Rose gives us shimmering “it’s a Christmas miracle” music over it all.
Eventually Sue winds down. Apparently of a mind that it’s not plagiarism if you’re stealing from yourself, she cribs a thought from her paean to John Bevins, the fat handyman.
That night, a driver and buggy hurtle out of the blackness and towards the school, possibly on a suicide mission.
But inside, no one notices. Mary discovers Laura crying in bed.
Laura starts blubbering about her failed love affair.
ROMAN: Mary should accidentally suffocate her trying to give her a pillow.
Laura then tells the story of Almanzo Manlyhandling the prostitute in the street. She gives a detailed description of the suspect, exaggerating rather freely.
Mary makes a few sort of “huh?”-type faces, then says she’s sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.
She adds that guys who go for saloon girls are trash anyways.
DAGNY: Easy for you to say, Mare.
AMELIA: Yeah. Adam would totally like them, he just can’t see them.
Well, says Mary, “he’s not the only man in the world.” (MSA is phoning it in a bit today, I think.)
DAGNY: Oh, is whatever man writes Ma’s dialogue doing Mary’s now too?
This episode was written by Michael Landon, so I suppose yes.
AMELIA: Mary should share Adam with her.
WILL: That’s a good idea.
DAGNY: Yeah. They could turn it into a game and see how fast he figures it out.
Laura whimpers on, then we head to commercial.
Back in Walnut Grove, David gives us his cheerful “skipping” arrangement of the title theme.
(Others have commented how strange it is they renamed the restaurant Caroline’s on the windows, but left the giant Nellie’s sign up on the roof.)
(Perhaps anticipating this critique, Landon has tried to conceal the truth behind some pine branches. Ha! Not this time, bruh.)
At Nellie’s, Ma compliments Nellie on her baking. It would be impressive for her to master it so quickly. Baking is famously tricky, and I’ve never had much luck with it, though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by good bakers my whole life.
Nellie says “Perciville” helped her with the recipe.
Then we get a nice scene between Nellie and Caroline! Very rare indeed. Nellie asks Ma if men are bothered by taller women. Oh boy! In my youth, I knew a few girls who were very bothered by the idea of dating shorter men. (I am 5’9”. The average height for a man, I believe.)
Actually, I’ve been friends with some very tall girls who contorted themselves into unnatural positions to conceal their height from prospective boyfriends. They have back problems to this day.
Anyways, Ma diplomatically (and hilariously) says she “doesn’t know what the percentages are” when it comes to male height preferences.
Nellie says, “I can’t think of a man in Walnut Grove whose wife is taller than he is.” (I can’t either, though it can be hard to tell with all the bonnets, hats, hairdos and elevator shoes.)
(When I was sorting through pics for that collection, I was surprised to discover we’ve never seen Adam in a hat at all!)
(That’s wild for the time period. Oh well, maybe that’s why his hair is always so messy.)
Nellie worries that “Perciville” doesn’t like tall women.
Not knowing how to reply to this, Ma laughs nervously and says, “I think in his case, he’d better learn to! . . .” (A funny line, perfectly delivered by Grassle.)
Nellie then brings her fresh-baked bread out to “The Customer,” who complains that it’s cold. (Was bread at smalltown restaurants in the 1880s always served right out of the oven, or something?)
“Why are you always the one to complain?” Nellie asks bluntly. And indeed, I feel for her, if this is the caliber of complaint she’s been getting from people like this nutbag.
Well, Nellie is about to force-feed him like a foie gras duck when Perciville materializes and tuts her.
WILL: Who is that, Jackie Mason?
Hilariously, Nellie sweetens up and pretends she was just smoothing “The Customer’s” hair.
The other customer in the restaurant says he’s ready to settle his bill.
ROMAN: Actually, he looks like James Caan in Misery.
Nellie attends him – bending her knees so she appears shorter, just like I said. Contorted!
Perciville and Not-Jackie Mason/James Caan give her odd looks.
Not-Mason/Caan gives the restaurant a good review and departs.
