Season 2, Episodes 6 & 7 : Where The Heart Is

Oh, boy. This is one of my all-time favorite episodes. Love, travel, and raw, emotional pleas! ... 19th century Boston!

The Gist:  This is a double episode, folks! 88 quality 90's made-for-tv magical minutes.
Mama Quinn is very sick, so Michaela and family  run out to Boston to wish her well. Of course, Michaela discovers that her mother's fancy Boston doctors have misdiagnosed her hepatitis as cancer of the liver -- and she rallies and saves Mama Quinn via a Cheyenne detoxification remedy. Oh, snap! Go Michaela! So Michaela winds up staying in Boston for somewhere between five and eight weeks, between healing her mother and making some presentations about her own experiments with Indian remedies. 

And Also: One of Mama Quinn's physicians - the young and creepy-handsome (see below) Dr. Burke - is quite taken with Michaela's boldness and resourcefulness and makes several moves. Including a marriage proposal.   Sully, concerned about the length of Dr. Quinn's time in Boston heads out there.  He makes some attempts to fit in with her Boston lifestyle -- which are met with various levels of success.  

Commentary:
1.  One thing I love is when the potential threat is some kind of creepy-looking smiley dude.  Every time Dr. Burke looks at Michaela, he's either dripping with condescension or  awash in obsessive glow. Or maybe it's just all the soft focus. At any rate, we know he's not the right guy because his bland, generic (and somehow CREEPY!) good looks are no match for Sully's rugged handsomeness.

2. I love the motif of taming wild creatures; it's woven throughout the series. In this episode, we see many attempts to tame Michaela (from her sisters, from doctors, from her mother).   Sully tames himself in an effort to win her.  Matthew cannot be tamed. Michaela desperately tries to "tame" or norm the Cheyenne remedy, making it palatable to the Boston elite.

3.  There's a great moment when Colleen is having tea with her adoptive cousins.  She stumbles over her words, clearly feeling insignificant beside the grandness of Boston.  She is shocked, however, to learn that these young girls, for all their sophistication and opportunity, want nothing more than to become picture perfect wives.  When they express doubt that women can ever attend medical school, Collen simply states, "Yes. They can." Go Colleen!

4. Matthew's relationship with Michaela is probably the most complex of all the Cooper children.  Nearly a legal adult when he's adopted, he never sees her as a 100% maternal figure.  This episode really highlighted the relationship he developed with Sully.  From the attempt to grow out his hair to the overwhelming sense of constraint he feels in Boston ... and then Sully's role in understanding Matthew's heartache over being away from Ingrid. There's a really lovely dynamic with these two in this episode.

5. When Sully desperately tells Michaela that he loves her ... and when Michaela finally returns the words some time later. The music is so very lovely. Michaela and Sully are lovely.  Perhaps this is what makes Dr. Feelgood so utterly unlikeable. Damn the man who would ever come between Michaela and Sully! Seriously, though, the frantic way Michaela chases him down on the train and the incredible dance it takes for either of them to get the words out.  These are deeply damaged people, battered and bruised by the 19th century; for either of them to open up to a new person is a terrifying prospect.  And they realize that there's something worth fighting for in each other.