The First Day

Like a previous reviewer wrote this episode was very off considering John-Boys character. He was portrayed like a total elementary kid getting constantly picked on. It seems like the previous episode were John-Boy was in the middle of a land battle! Didn't exist. He doesn't listen to anyone and continued to wear a dumb suit the entire episode. The professor had no good advice for him nore any great dialogue exchange in the end. John Boy forgetting his admission pappers at home while he was already up very early and prepared before he went off to college seemed astonishing.

On the other hand seeing Jason acting a little mature was refreshing.

This episode is on the stupid side of Walton's Mountain. John Boy's first day of college is full of hi-jinks and misadventures but the most obvious failing of it is the total transformation of the boy who wants to be a writer into a complete country rube more naive than Andy Griffith's Will Stockdale. Only one episode ago John Boy was wounded by gunshot and there is no sign of it in this, not even a lingering cringe. This episode introduces a bunch of new characters. some supposedly new College friends of John-Boy, never to be seen in any other episodes. John Boy turns into a total fool and wimp when tricked and hazed by bullying upperclassmen. One wishes he had more John Garfield in him when he is confronted by these boorish dolts and knocked them on their arses instead of becoming the subservient chuckle head of colossal stupidity he is portrayed as to the point of wearing a stupid freshman beanie cap that makes him look like a King's fool. Even the ending shows John Boy as more passive than he ought to have been growing up in the country when he finally stands up to the bullying. I guess that gunshot wound took more out of John Boy, like his cojones, than this episode will allow.

This episode was absolutely stupid. It completely contradicted Jon Boys character and he dressed ridiculously!

John-Boy's first day at Boatwright University begins with mixed emotions -- trepidation over new responsibilities and experiences, yet hopefulness about new opportunities -- but turns into something of a comedy of errors. Along the way he gives a ride to a very aggressive fellow student named Polly Thompson, and at the university itself is befriended by another student, Mike West, who tries to teach him how not to be so obviously an underclassman. But those are two of the only positive moments for John-Boy on a day when everything else seems to go wrong, from being the butt of a cruel practical joke to leaving an important document at home.

This episode marked a turning point in the continuity of the series, with many new story possibilities being created by John-Boy's departure for college (even as a commuter). The series thereafter in essence had two distinct tracks -- one involving John-Boy at the university and the other about the remaining characters left behind. This episode, for example, had a subplot dealing with Jason's faltering attempts to fill John-Boy's shoes during the first day back at the Walton's Mountain School for the rest of the children.

While there had been other shows dealing with John-Boy's preparation for college, given that this episode marked such a departure for the series, it's regrettable that it wasn't selected as the season opener -- that episode was a two-hour stand-alone story about the federal government wanting to acquire land from some Walton relatives for a park project. During the first season, the show's story lines had almost stereotypically involved the "outsider of the week" -- a deaf girl, a carnival troupe, a traveling writer, a gypsy family, an actress, etc. etc. -- and this continued to some degree in the second season; but the best episodes were often those that dealt with the relationships among the Walton family members themselves.

The college setting offered the chance to combine the best of those two plot lines -- John-Boy could make acquaintances among the people at the school while still maintaining ties to his family, as in episodes like "The System" in which he is accused of violating the school's honor code, or "The Job," in which he is hired to read to a blind woman who is bitter about her condition. Unfortunately, the possibility that some of the characters from this episode would become part of a new circle of semi-regulars at the college didn't happen -- the Mike West character reappeared only once, in "The Ring" a few shows later, and neither Polly Thompson nor Prof. Ghote, who played large parts in this episode, were ever seen again.

The pace of the series quickened after this, too -- while this episode is set in September, 1934 (only one calendar year after the first season, which was set in 1933), by the end of the series World War Two came and went in just six remaining television seasons. Of course, there was no reason to try to coordinate television years with real-life years per se, but it's interesting to note that, whereas the creators had actually tried to slow things down up to this point, they would instead speed things up from here on. When Richard Thomas left the series at the end of the fifth season less than three years after this episode, he had apparently finished his four years of school despite the passage of fewer years of "real" time.