Looking over his glasses like the Bead with a hangover, Percival asks why she’s walking so stupidly.
He assumes she’s making fun of his height again and huffs off. (In real life, Steve Tracy was apparently 5’8”, so not actually so very short, ahem.)
(It’s interesting, because Nellie’s taller than Percival, but Alison Arngrim’s height is estimated on the internet at 5’4″ to Tracy’s 5’8″. Elevator shoes again?)
“The Customer,” meanwhile, hilariously continues yelling about bread.
Nellie bellows with rage and hurls a plate at him. Direct hit!
ROMAN: Hey, it’s like the night you broke the plate, Mom.
So perhaps now is a good time to do Steve Tracy’s bio. Tracy’s offscreen friendship with Alison Arngrim is legendary amongst fans, but let’s begin at the beginning.
Born into a (spoilers) Jewish family in Ohio (like Michael Landon, he changed his name), Steve Tracy came to Hollywood as a college student.
He’s best known as Percival, but he also appeared on (the Lance Kerwin vehicle) James at 15, Quincy, The Jeffersons, and Tales From the Darkside. (My favorite horror anthology show.)
The rest of his resume gets racy. He was in a poorly reviewed National Lampoon film (and Anne Ramsey vehicle) Class Reunion, and in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, a 1979 Russ Meyer sexploitation film cowritten by Roger Ebert, the great critic and a personal hero of mine. (Not because of Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, though.)
Tracy was also in a straight-to-VHS “naughty” game tape called Party Games for Adults Only.
Anybody else remember those VHS games? My parents got me the Parker Brothers VHS Clue game in 1985, thinking it was the Tim Curry/Eileen Brennan/et al. movie, which I loved.
It wasn’t, but the pleasant surprise in that case was that the VHS Clue game was also hilarious. I had the tape converted to DVD in the early 2000s, I liked it that much. You can watch the full thing here, if you think you’re likely to be amused by it.
Anyways, I’ve never seen Party Games for Adults Only, nor had I ever seen the other noteworthy entry on Steve Tracy’s resume.
For Tracy is, I believe, the only recurring Little House cast member ever to star in a hardcore pornographic film.
Now, before you get too worked up, Tracy has what they call a “non-sexual role” in the film. Technically he plays the main character, so I guess technically you could say he was a gay porn star, but he doesn’t appear in any explicit scenes.
In the movie, Tracy plays Chester, a nebbishy bookstore clerk who receives a magic book that can temporarily transform him into a stud.
The movie was called Heavy Equipment (ha!), and you can watch a cut of its “clean” scenes at YouTube.
(Well, the clip is actually fairly dirty, but not X-rated. Chester cuts out a paper doll of a penis at one point. I won’t be blamed if you shock yourself! Approach only if prepared . . . it’s excerpts from a gay porn film called Heavy Equipment, for crying out loud.)
The script is quite funny, though perhaps not on the same plane as Parker Brothers’ Clue VHS game.
Dags felt Tracy was too good an actor for the production.
Anyways, Steve Tracy was gay himself, but on the set of Little House, he kept it mostly a secret . . . except from his TV wife, Alison Arngrim. (In Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, Arngrim wrote that Michael Landon made jokes suggesting he knew, though.)
Tracy and Arngrim had great chemistry as Percival and Nellie, and apparently it was even better as real-life friends.
Looking through the many photographs of them fooling around together is enough to lift any Little House person out of a depression, I think.
Their happy days didn’t last forever, unfortunately. Arngrim and Tracy did stay close after their Little House tenure expired; but in 1985, he was diagnosed with AIDS.
The final year of his life, he worked to raise awareness of the disease, which became an epidemic in the 1980s (and beyond). He appeared in a play about it, and gave interviews at a time when most gay people hid their identities and HIV and AIDS were considered too shocking for the public to think about.
Tracy wrote that there were only two Little House cast members who knew about his illness. One was Arngrim, and the other was Katherine MacGregor, whom he also described as loving and supportive. (Dagny and I found this unsurprising. It’s easy to picture MacG – in real life a flamboyant, joyous, cat-rescuing, Charlotte-Stewart-spa-weekending, Hindu Earth goddess – as a den mother to misfits of all kinds.)
