Post by niecie on Oct 4, 2013 13:26:46 GMT -5
We hereby reach the end of the first season and the end of the black & white episodes. This story features the first appearance of Theodore Marcuse, who will go on to play the villain twice more, the second of H M Wynant's and Robert Phillips' four appearances on WWW.
The approach to Willow Springs reminds me of many of the outdoor scenes with Jim and/or Artie riding along with some tilted-looking rocks in the background. Probably the same location used over and over, possibly the Vasquez Rocks area.
As they ride into town, there is no one about, no one outside. Their first glimpse of the immobilized townsfolk is when they enter the saloon. That one guy's chair gets bumped and he tips right over to the floor!
Why does Artie shudder so when he's about to sample the drink? Strong aroma? Nasty one? I like Jim's little snort of disbelief when Artie claims he doesn't drink. But what does Artie then say to the bartender? It sounds like gibberish.
Artie miming the frozen blacksmith is funny.
Finally when they reach the bank they see people outside. They then see the eyes moving on one of the men and realize the frozen people might be alive.
The fact that the governor calls his barber an idiot does not speak well for his character. Nor his good sense either, come to think of it: how wise is it to insult someone who's wielding a razor-sharp blade so very close to your throat?
'I suppose I'll have to investigate,' says the governor in a blasé, bored tone of voice, as if being called upon to do his job is somehow a major imposition.
More insults heaped upon the barber.
Ah, now the governor also insults the people he lives among. I wonder if they know the level of contempt he holds for them! This is the type of politician recall petitions were invented for.
And when the governor asks Jim if he knows how he became governor of the territory, Jim's response of 'It beats me' is exactly what that braggart deserves.
That governor is the kind of boss no one wants, lording it over Jim because he got a message from the president and Jim didn't. La-di-da!
Artie in the morgue is initially played for humor. (And the set is familiar; I think it's the same room as Midas' kitchen in TNOT Burning Diamond.) Then Dr Kirby comes in and Artie greets him familiarly, as if this is not their first meeting. Kirby's sudden onset of paralysis is very convincing. But when Artie goes for the bag to find the medicine Kirby needs, then gets conked over the head, suddenly it's not funny anymore. Why does Artie gets knocked out though -- what's the motivation to knock him out? Is he getting close to the truth? Because to me it only comes across as deepening the mystery but lacking in a real motivation behind it.
Jim sure made it to Sand Hill in a hurry! When the gang is clearing out the town, I noticed horses moving and wondered if the locals' horses had been affected. Yeah, the things I wonder about. They sure pack up a lot of stuff, including silver items from the silversmith's shop and even a clock. I don't like that one guy wanting to gun down the frozen sheriff, so it's decent of the gang leader Coley to stop him from shooting the lawman. Coley tugs at his gloves while he tells the guy to stand down or he'll have to fight him.
Then they ride out right past fake-frozen Jim and his lively horse.
The fort reminds me of John Brown's Harper's Ferry in TNOT Flaming Ghost. In that one, Vasquez Rocks were visible through the gates when looking out. I think the same is true here.
Jim climbs up the outer wall of the fort using a grappling hook and finds a guard conveniently snoring. Jim sneaks up on Mr Sleepyhead and waves something in a vial under his nose, insuring the guard is very very asleep.
Coley is divvying up the loot when he realizes the take from the express office is far too small. He asks who cleared it out; the ensuing silence is deafening. Finally Frank, the same dude who wanted to gun down the helpless sheriff, speaks up in an insolent tone of voice, a 'whaddaya gonna do about it' voice. And if he's tired of Coley, Coley is also tired of him!
Frank tries to get the others on his side against Coley. And now Coley pulls out his glove and slips it on. Man, those gloves! You can just feel it that when Coley goes to flexing his hands in his gloves, bad stuff is about to happen.
Lafe speaks up, apparently trying to defuse the situation. And then it turns out that Lafe was playing Good Cop to Coley's Bad Cop to get Frank's guard down. The whole gang grabs him and takes his wallet which is indeed stuffed with the money from the express office.
