"Hard-working folks only smell bad to people who have nothing better to do than stick their noses in the air. Well, whenever you stick your nose in the air with me, Nellie Oleson, it's going to get punched." - Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls
Little House on the Prairie: Season 2 DVD Review
By Christopher W. Czajka
Despite a lukewarm critical reception (one critic referred to it as The Waltons Lite) during its inaugural 1974-1975 season, NBC's Little House on the Prairie was a overwhelming hit with audiences, and returned for its second season on September 10, 1975. With characters, settings, and themes firmly established in the first season, the series truly hits its stride in 1975-1976, combining adventure, social issues, melodrama, and the Little House "Three F's" (family, friends, and faith) in a semi-serialized format that would support the show's success in the ensuing years. The second season lays the foundations for plotlines--and plot contrivances--the series would utilize for years to come.
While the first season largely focuses on the Ingalls family as a unit, season two develops the storylines of secondary characters, and also zooms in on Laura and Mary's trials and travails beyond the walls of the little house. Mary (Melissa Sue Anderson) takes a job working with the town seamstress, Mrs. Whipple, while simultaneously becoming the star student of the one-room schoolhouse, and nursing a long-term prepubescent romance. Laura (Melissa Gilbert) develops a series of one-episode crushes on a selection of shaggy-haired boys (usually with disastrous results), befriends the crotchety new town banker, and is expelled from school by an unfair teacher. And, as per usual, both Mary and Laura continuously fall victim to relentless torment at the hands of Nellie (Alison Arngrim) and Willie (Jonathan Gilbert) Oleson.
A major storyline of the second season centers on the Ingalls' gruff and grizzled neighbor, Mr. Edwards (Victor French), and his awkward courtship of the uptight town postmistress, Grace Snider (Bonnie Bartlett). When the widowed Julia Sanderson (veteran actress Patricia Neal) falls ill and dies in the two-part tearjerker "Remember Me," Mr. Edwards and the Widow Snider get married and adopt her three children: John Junior (Radames Pera), Carl (Brian Part), and Alicia (Kyle Richards, who would appear as one of Jamie Lee Curtis' babysitting charges in Halloween). It's the first instance of a plot device that Little House writers would utilize for years to come: whenever producers were hoping to keep kids interested (in particular, boys who saw the series as a "girl's show"), instant families were created by sudden and unforeseen adoptions. Once the Widow Sanderson dies, there's plenty of drama as Mr. Edwards adapts to family life and adjusts to his eldest son, John Junior, a dreamy idealist and aspiring poet. Conveniently, John Junior also serves as Mary's continuing love interest.
While the adoptions and the Mary/John Junior romance hint at the serial format that Little House would eventually become, the second season also perfects another recurring element of the series: the stand-alone "adventure episode." The second season contains some of the best-loved and most memorable adventure episodes of the series. In "The Campout," the Ingalls and Oleson families hike into the mountains (in southwestern Minnesota, of course) for a camping trip. While collecting leaves for a school project, Laura and Nellie fall into a raging river and narrowly escape certain death on the rapids. In "The Runaway Caboose," Laura, Mary, and Carl Sanderson unwittingly go on a cross-country thrill-ride while researching another school project (apparently, Miss Beadle was very much into hands-on learning). In "The Long Road Home," cash-strapped Charles Ingalls (Michael Landon) and Mr. Edwards accept a nerve-wracking job transporting explosives on a perilous journey across the prairie. In "At the End of the Rainbow," Laura and her very best friend (who, of course, only appears in this episode), spend weeks collecting "gold" they have discovered in a nearby creek. While preparing to take the gold to the bank and permanently solve her family's interminable financial woes, Laura has a series of hilarious dreams, in which the Ingalls reside in a Disney-esque castle, the Olesons look like escapees from Deliverance, and Laura plies Miss Beadle with a bathtub-sized basket of apples. In another humorous episode, "The Gift," Laura cooks up a scheme to raise funds for Reverend Alden's birthday present by selling homeopathic remedies door-to-door. Her marketing approach includes smearing dirt on her face and wearing a flour sack to inspire sympathy in her potential customers.