Tracy died in 1986 at age 34. As I probably don’t have to tell fans, Alison Arngrim has remained devoted to his memory, working as an advocate for HIV research and LGBTQ+ issues since that time.
Well, we salute them both. Tracy is one of my favorite additions to the show, and I’m sure Arngrim would agree that reveling in his performance is a great way to celebrate him, all these decades later.
So back to our story. Ma returns home that night on foot. (She has to walk two miles in the dark?)
Pa is nicely making supper. Reader frauschiller89 wrote recently that it drives her crazy when characters toss dishrags on hot stoves on this show. Of course, there actually be a roaring woodfire inside, making it indeed a fire hazard. (“No wonder everything is always burning down,” Dagny said. “The whole town is clueless about fire safety.”)
Ma notices the wagon is back from Sleepy Eye. Pa makes her a cup of tea and explains that Laura returned upset after catching Almanzo with the saloon girl.
Pa says once again how pleased he is he didn’t let Laura marry such a lowlife.
ROMAN: Can’t Laura hear this conversation?
But no, Pa says she’s sleeping. He adds that “Almanzo Wilder is not gonna get away with this,” saying he has business in Sleepy Eye this week and will also be giving Almanzo “the business.”
AMELIA: Why? Didn’t they break up? Manly can do whatever he wants.
Ma agrees with Amelia that this is a stupid idea. But Pa growls, “Nobody is gonna hurt one of my babies like that and get away with it.”
I think most fans would agree that what John Junior did to Mary was actually much worse, and Pa let him “get away with it.” (Or at least, he didn’t murder him.)
I know what you’re thinking, and so am I. Why wasn’t he so protective of Albert (after all, his favorite “baby”) when Penelope Parker was treading his heart under?
Back in Sleepy Eye, we see Almanzo delivering blocks of ice in a pouring rainstorm, presumably in the early morning. Looks cold, and the wind is howling. (You know what that means.)
Later that day (the weather has not improved), Almanzo pays a visit to the Garvey Kendall School.
He hears harmonica music coming from one of the upper chambers, and calls “Houston!” I didn’t realize they were acquainted.
He coughs as he climbs the stairs. (Roger Ebert, who as I mentioned was one of the minds behind Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, once observed that any character who coughs in a movie will most likely die before the end of the story.)
The harmonica music continues. Sounds a bit like “My Lodging is On the Cold Ground,” an English folk tune that became associated with Ireland in the early Nineteenth Century as “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” (Not exactly the same – but similar.)
(“My Lodging”/”Believe Me” is the fiddle tune that opens “Come On Eileen.”)
Houston Lamb is of course the harmonicist in this case, but he’s alarmed when he sees Almanzo’s wet sickly state and says, “Come on in, Alamanzer!”
With Manly, Manny, Manzo, Zaldamo, and Alamanzer, Almanzo is surely the character with the most nicknames on this show, and that’s not counting affectionate (?) permutations like Zaldumbass, Zaldipshit, etc.
Almanzo coughs exaggeratedly and sits down. Clearly the overwork and the weather are combining to kill him.
Houston thinks he should see a doctor, but all Glistening Alamanzer cares about is whether Laura knows he’s sick.
Houston informs him Laura’s flown the coop, and Manly makes a bitter crack.
Houston says for the third or fourth time that he needs medical treatment.
AMELIA [as HOUSTON]: “Let me bathe you, boy!”
DAGNY: Yeah. [as HOUSTON:] “I got me some Vicks VapoRub!”
But Alamanzer shouts him down and leaves. (It’s unclear why he came here in the first place, but whatever.)
“That dumb kid thinks he knows everything,” Houston mutters to himself (hilariously).
But then he becomes frightened when he hears Almanzo fall down the stairs (accompanied by a goofy little slide whistle toot from the Rose, to whom the instrument perhaps sounded different than it does to the rest of us).
