S1E9: Ghost From the Past (2007)
The episode begins with Ms. Bell singing to Sugarfoot; remember the song she sings to him. It will become an important plot device later. A leisurely trail ride originally intended to deliver groceries as a courtesy to Ms. Bell ends when Amy arrives at her house and discovers something far worse than either she or Mallory (who was with her on the trail ride) could ever have imagined. Ms. Bell, alone at home were it not for Amy’s visit, has collapsed and has had a heart attack. Having already seen the trouble brewing between them in an earlier episode, Maggie once again rejects daughter Soraya’s attempts to spend time with Ben Stillman, nephew of the famed local breeder Lisa Stillman.
A new arrival who claims to work for Briar Ridge, Kerry-Anne, as her first act in Hudson, steals money from Maggie’s. This theft is not an isolated incident and is in fact a symptom of kleptomania and a life of petty crime, perhaps a parallel exploration of what Ty might’ve made of his life if he had not come to, and stayed at, Heartland. As he enters the ranch on his truck and picks up the mail on his way to the house, Ty, who at this point does not know Kerry-Anne is in Hudson, sees a letter from the same division of the juvenile detention and rehabilitation program that placed him at Heartland as the season began. Following a tip given to her during her Maggie’s stopover, Kerry-Anne finds her way to Heartland in search of Ty, claiming to be his girlfriend when she arrives. The pair kiss, and almost immediately thereafter, Kerry-Anne’s car
Sugarfoot, Copper, and Spartan return to Heartland with Scott, Amy, and Mallory, but here, we discover one of Sugarfoot’s many eccentricities: that he is house-broken, and, according to this episode, also apparently car-broken. Back at Heartland, Scott identifies Sugarfoot’s age as being somewhere between 25 and 30 by looking at his teeth. The writers of the show really did their homework in nailing this detail, because that is in fact one of the ways we identify how old a horse is. One of its incisors will start exhibiting a thin, dark, vertical groove, called Galvayne’s Groove, around the time the horse turns 10 or so. As the horse ages, the groove will become longer and more obvious. Thus, the length of the groove can be used as a way to estimate a horse’s age. “Floating” of teeth, as Scott mentions, simply refers to filing down teeth to keep their surfaces suitable for chewing and to prevent horses from injuring themselves with their own teeth. Later in the episode, it will be mentioned that Sugarfoot in all likelihood has never had a Coggins test. Coggins Tests detect EVA, or Equine Viral Anemia, a potentially fatal contagious viral infection spread by flies, ticks, and other insects which causes most of its damage in and is spread through the bloodstream.
After the family dinner scene—which as I have mentioned is and will remain forever an integral part of the show and its character—Kerry-Anne fires what can only be described as a territorial warning shot at Amy, attempting to preclude her from making any advances toward Ty. Turning to him she then confesses to a second act of kleptomania by only the first third of the episode. In the yard at Briar Ridge, having returned there in Ty’s truck, Kerry-Anne and Ty share what amounts only to a passionate kiss, though I am sure that the coy, seductive, and manipulative Kerry-Anne had intended for that to have escalated further. Ashley remains a primary antagonist and Kerry-Anne demonstrates her total ineptitude as a girlfriend (and likely wins an award for the worst romantic partner on the show) as the two engage in frivolous and untrue gossip about Ty and his hosts at Heartland.
Meanwhile, both Fleming sisters are deeply concerned for Sugarfoot as he spends the night in the barn for the first time in decades, in all likelihood. I mentioned earlier that Sugarfoot was housebroken, but I did not elaborate. That simply means that Ms. Bell has trained him to be far more emotionally comfortable in a house (and that he can control his bodily functions like you would train a dog or cat who stays indoors) than by himself in a stall or paddock like horses and ponies are normally raised.
