Boonesborough is the meeting place of Abraham Lincoln's future parents, Tom Lincoln (Burr de Benning) and Nancy Hanks (Marianna Hill). The Boones would like to get them together, but they alternate between fighting and courtship with some frequency.
In the run-up to series' end, the DB writers are given some experimental freedom, and this innovative what-if is a product of that. A. Lincoln himself described his background as "the short and simple annals of the poor," and a teleplay is probably the best means of adding some color to those annals. TV journeyman de Benning does the best he can to make a likable protagonist out of an unlikable (see below) and Marianna Hill has an easier task fleshing out a figure handed down to us only through positive myth-making. In one of those unexpected junctions of show business and history, Hill (also psychiatrist Helen Noel on "Star Trek: TOS) is the cousin of the late Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf of Desert Storm fame.
Rebecca Boone gets to step away somewhat from providing homefront support to Dan into a matchmaker\social strategist role; Fess Parker is around but peripheral to the female doings.
Straight to the historical context - all the scholarship handed down to us on Tom Lincoln indicates he was a limited and unlikable man of middling economic success who retained the singular virtue of disliking slavery, though more so because he disliked its economic competition. He apparently thought little of Abe's pretensions to town and legal life, and was not shy about showing it. Telling that when Tom passed Abe - by then economically well-established - found better things to do than attend the funeral.
Again, Nancy Hanks (show business and history again - she is an antecedent of Tom
Hanks) is known to us mainly through Abe's fond memories. She apparently softened Tom's rough edges to an extent, inculcated in Abe his love of books, and died in Indiana when he was very young.
Its "Tales of Boonesborough" time on the series again; the action is limited and we see plenty of Cincinatus and the fort crowd. No spoilers here, but any viewer with the most basic education should be able to see where the arrow is pointing. But the hour avoids corny overstretch such as Tom mulling Gettysburg Address-like phrasings, and for a bottle episode stays engaging. A nice coda would have been an Israel in his 80's (the historical namesake being KIA in the Revolution) attending a Lincoln-Douglas debate.
