Lassie...what a strange show.

After an interesting day of job interviews – one each for me and my wife – I sat down in front of the TV to put my mind in vacation mode for a while.  Flipping through the channels, I stopped at our COZI-TV affiliate, and they were showing Lassie.

Now, I say the following in jest.  Well, partly in jest anyway.  I remember watching the show as a kid, and you couldn’t help but like Lassie.  Say it with me folks, “Good girl, Lassie”!

What I saw tonight wasn’t one of those “Timmy fell down the well…again” episodes.  Apparently some calamity had happened in the woods – maybe a forest fire – and Lassie took it upon herself to go around and check up on the little woodland creatures, and set things to rights if necessary.

(Hey, you know what you can find in the woods?  Squirrels!  I saw one on Lassie.  Okay, yeah I’m sure that’s true, but they’re not what you’d call exotic.  It’s not like you’d hear, “Dad!  Let’s go to the woods.  I know it’s a long way to drive, but I really wanna see a squirrel.  Please?”  Look kid, just come over to my yard.  We got your squirrels.  Bring your traps along, and you can take as many of those tomato thieves with you as you want!  But I digress.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the woods…Lassie…little animals.

By the way for those of you new to our fine world, Lassie was a big, good natured collie dog who apparently communicated by a combination of body language and barking.

So a fox walks into the woods.  Which sounds like a setup to a joke, “A fox, a dog, and Indiana Jones walk into the woods”.  No, no, no.  No joke, this fox was a skinny, scrawny thing.  Really pathetic looking.  Lassie watches the fox for a while, then harangues it with a few barks.  The fox pauses, then ambles on a bit.

Then we see a quail.  The camera pans over a bit, and there’s the quail’s nest, with five eggs out in the open, unprotected!  Lassie looks at the nest, then looks at the fox looking at the nest.

Foxes gotta eat too, you know.

For some reason this made me think of Solomon, preparing to pass judgment on a difficult dispute.  What will Lassie’s decision be?  “Okay fox, you can eat two quail eggs, but no more than that.  Got it”?

Then the camera cut to the branch of a nearby tree, where sat an owl and two owl chicks in the nest.

“Okay, two quail eggs, and I’ll throw in one of the owl chicks.  But don’t you even think about going for the other one”!  But of course, all you heard was barking.  More barking.

It’s as if Lassie expected all the different forest animals to understand Doggish.  That would be like one of us traveling to France or Germany and expecting everyone to understand English.

What must be going through the minds of these animals?  It wouldn’t matter much to them that Lassie lived on a farm.  No, when you live in the woods you have to be tough.  I can almost hear them thinking, “Just who does this softy from the suburbs think she is, coming here and poking her nose into our business”?

Right then I was called to supper, which is just as well.  I don’t know if the plot turned into some dramatic struggle, fox versus helpless small animals.  It wouldn’t have been anything really intense, though.  We could watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom if we wanted to see intense.