Netflix ‘Little House On The Prairie’ Boss On Fever Flashbacks, ‘Anne of Green Gables’

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the fourth episode of Netflix‘s ‘Little House on the Prairie.’

Little House on the Prairie showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has previous experience when it comes to the genre elements of dreams and flashbacks.

In the fourth episode of Netflix’s adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, fever descends upon the residents of Independence, Kansas, which readers learned was malaria transferred by mosquitoes in the “Fever ‘N’ Ague” chapter in Wilders’ novel of the same name.

“When you’re reading that as a kid, you think, ‘Oh my god, that’s so scary.’ She is so little, and her whole family is depending on her. We definitely wanted to portray that from the book, but obviously being sick in bed is not a story,” the showrunner said.

Thus, the writer and executive producer wove in hallucinations disguised as flashbacks to Ma and Pa’s past before they took their daughters west in a daring and risky venture in the eyes of their family members. Pa (Luke Bracey) sees his younger brother George (Connor Paton), who ran away to fight in the Civil War, and Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald) sees her sister Eliza (Catherine Bérubé) who didn’t agree with her leaving with Charles.

“I have worked on lots of shows that have done flashbacks and wanted to be able to do something different, but have the same concept. So I thought fever dreams would be really fun, because now there’s stakes. Now we’re getting the story of the reasons they left Wisconsin under those circumstances, and why no one came with them,” Sonnenshine said. “We’ve been dropping little bread crumbs, and now we get to hear the story of what happened to George, and we also get to hear the story of why Caroline’s sister would write a letter like that in episode three, alluding to the fact that that Caroline was a little unsure about coming at some point. All of a sudden, we had a compelling story narrative for malaria.”

Alice Halsey’s Laura doesn’t get the fever right away, possibly thanks to the coffee she drinks with Pa, so she is “the last one standing” doing the chores while her parents and sister Mary remain burning up and bedridden. She has visions of her grandmother (Megan Follows), who is back in Wisconsin in the Big Woods, which signal she has finally caught the bug. Wilder’s prequel of sorts Little House in the Big Woods is alluded to throughout Season 1.

“It’s sort of a genre element. I’ve worked in genre, so some of those things work their way into dream sequences,” she said. “It was actually very similar to my last show, I also did a big f dream sequence episode in Archive 81 and I was like, ‘Wow, I clearly have a thing.’”

Sonnenshine likened the fever outbreak to the early stages of the COVID pandemic when the world did not know how to fight the disease. Eventually, information was gathered to help stop the spread, but in the initial weeks and months, that knowledge had not yet become clear. Even the chapter in the book has hindsight knowledge applied, and the show makes sure to emphasize that the way the illness spread wasn’t known when Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss) tells Caleb (Kowen Cadorath).

“One of the things that is so interesting is, we know so much now, and they just didn’t know, and that is very, like [the COVID] pandemic, right? We were like, ‘Ah, should we scrub down all our groceries?’ That was a very modern thing that we experienced that we had not really experienced before, and malaria was like that, and that chapter in the book is so scary when you’re a kid,” Sonnenshine told Deadline.

Some readers might remember that Mary (portrayed by Skywalker Hughes in the show) does eventually go blind in the first chapter of On the Shores of Silver Lake due to Scarlett fever. The showrunner didn’t share much when asked if this episode could be seen as a foreshadowing to that event later on, but she did stress the juxtaposition of Gemma James (Mary Holland) hoarding quinine needed to cure the fever versus the community mentality of helping others. Dr. Tann (Jocko Sims), whose real-life likeness Sonnenshine spoke about in a panel discussion moderated by Deadline, saved the day with the medicine eventually, aided by Lacey Aubert (Rebecca Amzallag) who knew Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie) had stockpiled some of his own.

“We just went through this in a pandemic where people are hoarding supplies and saying ‘I have to protect my family,’ and, let’s just face it, there’s a guy out there who’s basically said the same thing, ‘You got to protect your family first,’ and don’t worry about your community,” she said. “Some people, that is their instinct, and a lot of other people don’t have that instinct. A lot of people have the instinct that we have to help each other and care. I think there’s more people that think that. Gemma, in her mind, has a really good reason for not giving up that quinine, because what if she needs it, and yet there are people dying, so nothing has changed.”

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