Waltons 9.14: “The Beginning”

Airdate: 3/5/81

Toni also happens to be the winner of the Alanis Morrisette lookalike contest.

…of Jason and Toni’s marriage, that is, but it’s not without a few snags, namely the Walton family’s anti-Semitism. When Jason casually drops the fact that Toni’s Jewish, she gets the cold shoulder, and runs off, in part to rediscover her Jewish identity. When Jason proposes marriage, she resists, claiming she’s tearing him from his family – but later shares in the joy that they will soon be a married couple.

While all this is going on, Waltons Mountain gets (another) new minister, Rev. Tom Marshall, who wakes everyone up in the middle of the night by ringing the bell when he sees how dilapidated the church has become. Corabeth is appalled at his inaugural behavior and checks his credentials, but they come out sterling. Soon nthe whole town is fixing up the church and joining his celebration as Baptism as the true Christian denomination of freedom tolerance.

Finally, Jason and Toni are about to tie the knot – but there has to be an obstacle, and the writers decided it be religious differences (remember Ashley Longworth’s atheism?). Funny to see them tiptoeing around the anti-Semetism, demonstrated most abhorrently by Ben, but trying not to really spell it out, hiding behind the “tearing the family apart” issue. In the end, presumably, everyone’s fine with a Jew in the family – all it took was 47 minutes and Earl Hamner’s closing narration.