Season 3 episode 2 -- I'll Ride the Wind

 Day 2
This is the episode where John Jr. (Grace & Isaiah Edwards' adopted son) engages himself to a thirteen year old and receives a college scholarship.
 
OK, so this episode starts out with John Jr. and Mr. Edwards in a field pitching hay. He meets Mary and finds out that he has been offered a scholarship at the University in Chicago. Claiming that he is now a man, he asks 13-year-old Mary to marry him, and she accepts. When he goes to visit Mary, her Pa keeps trying to get a 'talk' with him, but John always gets off to talk to Mary. Because Mary is upset that Johnny will be gone for 4 years although he comforts her that they will still see each other twice a year, he makes the decision to not accept the scholarship, which makes Mrs. Edwards very mad, but Mr. Edwards (and, at first, Mary) very happy. Soon they start construction on their house. One day, a sobbing Mary has the realization that John would be much happier at the University, and after another bout of sobbing, she bids him farewell on the train platform.


LHOP (sadly not Little House Of Pancakes) Trope Tracker for This Episode:

Generic Neighbor House used: NO
Doc Baker tries to heal dog: NO (in fact most of the townspeople weren't even there, and  I kind of missed them. All except the Olsens. Whom I never miss.)
Pa broke a bone: NO (surprisingly, because there was house building going on)
Somebody cries: YES (Mary [x2] MEGA monologue cries)
Pa cries: NO
Crop failure: NO (But they were planting a crop, so you know crop failure is coming!)
Runaway Wagon: NO
"Oh, Pa!": YES (Mary, for once)
Pa punches someone; someone punches Pa: NO (But it looked like it might go that way with J.Jr.!)
Thing that TOTALLY would not fly today that miraculously flew in the 70s: YES (Thirteen-year-old girl [Mary] gets engaged to a fifteen-year-old boy and the parents are fine and happy. SO CREEPY!!!!)
Unexplained absence of a main character: NO

Quote Of The Episode:
"Well, boy, she's here, she's yours, and you can go to work on her tomorrow!" ~ Mr. Edwards, talking about land, with his fifteen-year-old son and his (son's) thirteen-year-old fiancee in a strong embrace.

My Personal Thoughts About This Episode:
This is one of the creepiest episodes of all time. Wait. There are seven or eight more seasons to go. Maybe I shouldn't say that yet. But anyway, it's especially creepy for me, as a thirteen year old girl, to think of all the fifteen-year-old boys in my acquaintance and picturing myself setting up house with any one of them... ughhhhh! This is what happens when producers want a show to have a certain story, when the show  has no proper fitting characters for that story (Because this episode would have been kind of touching if Mary had been 16 or 18). The result can be very very creepy or very random.