Coley slaps Frank around and knocks him to the ground where Frank grabs for his gun. Then, as Lucky Ladybug has pointed out, suddenly when Coley draws on Frank and shoots him, Frank isn't on the ground anymore, so that when he falls this time after Coley shoots him, he knocks down one of the support beams for the ceiling -- and this dislodges James West, who has been hiding in the ceiling all this time listening. Hello, boys!
We come back from the end of act freeze frame, and you can almost hear the director call, 'Action!' because that's what breaks out! Jim punches two guys simultaneously, then ducks as the man behind him (oh, that's Coley) fires his gun. Fists and bodies are flying everywhere! Then Jim grabs the lantern and pitches it out the window, plunging the room into instant darkness so he can make a break for it.
Jim takes advantage of all the junk the gang leaves scattered around the yard to hide as Coley and the others come outside to search for him. He sends the horses drawing the wagon (and why, pray tell, are they still hitched to the wagon and not in their stalls having their supper?!) racing across the yard to provide him some cover and a bit of misdirection. While the gang chases the wagon, Jim ducks around a corner, finds a door with a large bolt on the outside, and goes in.
Seriously, the door is bolted from outside. The first time I watched this recently, my immediate thought was, 'Don't go it there! You might get locked in, and I don't think the lock pick will work on that kind of lock!'
Anyway, Jim winds up in The Tower. The gang refers to it as The Tower, and most of them seem to be scared to death to even set foot inside it. The circular staircase reminds me of the steps in the lighthouse in Howling Light, but I don't know if it's the same set. Well, it also reminds me of the set in the 'horses are a man's best friend -- make that second best' scene in Golden Cobra.
He hears someone coming down the stairs, so he ambushes the person, arm raised to clobber whoever it is, only to realize this is a woman. Instead of hitting her, he grabs her instead. She starts to beg -- 'Oh, please!' -- then looks at him and realizes he's not one of the gang. Her reaction to being grabbed, then discovering the grabber isn't a gang member, says something about her relationship to the members of the gang, I think.
They hear Coley ordering Lafe to check the tower. Lafe balks, just utterly refuses, so Coley himself winds up searching it -- and not very thoroughly! I think the place gives him the willies too.
As long as Jim is locked in one of the rooms of the tower, he might as well explore, right? He's in a room full of caged animals. Well, the monkey isn't caged. Jim finds the ferrets, by the way.
Scene with Coley and the gang talking about the 'crazy doc.' I like the way Lafe shudders when he talks about the doctor. (And this is where, as Lucky Ladybug points out, Lafe wipes the mouth of the booze bottle before taking a swig.) One of the gang is called Whitey. Is that Whitey Hughes? If it is, he doesn't quite look like his normal self.
Jim and the girl. She's brought him the picnic, as Artie will call it later. 'How could you possibly lie to me'! Oh, Jim, what a line! I sure hope he's just feeding her a line; surely he wouldn't think because she's a pretty girl, she must automatically only tell the truth. Well, I don't think she does lie to him, or at least that she believes what she tells him, but it's just that that's an awfully naive thing to say.
By the way, I can't help wondering how the ruler of a province in China back in those days could strip her father of his medical license and make it stick worldwide. Couldn't her father just get relicensed elsewhere?
I'm amazed that Coley didn't lock the tower door again when he left. Well, I'm also amazed that Jim makes it across the main yard of the fort without anyone noticing. Convenient stack of boxes too. Puts Jim right next to the barrel where he hid his grappling hook earlier.
Oh, now the guard notices! He shoots, but Jim just keeps running. Two guys come running outside too and now they and Jim are running around in the dark. The scene is barely lit, making it hard to see what's going on. More guys come charging out, these on horseback. Jim tosses a smoke bomb, then heads off a different direction. Before the smoke can clear, someone runs to that spot. Who is that? The horsemen go charging after him. He runs, but the horsemen are after him and one jumps him. Four men pile onto him, and he fights like the dickens before they subdue him and haul him off to show Coley. And when Coley sees his face, he starts. Why? When did Coley ever see Artemus Gordon before?
