Little House on the Prairie

Part of the reason Ellen drowned was because the girls dunked underwater quickly when they discovered a group of boys trying to peek at them without theit clothes on. In Laura's Ingalls Wilder's fourth book, On the Banks of Plum Creek, which featured Laura as a girl about the same age as Laura in this episode, Laura Ingalls Wilder talked about how she and her sister Mary wore old clothes to swim. Back in the day, skinny-dipping was as inappropriate for girls that age as it is today. What's more, in episodes like Season 2's A Matter of Faith and Season 9's Times are Changing, the boys wore their pants (and sometimes even their suspenders) and just removed their shirts while swimming, and the girls often swam in their bloomers (or the wealthy girls, like Nellie and Nancy Oleson, had fancy old-fashioned bathing suits). That being said, it's unusual that Mary, Laura, Ellen, and Carrie didn't have anything on in this particular episode's swimming scenes.

Note the obvious difficulty that Melissa Gilbert (Laura) has with her crying scene with Michael Landon (Charles) in the barn. She keeps squinting her eyes really hard, and it's obvious that she is having trouble, which usually didn't come across with Gilbert's typically strong acting.

I often wonder why Eloise blamed Laura for the accident. Mary and Carrie had also been there when Ellen asked if she could "go swimming with the Ingalls girls." It's unusual that Eloise would single Laura out in that situation. Reply: Maybe it's because Laura was the one doing most of the talking when she, her sisters, and Ellen ran over in the first scene to ask Ellen's mother for permission to go swimming, so Eloise remembered that. Or maybe it was because Laura was the first Ingalls girl that Eloise's eyes stopped on at the funeral. Deep grief prompts many people to act in haste, which is clearly what Eloise did when she blamed Laura.