The Music Box 2/5

Laura and Anna walk home through a field. Laura asks Anna to name all the items she can in Nellie’s dollhouse. Anna rips through the list without a stutter or stop. Laura has Anna go through another list, this time shouting it as loud as possible. I forgot that Laura has a knack for speech therapy. You go girl! Both of you!

As Laura returns to the Ingalls barn, she remembers she has a music box in her petticoat. She rushes up to the loft to play with it. She winds up the music box and enters into an almost drug-induced euphoria as the music plays. Laura sets the music box on a shelf and starts to sway to the music. She then gets up and pretends to waltz. I guess she didn’t get dance lessons for her birthday either – she is a bit rhythmically challenged. Suddenly, the barn door slams and Laura panics. She tries to close the music box but knocks it to the floor instead. The door squeaks and slams a few more times and Laura realizes that it was just the wind. She goes back to the box but the music is all warped. Laura realizes she may be in big trouble.

That evening Charles entertains the rest of the family with his fiddle while Laura contemplates her fate next to the hearth. Charles asks if there is anything wrong. Well for starters the scene is shot at a weird angle that I don’t recall seeing on the show before and the lighting is just wrong. Oh, he was talking to Laura. She murmurs that there’s nothing wrong. Caroline also asks if Laura is okay and gets a meek “I’m fine” in response. Mary speculates that Laura has a stomachache from a candy overload at Nellie’s. Laura snaps at her sister. Before the fight escalates, Caroline notices Carrie entering into sleep mode and decides to take the youngin’ to bed. Charles decides that it is bedtime for everyone. Mary gives Pa a good night kiss and heads upstairs. Er, upladder? Laura follows without any affection for Pa – he calls her down. Pa asks again if Laura is all right, and she says again that she is fine. Charles kisses her forehead and she goes up to the loft.

We join Laura as she appears to have a bad dream of some sort. Uh oh, the screen is getting all wavy and a harp starts to play – we’re going in! Oh, I just realized that the music box song is the Nerd March! Now that it is being played in a minor key I totally recognize it. Anyway, we see that Laura is dressed as a serf and is standing in handcuffs in a defendant’s stand. The camera pulls out until the top of a judge’s bench can be seen. A gavel comes down. The judge asks for a verdict from the jury. Madame Foreperson (who sounds an awful lot like Harriet) declares a guilty verdict. Um, mistrial? The judge affirms the verdict and sentences Laura to 100 years of school where she will have to write “I will not steal” 10 million times. Laura begs for mercy, but she is met with an awkward close-up of the judge just nodding like a bobble-head. It’s a good thing fisheye lenses were still in the development phase when this was produced or this would have been a really freaky scene instead of just weird.

After fog shrouds the judge, we see Laura back in the house saying she didn’t mean it. Mary wakes up her sister to get her to shut up. Mary Ingalls sucks at sympathy. “Try to dream of something different,” Mary tells Laura. Laura lies down again and says she’ll try.