(Well, to be fair, even with the poor lighting in the chase scene, it's pretty obvious that's Artie. For once he gets to have a good fight scene in season one -- so we'll think he's Jim instead? -- even if he does get subdued. The question is how, though, for as we're about to learn, Artie's supposed to have a concussion. That much activity should have him puking all over the place, shouldn't it?)
Oh, and it dawned on me why Coley started. It's not because he recognizes Artie; it's because he doesn't recognize him. This isn't the man they were fighting earlier, so who is he?
Back to the governor. What a jerk! Still insulting his barber and paying next to no attention to the sound advice Jim is giving him. But it's when Jim learns that Artie is running around with a concussion searching for him and the governor sees that only as reason to be even more insulting --that's when Jim snaps. He takes the straight razor from the barber and gives Governor Snippy the closest shave of his life in one of the best scenes in the entire series.
Good grief, Artie's strapped down on a table! (Did a fangirl write this part?) And here comes Coley with a cage full of ferrets and a slab of bacon. This torture scene reminds me a great deal of the character the same actor plays in a later episode, Little Pinto in Poisonous Posey. When he smears the bacon on Artie's face, I can't help but think of the fact that Ross was Jewish (so I hope it was fake bacon).
Artie claims to have shot a man in Virginia City. Cue the Bonanza theme music. (Not really.)
The doctor's daughter shows up and takes the ferrets away. Coley seems to enjoy teasing her, asking her if she wants to watch him interrogate his prisoner as he pulls out his gun. But just as Coley cocks and aims the gun at Artie, someone new arrives, someone Artie recognizes. Yep, there's been just one doctor onscreen in the whole episode.
(Oh, and Coley gives his gun a little spin as he holsters it.)
Owl. Pretty owl.
Jim's back! I'm not sure how crawling toward the fort in a poncho that leaves his head exposed is supposed to prevent the guards from seeing him, but whatever. Jim's got what my dad would call a possibles bag slung across his body, and from it he pulls spikes to make himself a path up the wall.
Guard nearly shoots the pretty owl. Boo! Hiss!
The wall looks to me to be a bit too crumbly for the spikes to get a firm hold. Um, and as Jim climbs the first spikes and goes to drive in the next ones, you can see the next two holes are already there in the wall!
And there's Lafe's line: Every time I get a good hand! as the gang leaves the poker game to investigate the noise of Jim knocking a guard down off the wall.
Dr Kirby says Artie has a brain, albeit in a rudimentary state of development. Oh, how kind of him!
The fight in the lab that ends act three is exciting, and the music when Kirby and West come face to face (not to mention, the look on each man's face) makes it clear they've met before -- but not onscreen anywhere in the episode. Cal Gal was the first to point that out to me. There must have been a scene where the two of them saw each other earlier that was deleted for unknown reasons. Wish we could read the script! (Well... *shameless self-promotion* I will be posting a deleted scene story next Monday...)
And now the daughter bursts in and cries out, 'Jim!' And then she gets an 'oops' look on her face as her father gets upset with her. As she says Jim wants to help, Artie shoots Jim such a look! As if he's thinking, 'Oh, trust Jim to always find a pretty girl in the middle of a case!'
Kirby is so upset that his daughter hid Jim West before, but really, how was she to know this man was her father's enemy? If she really believed she and her father were Coley's prisoners, then of course she would have helped him against Coley. So did she know her father was working with -- even using -- Coley's gang or not?
Kirby prepares a syringe and tells Anna she will inject these men with his new culture. Whatever she may believe about the working relationship between her father and the gang, she clearly knows what his new culture will do! It's nasty of him, in my opinion, to force his daughter to do such a thing. But she agrees.
The next thing we see is statue Jim and statue Artie being hauled into the cage room where Jim hid before. Once the gang leaves, Jim starts moving, but Artie is scared to try. Turns out, Anna only pretended to give them injections. I suppose she figured if she refused, her father would inject them for real, so agreeing was her only way to save them. Oh, and reusing the needle like that -- very pre-AIDS. Artie wanders the room making cute remarks, even trying to talk monkey.