Laura and Nellie Oleson's bitter rivalry blossoms in the second season. In "The Talking Machine," Nellie secretly records Laura speaking about a boy she likes with a newfangled invention, and later plays the recording to the entire school. In "For My Lady," Nellie taunts Mary and Laura with chants of "monkey business, monkey business, monkey business" when she mistakenly believes that Charles Ingalls is having a sordid affair (!) with a young widow in town. She is rewarded with a punch in the nose. In "The Campout," of course, Nellie blames the entire river-rafting trip on Laura, and claims that she was pushed into the rapids.
The second season also contains a handful of "issue" episodes, in which the problems of 1970s America creep into 1870s Walnut Grove. In "Soldier's Return," Mrs. Whipple's estranged son (Soap's Richard Mulligan), a Civil War veteran, returns to Walnut Grove. Unfortunately, he's a morphine addict and suffering from Vietnam-style flashbacks. In "Centennial" (aired four months before the bicentennial), excitement about the nation's hundredth birthday is quelled when the government raises the dirt poor citizenry's taxes. It takes a Russian immigrant's soliloquy on the greatness of America to remind the folks of Hero Township how lucky they are to live in a free country. And in "Haunted House," Laura develops a friendship with the town hermit, and coaches him through his grief over his long-dead wife.
Additionally, season two provides some dark foreshadowing. In "Four Eyes," Mary's grades are inexplicably suffering until Charles discovers that she is having trouble seeing. He promptly whisks her off to Mankato, where she gets a new pair of glasses. Melissa Sue Anderson's wobbly-mouthed sobs when she admits her problem provide a sneak peek at her signature wailing aria ("Pa, Pa, I can't SEEEEEEEE!"), which will hit in a few seasons.
The entire Little House cast provides strong performances in the second season, but two actors stand out. Melissa Gilbert, at the tender age of ten, shoulders much of the season in a straightforward, non-cloying, and mature performance. She is entirely believable as Laura, and plays both dramatic and comedic scenes with heartfelt sincerity. She endows the role with an impishness, feistiness, and vulnerability that make the character an utterly believable child. Simultaneously, Katherine MacGregor, as mercantile owner Harriet Oleson, is also unforgettable. Her bitchiness and skullduggery create a character that is equal parts of Lady Macbeth and The Wizard of Oz's Almira Gulch. MacGregor's dangerously glittering eyes, pursed-lipped frowns, and shrill character voice, combined with impeccable comic timing, create a thoroughly enjoyable villainess.
At the end of the second season, a nocturnal twister destroys most of the Ingalls' crop. Charles, his will broken for the umpteenth time, vows to take his family back to the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Only after reminiscences, floods of tears, and advice from some hoary old settlers do the Ingalls agree to give Walnut Grove another try. The third season can't be far away.
The twenty-one episodes that comprise the second season are divided onto six DVDs. The DVDs are housed in a foldout digipak case, which fits into a cardboard slipcover. The slipcover depicts a photograph of the beaming Ingalls family, obviously from later in the series, and not season two. Opening the digipak, each panel features photographs of characters, including a bizarre shot of the Ingalls family in costume for one of the dream sequences in "At the End of the Rainbow." The disc holder area of the digipak is adorned with a beautiful panoramic photograph of white clouds sailing over a golden, wheat-covered prairie (a real, honest-to-goodness prairie, which any longtime Little House viewer will recognize as a stock photograph, not the show's rugged, arid and semi-mountainous Southern California filming location). Each disc also features the prairie backdrop, and individual photographs of cast members: Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, Mr. Edwards, and, in the tradition Season 1's off-the-wall packaging, Merlin Olsen as Jonathan Garvey (who doesn't even show up in this season). This design choice is just plain old sloppy. Also included in the packaging is a booklet containing brief summaries of each episode.
The menu designs on the DVDs are simple and functional. Episodes on each disc are listed, while a montage of memorable Little House moments plays in a widow, accompanied by the show's theme music. The episodes, unfortunately, are not divided into chapters. This forces the viewer to watch the entire episode in one sitting or to fast forward to their stopping point later on. There is a play all feature.