“Alamanzy, Alamanzy!” Houston screams (yet another variation) and rushes to get help.
Back at the Little House, the family (minus Pa) is having supper, but Laura just picks at her food.
Carrie slurps something that was incomprehensible to me, but which the subtitle transcriptionist deciphers as “You’re lucky you’re bigger, Laura. When I don’t eat, I have to go to bed.”
Ma snaps at Carrie, quite irritably. Their relationship has really frayed over the course of this season.
Baby Grace, meanwhile, enjoys her mush.
AMELIA: I think Grace is much cuter than Carrie.
WILL: Really?
Albert, who has an even smaller part in this story than Mary, suggests a game of checkers.
But Laura is too depressed, and leaves the table.
Pa comes back from Sleepy Eye (so it’s been a couple days?), and we see they’re eating fried chicken. (They say the fried chicken on this show was just ordered from KFC, which may or may not be part of an insidious product-placement conspiracy, as we’ll investigate further when we get to Season Eight’s “Wave of the Future.”)
Pa says he has something important to talk to Laura about, so he and Ma ascend to the loft.
Pa tells Laura that on his trip to Sleepy Eye, he conducted a thorough investigation and learned that Almanzo has been working his second job so the Blind School can meet its obligation to Mr. Pims. (The story about lowering the rent was an invention by him and Houston.)
He adds that he believes the saloon-girl incident was a misunderstanding.
Then Pa tells her Almanzo is very ill.
ROMAN: Wow, it’s Beauty and The Beast.
“Houston’s taking care of him at the Blind School,” Pa says.
WILL: Surprise, surprise, Mary can’t even be bothered to help with that.
Laura says she must go to him, and Pa says he’ll take her in the morning.
They hug, and Laura says, “Oh God, please let him be all right.”
ROMAN [as CHARLES]: “I’m not God. A lot of people make that mistake, though.”
After another break, we return to Sleepy Eye, where Mustache Man is still driving around in front of the school.
Laura and Pa arrive, where they find Houston tending the dying Almanzo. (Where are Mary and Adam, exactly?)
WILL: Is he gonna have a dance hallucination, like in Oklahoma!?
“Doc had to send out for some ice,” Houston reports – a cold irony. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Manly remains unconscious, which makes him considerably more sympathetic to the audience.
(The characters don’t notice, but a shadowy figure seems to be watching them from the corner of the frame. The Angel of Death?)
Pa goes out to help find some ice, and Laura asks Houston to explain Manly’s deception.
“I don’t know, little lady,” Houston says gently. “Folks in love do strange things.”
Unexpectedly, then, he goes on to say, “I expect that’s the reason why I never did fall in love myself,” then admits it’s meant a lonely life for him.
DAGNY: Oh, is he gonna propose to Laura?
AMELIA: Yeah. [as HOUSTON:] “Dear Laura, I love you and I want to dot dot dot . . .”
Laura turns her attention back to Manly, and Houston gives her a little pep talk. “Talk to his heart, little lady,” he advises.
Laura turns to him with wonder. “You’re a strange man, Houston,” she says. “You’ve never been love, but you talk as though you know what people feel in their hearts.”
WILL [as HOUSTON, shrugging]: “I read a lot of the Brontë Sisters.”
The more he talks, the deeper Houston gets mired in syrup, saying with a rheumy twinkle, “I’ve been alone my whole life . . . until you and the children came along.”
All joking aside, I think Dub Taylor is wonderful in this part. I love Houston.
Gilbert is fantastic here too. I mean, I hate how Laura changes sort of overnight, but you know what they say, hate the song, not the singer, or whatever.
Well, Houston withdraws, and Laura tries the whole talking-to-his-heart thing.
Back at Caroline’s, Pa returns. (It’s implied this is the same day, the show having conveniently forgotten how far away Sleepy Eye is yet again.)
Pa gives her an update, that says something neither the transcriptionist nor I can make out. To me, it sounds like, “Look, why don’t I get you back to some covers and get you home? You’ve been workin’ all day.”
