The Genius is a story of John-Boy bringing a fellow student from college to stay the weekend with the Walton family. And this student is far from ordinary.
I have to admit when I started watching this episode, I was a little turned off in the first few minutes. It didn't strike me as a very original idea. It seemed a lot of TV programs in those days had an episode with a similar storyline with this kind of stereotyped character: the person who is a genius intellectually but has no social skills and no understanding of human beings at all. And of course you can predict the character either gets his comeuppance and/or learns some lessons about what really counts.
But I'm glad to say I was proven wrong. Sure, the destination was a bit predictable. But it was a great trip getting there, thanks to fine writing. There was a good deal of humor in this episode, some of it in the form of delightful surprises. The script portrayed well how there's much meaning in life that can't be explained logically.
One small criticism: the character of Lyle was maybe a bit extreme. He started college at 15. He was thoroughly knowledgeable of John-Boy's physics course material from having only "looked at" the textbook a couple. The writers could have made him someone who simply was intellectually oriented and introverted, but not at such an unbelievable level of genius. It could have told the same story but more realistically. Less would have been more.
John Walton Sr. is conspicuously missing in this episode. I would guess Ralph Waite was sick or unavailable for whatever reason when this episode was filmed, so they wrote him out. Part of the story concerns how Lyle dismisses religion as nothing more than the product of primitive minds. Naturally this causes great consternation with the family. But John Walton Sr. is the one family member who, while respectful, doesn't find organized religion conducive to his path in life. And that was a theme that came up in some other very interesting episodes. I'm imagining how the conversation could have been even more interesting if John Sr. had been at the dinner table as well. What a lost opportunity.
