NEED TO KNOW
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Little House on the Prairie cast members Alison Arngrim and Dean Butler opened up on the season three episode “Bully Boys”
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The cast members and their podcast cohost called the installment “disturbing” and “horrifying,” as it saw three men come to town and attack women, including Mary and Caroline Ingalls
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Butler called out one episode as being the most “menacing” in the whole series
Though fans might think of Little House on the Prairie as only wholesome, the cast thinks one episode was particularly “disturbing,” “horrifying” and “shocking.”
On the Sept. 25 episode of the Little House 50 podcast, Alison Arngrim (who played Nellie Oleson) and Dean Butler (who played Almanzo Wilder) were joined by their co-host Pamela Bob to discuss the season three episode “Bully Boys.” The episode saw two adult men and a teenager, the Galenders brothers, arrive in Walnut Grove, Minn., where they quickly wreak havoc on the townspeople.
“There is so much woman-beating in this episode. It’s crazy,” Bob said in the podcast.
“They target the women. They’re cowards,” Arngrim, 63, said. “They don’t want to fight the men. They wanted to attack the girls.” She called the men “creepy and disturbing” and said there was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibe to the men. Roy Jenson played George Galender, Michael LeClair played Bubba Galender and Geoffrey Lewis played Sam Galender.
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Melissa Gilbert (left) and Michael LeClair in the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ episode ‘Bully Boys’
“This plot is very simple,” Butler, 69, said. “It’s really about how much will people take.” Butler also said the Galenders were “an illustration of no moral guardrails of any kind.”
When Bubba spends time in the schoolyard with the other kids, Bob said, “This was the craziest scene ever when he, out of the blue, punches Mary in the face.” Bubba purposefully knocks a girl down with a dodgeball, and when Mary tells him to stop being mean, Bubba punches her.
“It is jarring to say the least as a viewer watching this,” Bob said of seeing Mary, played by Melissa Sue Anderson, be attacked. She added that Melissa Gilbert’s Laura was “a little more nonchalant” than you’d want her to be.
Even though Mary has a black eye for the rest of the episode, she feels pressured to keep what happened to her quiet. In the episode, Arngrim’s Nellie tries to make herself Bubba’s girlfriend, which Arngrim called “reprehensible.” “She sees him beating women, and she’s cool with it,” she said.
The breaking point for the town is when Karen Grassle’s Caroline “Ma” Ingalls is attacked by the two older men when she’s walking into town to sell eggs. “
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Melissa Sue Anderson (left) and Jonathan Gilbert in the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ episode ‘Bully Boys’
“It’s all sexual innuendo. It’s horrible. It’s horrific,” Bob said. “It’s really bad,” Arngrim agreed.
In the scene, the men leer at Caroline and touch her face. She begs them to let her go, but they grab her basket and all the eggs fall and break. She eventually breaks away from them and runs home.
Butler called the scene, “probably as overtly a menacing scene as . . . has ever been shot on the show.”
“And this is Caroline. I mean, viewers had to have gone, ‘Oh my god, that’s your mom,’” Arngrim said. The scene, she said, was clearly “assault.”
Arngrim praised Grassle for her performance as she tells Michael Landon’s Charles “Pa” Ingalls. “Her portrayal of trauma from sexual assault is so dead on,” she said. “The desperation to say it wasn’t that.” She tries to blame herself as she’s “losing it” until she tells Charles what happened.
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Michael Landon (left) and Karen Grassle in ‘Little House on the Prairie’
But things ultimately work out. Near the end of the episode, Mary and Laura stand up to Bubba and many of the kids join together to beat him up. “The children have said, we’re going to stand together, and we’re going to handle this,” Butler said. “And this is the . . . powerful allegorical moment for everybody to see. It’s time to stand up together and be counted when someone is treating you wrong.” He added that sometimes the hosts have called Mary “a narc,” but there’s “no moral ambiguity or doubt” in the character, and that shines in this episode.
Ultimately, Reverend Alden (Dabbs Greer), who had been sympathetic to the Galenders, calls them out during church on Sunday, and the men help him eject them from the church and the town. As they walk them out, Caroline leads the women in church in singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Bob said the episode is “still shocking” every time she rewatches it, and Butler called it “stunning” to see this much violence. Arngrim added that LeClair was actually very nice in real life.
Little House on the Prairie premiered in 1974 and ran for nine seasons, ending in 1983.
Read the original article on People