Ms. Bell has never been well when she has been with Lou during the course of this episode, so there must be a backstory to how Lou can sing the same song that Ms. Bell had sung to Sugarfoot before the heart attack without any assistance. In fact, there is a backstory Marion and Ms. Bell together taught the Fleming girls how to ride when they were little, and surely Lou learned the song from her then and has always remembered it. In both girls’ cases, they learned to ride from the very beginning on Sugarfoot. Once the sisters leave the bar, the following morning, when the barn is still quite dark, the housebroken Sugarfoot opens the latch of the stall where he is kept, entirely unaided, as Amy exercises Spartan in the adjacent arena. Sugarfoot then enters the ranch house and eats a few Timbits (donut holes from Tim Horton’s) right next to a sleeping Jack, who is not awoken by the sound of Sugarfoot’s hoofbeats on the wooden floor. Tapping his hoof outside the bathroom door, an impatient housebroken Sugarfoot finds his way into the bathroom as Lou is mid-shower.
Jack, who as I have mentioned, is at least in his early 70s, demonstrates clear signs of his age and of osteoarthritis as he mounts Paint, his horse. (The backstory of the acquisition will be told in a commentary in several seasons.) Having been given a concoction to drink by Mallory—never a good idea unless the exact contents of the drink are known—Jack initially takes a sip because she says it will improve his health, but them immediately spits the drink out and refuses to have any more of it once she reveals that in her trickery, she has given Jack one of Ms. Bell’s alternative therapeutic formulations for Sugarfoot.
We turn our focus back to Maggie’s, and to a phone conversation between Amy and Soraya regarding an expensive necklace Ashley had prominently displayed in Kerry-Anne’s view when she had been at the diner earlier. The necklace is missing, and because Kerry-Anne is suspected and Ty knows her, they both are implicated as potential suspects in the loss of the necklace.
Image is a very powerful tool, especially for early-Heartland Ty, who cares as much about how the reality of his and Kerry-Anne’s situations appear to Amy as about what those situations are in reality. Kerry-Anne, we learn, was expelled from home by her parents, whereas Ty ended up in the system because he had been charged as an accomplice to a crime.
Ms. Bell’s niece Vanessa arrives at Heartland, seeking to regain custody of Sugarfoot in her aunt’s stead, while her aunt recovers. Bear in mind that Lou has a business undergraduate degree and an MBA—and is thus an expert negotiator and staller. Lou takes advantage of this training by pointing out a litany of medical issues covered above—some of which, while they are real, do not apply to Sugarfoot at this moment—as a means of delaying his release and keeping him at Heartland a little while longer. Lou falls victim to exactly what she warned Amy about: excessive attachment and sentimentality toward short-term tenant Sugarfoot.
Having placed Ty in charge of fixing her car earlier in the episode, Kerry-Anne’s patience with her supposed boyfriend wanes, and she wants to take back a car that might not yet be roadworthy. Signs of Jack’s age are again on display as he forgets where he placed his reading glasses, only for Mallory to find them nearly instantly in the pocket of his shirt. Ashley arrives at Heartland, furiously claiming the theft of the necklace, which, since Kerry-Anne is suspected, must mean Ty is an accomplice as well. Not only is this an unfair assessment of Ty’s rehabilitation at Heartland, but it also will prove factually incorrect. Knowing that Clint Riley, his probation officer is coming for a routine visit that day—and knowing the risks of not being present at such visits—Ty leaves Heartland in a hurry, in hot pursuit of the real thief, the kleptomaniac Kerry-Anne.
Louscott pairing stans will surely enjoy the touching moment between Lou and Scott in the office, otherwise alone, albeit with Sugarfoot present there as well.
Having correctly guessed which route Kerry-Anne would take toward the United States, Ty follows her footsteps and tracks her down before she can cross the border since her car has broken down again since he could not finish his repairs on it. Shrewd as he is, not to be outdone by Kerry-Anne’s cunning, Ty knows she bears full responsibility for the theft and offers to complete the repairs if Kerry-Anne returns the stolen necklace.
Clint arrives at the ranch while Ty is still gone tracking down Kerry-Anne, so Amy and Mallory manufacture bogus problems with Clint’s car in order to delay him so much that he will still be at the ranch when Ty returns. Covering up his late return with a half-truth (that “a lady had some car trouble”), Ty manages to salvage the visit with Clint.
