Season 3 episode 1: The Collection

(I am starting with Season 3 because I got it for Christmas yesterday and I haven't watched it in a while, whereas I watch season one all the time. I will finish the series from here and circle back and do the less-ridiculous first two at the end.)

This is the one where:
Caleb Hotchkiss (Johnny Cash) attempts to rip off Walnut Grove by posing as a preacher and collecting 'donations for Gray's Corners'.

This show is over thirty years old and I am going to spoil the heck out of it. If you can even call that spoiling.
Caleb finds Reverend Alden sick in a wagon speeding down the road (Classic Little House moment). He later finds out that Rev. Alden was on his way to Walnut Grove to collect donations for the people of Gray's Corners who had recently suffered a very large fire and crop failure, and he volunteers to collect instead, but his intentions are to steal from everybody in the town for his own personal gain. He takes the Reverend's clothes, hat, and engraved watch. Later in the episode, after Caleb is pretty much reformed by his own (at first forced) kindness to and praying for other people, his greatly pressured wife (played by June Carter Cash, Johnny's real wife) reveals his scheme to the Reverend. In the end, Caleb is reformed in front of the entire congregation, and the donations go to the place for which they were originally intended.

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

Generic Neighbor House used: YES (Peabody sisters)
Doc Baker tries to heal dog: YES (Edwards' pup)
Guest Star sings: YES (But I'm glad, 'cause it's Johnny Cash)
Pa broke a bone: NO (surprisingly)
Somebody cries: YES (Mrs. Hotchkiss)
Pa cries: NO
Crop failure: YES
Runaway Wagon: YES
"Villain" reformed by kindness: YES
"Oh, Pa!": NO
Pa punches someone; someone punches Pa: NO
Comforting crackpot theology: YES. (Caleb tells Alicia that her dog will go to heaven, but only after they bury him.)
Thing that TOTALLY would not fly today that miraculously flew in the 70s: YES (Preteen girl [Mary] gets on a horse w/ total stranger to take him to her house [STRANGER DANGER!])
Unexplained absence of a main character: NO

My actual feelings about this episode:
This is a hard one for me to pick on. It actually gets me a little choked up, to watch this and think about Johnny Cash's song 'Hurt'. (If you haven't seen its video, now is the time. It's embedded below.)



NOW YOU ARE ALL CRYING BWA HA HA HA.