Little House on the Prairie

The real Caroline Ingalls was a brunette as a child, just like her daughters Laura and Carrie, but in the flashback sequences, the actress playing young Caroline is a blonde.

The flashback sequences show Caroline with a younger sister named Eliza Ann, and an older brother named Henry. In real life, Caroline was one of seven children--four girls and three boys. There was also a half sister named Charlotte.

In this episode, we learn that it was a town dance that brought Charles and Caroline together romantically when they were younger. However, in Season 1's The Love of Johnny Johnson, it was allegedly a one-on-one picnic that represented their first date. That's not the story we see in this episode.

Caroline tells the girls that she and Charles lived near the Oconomowac River as children. It's correctly pronounced "o-CON-a-moe-wok", but Karen Grassle really butchers the name, pronouncing it more like "Oh-ka-NAH-ma-wak". It sounds like she's just making a guess as to how the word is pronounced. Simple research on the writer's part could have prevented this.

Audiences may notice that the child version of Charles Ingalls (played by Matthew Laborteaux) is a bit more strange and psychotic than anything else. Every time he gets angry at his brother or a classmate, he lowers his head and starts waving his arms in a circular motion, and he rams into people head-first, like a billy goat. It's actually quite humorous to watch, and it doesn't quite establish Charles as a tough kid, which is probably what they were trying to depict.

In this episode's flashbacks, we see Charles' parents Lansford and Laura Ingalls, who are portrayed quite differently from Season 3's Journey in the Spring, where Lansford was a controlling downer of a man who wore his wife down emotionally. In this episode, however, he seems sweeter, gentler, and a good father and husband. Reply: True, but recall that in Journey in the Spring, Charles and his brother Peter mentioned that their father took a turn for the worse when he lost his farm. Before that, though, he was supposedly a good, strong, and loving man, as evidenced when Peter said to Charles, "Try to remember him the way he was when we were little."

In the flashback, young Charles states that he was 12. However, in Season 1's The Love of Johnny Johnson, Charles tells Laura that he was 15 when he met Caroline.

Charles Ingalls was four years older than Caroline. In this episode's flackback sequences, however, the actress playing young Caroline actually looks to be a bit older than a very young Matthew Laborteaux, who portrays Charles.

At the end of the episode, when Charles finally makes it home, he looks totally dry. I guess this is plausible since he was driving the wagon; however, the ground outside of the house when Caroline runs out to greet him is totally dry also, and the Anniversary sign hanging on the door frame doesn't look like it was wet either.

Young Caroline is depicted quite differently in this episode's flashbacks than in the flashbacks of Season 8's A Christmas They Never Forgot. In that episode, Caroline recalled her struggles to accept her mother's new husband, and in that flashback, we could see that Caroline dressed and behaved more like a spoiled, slightly bratty rich kid. In this episode, however, Caroline (who is about the same age as she was in the other flashback) wears much more modest clothes, is more shy and sweet, and certainly does not live in the fanciest of houses.

In the flashbacks, when Mr. Watson is whipping young Charles for the third time (and young Caroline is watching from the window), you can totally tell that Mr. Watson is whacking the desk, not Charles. If you look closely, the stick is not even anywhere close to Charles when Mr. Watson is "whipping" him.

In this episode's flashbacks, we learn that Charles has a sister named Polly. However, we never get to see her as an adult in the series; we only meet Charles' older brother Peter in Season 3's "Journey in the Spring, Part 1."