I’ve now watched the second and likely last episode of the Waltons I’ll watch in this demented life of mine. Not because the show was bad; I found it compelling for what it was trying to do. But I have no other reason to watch it other than because a precious angel haunted two of its episodes: 70s Sissy Spacek.

You can download the episodes freely from the Internet Archive.

Sissy plays a sheltered girl who couldn’t wait to get out of her strict, religious nutcase of a mother’s clutches. In the previous Spacek appearance (“The Townie,” from the first season), she swore she would marry our wannabe-writer protagonist John-boy if only he asked, and days later she was already falling for a John Dillinger-wannabe. She convinced him to run away with her and get married, only for her to change her mind the moment that arrogant kid crashed his car. The girl is trouble, reckless not in a fun way; despite my obvious allegiance to Sissy, that John-boy is just too good-hearted of a kid to have to deal with that shit.

Anyway, the episode starts with John-boy being unable to write because his family home is full of crotch spawns who actively hinder the protagonist’s creative impulses. He decides to head off for a couple of days to a cabin somewhere uphill. We see him travel for a while decidedly not uphill. The plot made a big deal about a storm coming, and the production had to blow some leaves in John-boy’s face while he pretended to hear thunder, even though the sky was California blue. I’m surprised that the fans themselves didn’t appear in the shot. I’m not insulting the show, though; I’m sure they did the best they could with early-seventies resources. They could have paraded Sissy around until some financier fell in love with her and threw hundreds of thousands at them, like it happened for Ginger in the Morning.

John-boy reaches that isolated cabin only to find out that someone is hiding there: Sissy. He soon learns she’s run away not only from her mother but from her current legal guardians, who, according to her, were exploiting her. We never really find out if Sissy’s character exaggerated it. Given that her main preoccupation is marrying someone who could save her from a life of servitude, this girl and her romance-addled brain likely just hurried to get themselves acquainted with the first bad boy they could find.

Then, the episode reveals a twist that actually shocked me for a show as wholesome as this. I guess I had mistaken wholesome for sanitized. The second half of the episode deals with increasing complications that force Sissy to act out troublesome emotions and exertions. It would benefit this post if I could be more specific about it, but all I would want to mention are spoilers about the second half of the episode, and I don’t want to ruin the experience of discovering something new for anyone who may be reading these words.

I think Sissy did a fine job with the material that fell on her pale, freckled shoulders. One of the saddest points of that ordeal was Sissy’s character clearly realizing that John-boy would have made a fine husband. Just not for the kind of ambitious girl she was then.

The ending also left me unexpectedly sad. Partly because this was one fewer glimpse of seventies Sissy that I have left to discover, but also because I would never find out what else happened to that reckless girl who had gotten herself in such a mess of a life. We are told that she and John-Boy remained friends into adulthood, but we never get to see the life she made for herself. In the same way Sissy’s haunting loveliness inhabited this show for a short time, we only got to witness a small part of a fictional life likely full of hardship, poverty, and terrible decisions.