Coley is starting to see what sort of a business partner he really has in Dr Kirby.
Artie, in trying to escape the cage room, pounds on the door and declares it solid. Um -- didn't that risk someone coming to see what the noise was about and finding them mobile? Then Jim outlines Artie on the door to the accompaniment of more smart remarks from his partner. Now Jim mixes a substance and applies it to the outline, followed by him burning out the outline. So... kinda Looney Tunes, isn't that? An outline to show where the character busted through? (By the way, the outline wasn't complete at the head when Jim finished drawing it, but is complete by the time he starts applying the substance.)
Coley's had it with the doc and gives his men orders to clear out -- and of course just as Lafe has a good poker hand again! Whitey is sent to take care of the two agents. Boy, does Whitey get a big surprise! Kick! and the shape of a man gets knocked out of the door.
Kirby 'bout has a heart attack when he sees Jim come into the lab. Jim chooses to let the doctor believe his bacteria didn't work. Understandable. If he thinks it doesn't kill, maybe he'll stop trying to kill people with it.
And now the full extent of Kirby's paranoia manifests itself. And as he has his final meltdown, Coley and Lafe burst in. Jim starts fighting Lafe, and as Coley scrambles to retrieve the gun Jim knocked from his hand, he sees Kirby fire a gun, so Coley fires back. End of doctor. More fight, then Jim gets the upper hand. He sends Coley and Lafe out with Kirby's body, then sets fire to the lab. It's a pity about the animals, but if they were infected with the deadly bacteria, they wound die soon anyway, poor babies.
It's funny that Artie speaks of the possibility of some good coming from Kirby's discoveries, considering the then-unknown use botulism would eventually be put to -- Botox.
Question: how does Anna manage to suddenly sprout a fiancé? But I love Jim holding up the fourth glass for the absent John Chiang to join the toast.
The end -- finally! It took me a week to finish this review. Seriously, I started last Thursday and here it is Thursday again and I've finally written the whole thing. I think I'm getting burnt out on doing these reviews. So now that I've completed the first season, I plan to take a break for a while.
The approach to Willow Springs reminds me of many of the outdoor scenes with Jim and/or Artie riding along with some tilted-looking rocks in the background. Probably the same location used over and over, possibly the Vasquez Rocks area.
As they ride into town, there is no one about, no one outside. Their first glimpse of the immobilized townsfolk is when they enter the saloon. That one guy's chair gets bumped and he tips right over to the floor!
Why does Artie shudder so when he's about to sample the drink? Strong aroma? Nasty one? I like Jim's little snort of disbelief when Artie claims he doesn't drink. But what does Artie then say to the bartender? It sounds like gibberish.
Artie miming the frozen blacksmith is funny.
Finally when they reach the bank they see people outside. They then see the eyes moving on one of the men and realize the frozen people might be alive.
The fact that the governor calls his barber an idiot does not speak well for his character. Nor his good sense either, come to think of it: how wise is it to insult someone who's wielding a razor-sharp blade so very close to your throat?
'I suppose I'll have to investigate,' says the governor in a blasé, bored tone of voice, as if being called upon to do his job is somehow a major imposition.
More insults heaped upon the barber.
Ah, now the governor also insults the people he lives among. I wonder if they know the level of contempt he holds for them! This is the type of politician recall petitions were invented for.
And when the governor asks Jim if he knows how he became governor of the territory, Jim's response of 'It beats me' is exactly what that braggart deserves.
That governor is the kind of boss no one wants, lording it over Jim because he got a message from the president and Jim didn't. La-di-da!