In the kitchen, meanwhile, Percival is timing Nellie as she practices plating ham and eggs.
He praises her progress, and Nellie chuckles that she hopes to be faster than Caroline soon.
AMELIA: Does he have a rabbit’s foot sticking out of his pocket?
DAGNY: It’s his penis.
Percival sadly says she’ll have to attend to that on her own, since she’s now graduated from his cooking school.
Alarmed, Nellie says she isn’t ready, and they have a cute little flirty Christina-Ricci-and-Elijah-Wood conversation. (I have Yellowjackets on the brain for some reason today.)
(Misty is totally the Nellie Oleson of that show.)
Sadly, Percival says goodnight, and Nellie pronounces his name correctly for the first time.
“No need to thank me,” he says. “That’s what I get paid for.”
AMELIA: Way to fuck up that conversation, Perciville.
He exits . . . but where in the past we might have seen, hell, we have seen Nellie hurling crockery and foodstuffs, today she simply walks over to the sink and weeps.
Back in Sleepy Eye, Laura ain’t a-weepin’, she’s a-sleepin’. Apparently nodded off whilst a-vigil-keepin’.
Covered in a mountain of ice, Alamanzy begins wiggling his hand, like Lazarus, or Frankenstein’s monster.
WILL: This show loves indicating patients are fine by wiggling their fingers.
He comes to, and they catch up, Laura reassuring him all is well and she loves him. (There’s some nice melting-ice sound effects, too.)
Then they go into the matter of the saloon girl, which probably could have waited.
Speaking of waiting, Manly says he’s decided he can wait the two years to marry her.
Laura kisses him, coma-breath be damned.
Well, after another break, we see Almanzo old-man-climbin’ into the Chonkywagon as Garvey Kendall students and staff line up to say goodbye. (Mary in particular smiles idiotically.)
Mary and Adam thank Almanzo for his secret financial help.
Laura calls goodbye to Houston, who expresses joy at finding a new “family” of his own. (Pigtail Annie and the Sharp-Dressed Blind Kid smile nicely at this.)
Laura drives away as Mary waves.
WILL [as MARY, hysterically]: “I’M WAVING AS YOU DRIVE AWAY!”
Laura and Manly start making out at the reins, and almost drive the Chonkywagon into the General Store (which we see now is strangely identical to the one in Tracy).
Back in Walnut Grove, Nellie sits on the bed in her old room, still crying.
Mrs. Oleson and Nels come in, and Nellie whines that she’s realized she loves Percival.
Harriet immediately cracks that he’s a bit short to make a husband. Ha!
Nellie says she hates being tall, and Harriet says she can blame genetics on the Oleson side of the family.
“Your mother’s right,” Nels says dryly. “Her side is just fat.”
ALL [screaming]: OH MY GOD!!!!!
AMELIA: How can he say that after “Annabelle”?
WILL: I know, it’s horrible.
ROMAN: She should just be arriving as a surprise.
DAGNY: Yeah. She could bust through the wall like Kool-Aid Man.
(That’s Fat Joke #50, by the way.)
But Nels instantly redeems himself, or almost, by encouraging Nellie to go tell Percival she loves him before he leaves.
Nellie rushes out, and Nels keeps Harriet behind so the two lovers can work things out on their own.
Outside, Percival is playing a sort of dodgeball with the littlest schoolchildren, which is cute.
Nellie appears, and when she says, “Perciville?” he turns his attention away from the game and gets hit in the face with the ball.
Nellie tells him she loves him, which makes the kids giggle.
But Percival doesn’t giggle. After a nod to the height difference, he proposes, and after Nellie accepts, they have one of the nicer kisses we’ve seen on this show, I think.
Harriet begins squawking in horror from the window.
They inform Harriet and Nels that they’re getting married – tomorrow!
Mrs. O objects that church isn’t even open tomorrow, and Percival says cheerfully, “Oh, we can’t have a church wedding. . . . I’m Jewish!”