Ty returns the necklace to Ashley while she still believes that he—not Kerry-Anne—is at fault for the theft. Scott and Lou facilitate Sugarfoot’s return to Ms. Bell’s niece and Ms. Bell’s grandnieces and grandnephews (Vanessa Bell’s children). As Ty returns by motorcycle to Heartland from his outing to Briar Ridge after meeting Clint, he and Amy, who is riding Spartan, playfully race each other the few hundred yards back to the ranch house, and the episode concludes.
A new arrival who claims to work for Briar Ridge, Kerry-Anne, as her first act in Hudson, steals money from Maggie’s. This theft is not an isolated incident and is in fact a symptom of kleptomania and a life of petty crime, perhaps a parallel exploration of what Ty might’ve made of his life if he had not come to, and stayed at, Heartland. As he enters the ranch on his truck and picks up the mail on his way to the house, Ty, who at this point does not know Kerry-Anne is in Hudson, sees a letter from the same division of the juvenile detention and rehabilitation program that placed him at Heartland as the season began. Following a tip given to her during her Maggie’s stopover, Kerry-Anne finds her way to Heartland in search of Ty, claiming to be his girlfriend when she arrives. The pair kiss, and almost immediately thereafter, Kerry-Anne’s car
Sugarfoot, Copper, and Spartan return to Heartland with Scott, Amy, and Mallory, but here, we discover one of Sugarfoot’s many eccentricities: that he is house-broken, and, according to this episode, also apparently car-broken. Back at Heartland, Scott identifies Sugarfoot’s age as being somewhere between 25 and 30 by looking at his teeth. The writers of the show really did their homework in nailing this detail, because that is in fact one of the ways we identify how old a horse is. One of its incisors will start exhibiting a thin, dark, vertical groove, called Galvayne’s Groove, around the time the horse turns 10 or so. As the horse ages, the groove will become longer and more obvious. Thus, the length of the groove can be used as a way to estimate a horse’s age. “Floating” of teeth, as Scott mentions, simply refers to filing down teeth to keep their surfaces suitable for chewing and to prevent horses from injuring themselves with their own teeth. Later in the episode, it will be mentioned that Sugarfoot in all likelihood has never had a Coggins test. Coggins Tests detect EVA, or Equine Viral Anemia, a potentially fatal contagious viral infection spread by flies, ticks, and other insects which causes most of its damage in and is spread through the bloodstream.
After the family dinner scene—which as I have mentioned is and will remain forever an integral part of the show and its character—Kerry-Anne fires what can only be described as a territorial warning shot at Amy, attempting to preclude her from making any advances toward Ty. Turning to him she then confesses to a second act of kleptomania by only the first third of the episode. In the yard at Briar Ridge, having returned there in Ty’s truck, Kerry-Anne and Ty share what amounts only to a passionate kiss, though I am sure that the coy, seductive, and manipulative Kerry-Anne had intended for that to have escalated further. Ashley remains a primary antagonist and Kerry-Anne demonstrates her total ineptitude as a girlfriend (and likely wins an award for the worst romantic partner on the show) as the two engage in frivolous and untrue gossip about Ty and his hosts at Heartland.
Meanwhile, both Fleming sisters are deeply concerned for Sugarfoot as he spends the night in the barn for the first time in decades, in all likelihood. I mentioned earlier that Sugarfoot was housebroken, but I did not elaborate. That simply means that Ms. Bell has trained him to be far more emotionally comfortable in a house (and that he can control his bodily functions like you would train a dog or cat who stays indoors) than by himself in a stall or paddock like horses and ponies are normally raised.
Ms. Bell has never been well when she has been with Lou during the course of this episode, so there must be a backstory to how Lou can sing the same song that Ms. Bell had sung to Sugarfoot before the heart attack without any assistance. In fact, there is a backstory Marion and Ms. Bell together taught the Fleming girls how to ride when they were little, and surely Lou learned the song from her then and has always remembered it. In both girls’ cases, they learned to ride from the very beginning on Sugarfoot. Once the sisters leave the bar, the following morning, when the barn is still quite dark, the housebroken Sugarfoot opens the latch of the stall where he is kept, entirely unaided, as Amy exercises Spartan in the adjacent arena. Sugarfoot then enters the ranch house and eats a few Timbits (donut holes from Tim Horton’s) right next to a sleeping Jack, who is not awoken by the sound of Sugarfoot’s hoofbeats on the wooden floor. Tapping his hoof outside the bathroom door, an impatient housebroken Sugarfoot finds his way into the bathroom as Lou is mid-shower.