Artie in the morgue is initially played for humor. (And the set is familiar; I think it's the same room as Midas' kitchen in TNOT Burning Diamond.) Then Dr Kirby comes in and Artie greets him familiarly, as if this is not their first meeting. Kirby's sudden onset of paralysis is very convincing. But when Artie goes for the bag to find the medicine Kirby needs, then gets conked over the head, suddenly it's not funny anymore. Why does Artie gets knocked out though -- what's the motivation to knock him out? Is he getting close to the truth? Because to me it only comes across as deepening the mystery but lacking in a real motivation behind it.
Jim sure made it to Sand Hill in a hurry! When the gang is clearing out the town, I noticed horses moving and wondered if the locals' horses had been affected. Yeah, the things I wonder about. They sure pack up a lot of stuff, including silver items from the silversmith's shop and even a clock. I don't like that one guy wanting to gun down the frozen sheriff, so it's decent of the gang leader Coley to stop him from shooting the lawman. Coley tugs at his gloves while he tells the guy to stand down or he'll have to fight him.
Then they ride out right past fake-frozen Jim and his lively horse.
The fort reminds me of John Brown's Harper's Ferry in TNOT Flaming Ghost. In that one, Vasquez Rocks were visible through the gates when looking out. I think the same is true here.
Jim climbs up the outer wall of the fort using a grappling hook and finds a guard conveniently snoring. Jim sneaks up on Mr Sleepyhead and waves something in a vial under his nose, insuring the guard is very very asleep.
Coley is divvying up the loot when he realizes the take from the express office is far too small. He asks who cleared it out; the ensuing silence is deafening. Finally Frank, the same dude who wanted to gun down the helpless sheriff, speaks up in an insolent tone of voice, a 'whaddaya gonna do about it' voice. And if he's tired of Coley, Coley is also tired of him!
Frank tries to get the others on his side against Coley. And now Coley pulls out his glove and slips it on. Man, those gloves! You can just feel it that when Coley goes to flexing his hands in his gloves, bad stuff is about to happen.
Lafe speaks up, apparently trying to defuse the situation. And then it turns out that Lafe was playing Good Cop to Coley's Bad Cop to get Frank's guard down. The whole gang grabs him and takes his wallet which is indeed stuffed with the money from the express office.
Coley slaps Frank around and knocks him to the ground where Frank grabs for his gun. Then, as Lucky Ladybug has pointed out, suddenly when Coley draws on Frank and shoots him, Frank isn't on the ground anymore, so that when he falls this time after Coley shoots him, he knocks down one of the support beams for the ceiling -- and this dislodges James West, who has been hiding in the ceiling all this time listening. Hello, boys!
We come back from the end of act freeze frame, and you can almost hear the director call, 'Action!' because that's what breaks out! Jim punches two guys simultaneously, then ducks as the man behind him (oh, that's Coley) fires his gun. Fists and bodies are flying everywhere! Then Jim grabs the lantern and pitches it out the window, plunging the room into instant darkness so he can make a break for it.
Jim takes advantage of all the junk the gang leaves scattered around the yard to hide as Coley and the others come outside to search for him. He sends the horses drawing the wagon (and why, pray tell, are they still hitched to the wagon and not in their stalls having their supper?!) racing across the yard to provide him some cover and a bit of misdirection. While the gang chases the wagon, Jim ducks around a corner, finds a door with a large bolt on the outside, and goes in.
Seriously, the door is bolted from outside. The first time I watched this recently, my immediate thought was, 'Don't go it there! You might get locked in, and I don't think the lock pick will work on that kind of lock!'
Anyway, Jim winds up in The Tower. The gang refers to it as The Tower, and most of them seem to be scared to death to even set foot inside it. The circular staircase reminds me of the steps in the lighthouse in Howling Light, but I don't know if it's the same set. Well, it also reminds me of the set in the 'horses are a man's best friend -- make that second best' scene in Golden Cobra.
He hears someone coming down the stairs, so he ambushes the person, arm raised to clobber whoever it is, only to realize this is a woman. Instead of hitting her, he grabs her instead. She starts to beg -- 'Oh, please!' -- then looks at him and realizes he's not one of the gang. Her reaction to being grabbed, then discovering the grabber isn't a gang member, says something about her relationship to the members of the gang, I think.