There are those for whom race humor of any kind will always cringe, but our rumpus room denizens laughed and applauded. Surely this was Landon’s joke on people’s reactions when they learned the godfather of the all-time greatest Christian family show was Jewish himself.
Harriet starts shrieking. (I initially mistyped that phrase as sharts shrieking, and I suppose that’s possible too. She is pretty surprised.)
But Nels sees no problem with the arrangement. Interfaith unions in Nineteenth-Century America weren’t unheard-of, but they were more common in cities. Jews and Catholics apparently frowned on them more than Christian Protestants did, which seems a little strange today. Or maybe not.
Fortunately, Harriet’s relief at Nellie finding a husband quickly eclipses her antisemitism.
(By the way, David Rose brings in that crazy slide whistle again!)
As for Nellie, who you’ll recall spread antisemitic rumors about Isaac Singerman in “The Craftsman,” she’s completely unbothered by Percival’s revelation. In fact, she doesn’t even seem surprised, so possibly she deduced his religion beforehand. She’s not stupid, after all.
And the next thing you know, we see Doc Baker marrying the two of them by the Creek.
ROMAN: Does Doc have the authority to do this?
WILL: Yeah, Aldi should run in yelling, “Stop! Stop this at once!”
Looks like they’re doing the wedding in the Lake Kezia Zone, which makes sense, as historically we’ve seen that it’s also Groveland’s Jewish Quarter.
It’s a pity Kezia herself isn’t still around, otherwise she could marry them at sea.
Nellie is wearing a fancy pink dress (it’s beautiful), and has sewn a bunch of crazy little flower decals on her big pink bow.
Percival and Nellie rush to the waiting decorated buggy as the crowd throws rice.
DAGNY: They should be throwing eggs. That’s how the whole thing got started.
The guests are a rather random assortment. (Sarah Caulder and D.L. Dawson are some of the stranger invitees.)
Nellie and Percival kiss again, quite passionately. It’s said there were rumors on the set that Arngrim and Steve Tracy were romantically involved, which apparently filled the two friends with glee. (The two apparently would publicly “practice” kissing just to shock the rest of the crew, and according to Arngrim, NBC bigwigs described their onscreen chemistry as “looking like they fuck like crazed weasels.”)
Laura catches the bouquet.
“To the honeymoon!” Percival cries, and Nellie widens her eyes. I wonder if she told him she was married before? It’s a little complicated, so she probably didn’t. Maybe in a future episode he’ll find out and track down Luke Simms to get to the bottom of the story.
(Weddings always look like so much fun on TV, don’t they? In real life I find them rather dreadful, but never mind.)
Towards the back of the crowd, Ma and Pa smile.
Ma directs Pa to “tell them,” and he approaches Manly and Glazed-Carrot Laura and brusquely tells them “One year.”
Then we see Baby Grace planting a kiss on some little red-haired toddler.
Pa takes her away, and the red-haired kid goes, “I love her.”
Then we go to freeze frame (our sixth since series inception), and a title pops up that reads TO BE CONTINUED . . . IN FIFTEEN YEARS.
ALL: Oh my God/What??/Good Lord, Landon/etc.
STYLE WATCH:
At first I thought Laura was wearing Alice Garvey’s old red kerchief, but looking closely it appears to be a unique one.
AMELIA: Oh, I love Hester-Sue’s hat.
DAGNY: I love her bag.
But I’m prepared to go out on a limb here and say her hatband does appear to be made out of the same material as Alice’s sexy bandana!
There’s a broken window in the school, and Landon and Ted have painstakingly shone a beam of light through it to appear on the floor.
Ma wears her glamorous “The Willows” getup to the wedding.
Charles appears to go commando again.
THE VERDICT: Goofy things galore about this one, but the final product is charming and has an epic quality. I know I’m not alone in feeling unease about Laura and Nellie growing up, but Gilbert and Angrim couldn’t be better – everybody’s at their best, really – and Steve Tracy adds a jolt of new life that’s most welcome. It’s funny, the music and cinematography are great: an all-around crowd-pleaser.
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