Jack, who as I have mentioned, is at least in his early 70s, demonstrates clear signs of his age and of osteoarthritis as he mounts Paint, his horse. (The backstory of the acquisition will be told in a commentary in several seasons.) Having been given a concoction to drink by Mallory—never a good idea unless the exact contents of the drink are known—Jack initially takes a sip because she says it will improve his health, but them immediately spits the drink out and refuses to have any more of it once she reveals that in her trickery, she has given Jack one of Ms. Bell’s alternative therapeutic formulations for Sugarfoot.
We turn our focus back to Maggie’s, and to a phone conversation between Amy and Soraya regarding an expensive necklace Ashley had prominently displayed in Kerry-Anne’s view when she had been at the diner earlier. The necklace is missing, and because Kerry-Anne is suspected and Ty knows her, they both are implicated as potential suspects in the loss of the necklace.
Image is a very powerful tool, especially for early-Heartland Ty, who cares as much about how the reality of his and Kerry-Anne’s situations appear to Amy as about what those situations are in reality. Kerry-Anne, we learn, was expelled from home by her parents, whereas Ty ended up in the system because he had been charged as an accomplice to a crime.
Ms. Bell’s niece Vanessa arrives at Heartland, seeking to regain custody of Sugarfoot in her aunt’s stead, while her aunt recovers. Bear in mind that Lou has a business undergraduate degree and an MBA—and is thus an expert negotiator and staller. Lou takes advantage of this training by pointing out a litany of medical issues covered above—some of which, while they are real, do not apply to Sugarfoot at this moment—as a means of delaying his release and keeping him at Heartland a little while longer. Lou falls victim to exactly what she warned Amy about: excessive attachment and sentimentality toward short-term tenant Sugarfoot.
Having placed Ty in charge of fixing her car earlier in the episode, Kerry-Anne’s patience with her supposed boyfriend wanes, and she wants to take back a car that might not yet be roadworthy. Signs of Jack’s age are again on display as he forgets where he placed his reading glasses, only for Mallory to find them nearly instantly in the pocket of his shirt. Ashley arrives at Heartland, furiously claiming the theft of the necklace, which, since Kerry-Anne is suspected, must mean Ty is an accomplice as well. Not only is this an unfair assessment of Ty’s rehabilitation at Heartland, but it also will prove factually incorrect. Knowing that Clint Riley, his probation officer is coming for a routine visit that day—and knowing the risks of not being present at such visits—Ty leaves Heartland in a hurry, in hot pursuit of the real thief, the kleptomaniac Kerry-Anne.
Louscott pairing stans will surely enjoy the touching moment between Lou and Scott in the office, otherwise alone, albeit with Sugarfoot present there as well.
Having correctly guessed which route Kerry-Anne would take toward the United States, Ty follows her footsteps and tracks her down before she can cross the border since her car has broken down again since he could not finish his repairs on it. Shrewd as he is, not to be outdone by Kerry-Anne’s cunning, Ty knows she bears full responsibility for the theft and offers to complete the repairs if Kerry-Anne returns the stolen necklace.
Clint arrives at the ranch while Ty is still gone tracking down Kerry-Anne, so Amy and Mallory manufacture bogus problems with Clint’s car in order to delay him so much that he will still be at the ranch when Ty returns. Covering up his late return with a half-truth (that “a lady had some car trouble”), Ty manages to salvage the visit with Clint.
Ty returns the necklace to Ashley while she still believes that he—not Kerry-Anne—is at fault for the theft. Scott and Lou facilitate Sugarfoot’s return to Ms. Bell’s niece and Ms. Bell’s grandnieces and grandnephews (Vanessa Bell’s children). As Ty returns by motorcycle to Heartland from his outing to Briar Ridge after meeting Clint, he and Amy, who is riding Spartan, playfully race each other the few hundred yards back to the ranch house, and the episode concludes.
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