They hear Coley ordering Lafe to check the tower. Lafe balks, just utterly refuses, so Coley himself winds up searching it -- and not very thoroughly! I think the place gives him the willies too.
As long as Jim is locked in one of the rooms of the tower, he might as well explore, right? He's in a room full of caged animals. Well, the monkey isn't caged. Jim finds the ferrets, by the way.
Scene with Coley and the gang talking about the 'crazy doc.' I like the way Lafe shudders when he talks about the doctor. (And this is where, as Lucky Ladybug points out, Lafe wipes the mouth of the booze bottle before taking a swig.) One of the gang is called Whitey. Is that Whitey Hughes? If it is, he doesn't quite look like his normal self.
Jim and the girl. She's brought him the picnic, as Artie will call it later. 'How could you possibly lie to me'! Oh, Jim, what a line! I sure hope he's just feeding her a line; surely he wouldn't think because she's a pretty girl, she must automatically only tell the truth. Well, I don't think she does lie to him, or at least that she believes what she tells him, but it's just that that's an awfully naive thing to say.
By the way, I can't help wondering how the ruler of a province in China back in those days could strip her father of his medical license and make it stick worldwide. Couldn't her father just get relicensed elsewhere?
I'm amazed that Coley didn't lock the tower door again when he left. Well, I'm also amazed that Jim makes it across the main yard of the fort without anyone noticing. Convenient stack of boxes too. Puts Jim right next to the barrel where he hid his grappling hook earlier.
Oh, now the guard notices! He shoots, but Jim just keeps running. Two guys come running outside too and now they and Jim are running around in the dark. The scene is barely lit, making it hard to see what's going on. More guys come charging out, these on horseback. Jim tosses a smoke bomb, then heads off a different direction. Before the smoke can clear, someone runs to that spot. Who is that? The horsemen go charging after him. He runs, but the horsemen are after him and one jumps him. Four men pile onto him, and he fights like the dickens before they subdue him and haul him off to show Coley. And when Coley sees his face, he starts. Why? When did Coley ever see Artemus Gordon before?
(Well, to be fair, even with the poor lighting in the chase scene, it's pretty obvious that's Artie. For once he gets to have a good fight scene in season one -- so we'll think he's Jim instead? -- even if he does get subdued. The question is how, though, for as we're about to learn, Artie's supposed to have a concussion. That much activity should have him puking all over the place, shouldn't it?)
Oh, and it dawned on me why Coley started. It's not because he recognizes Artie; it's because he doesn't recognize him. This isn't the man they were fighting earlier, so who is he?
Back to the governor. What a jerk! Still insulting his barber and paying next to no attention to the sound advice Jim is giving him. But it's when Jim learns that Artie is running around with a concussion searching for him and the governor sees that only as reason to be even more insulting --that's when Jim snaps. He takes the straight razor from the barber and gives Governor Snippy the closest shave of his life in one of the best scenes in the entire series.
Good grief, Artie's strapped down on a table! (Did a fangirl write this part?) And here comes Coley with a cage full of ferrets and a slab of bacon. This torture scene reminds me a great deal of the character the same actor plays in a later episode, Little Pinto in Poisonous Posey. When he smears the bacon on Artie's face, I can't help but think of the fact that Ross was Jewish (so I hope it was fake bacon).
Artie claims to have shot a man in Virginia City. Cue the Bonanza theme music. (Not really.)
The doctor's daughter shows up and takes the ferrets away. Coley seems to enjoy teasing her, asking her if she wants to watch him interrogate his prisoner as he pulls out his gun. But just as Coley cocks and aims the gun at Artie, someone new arrives, someone Artie recognizes. Yep, there's been just one doctor onscreen in the whole episode.
(Oh, and Coley gives his gun a little spin as he holsters it.)
Owl. Pretty owl.
Jim's back! I'm not sure how crawling toward the fort in a poncho that leaves his head exposed is supposed to prevent the guards from seeing him, but whatever. Jim's got what my dad would call a possibles bag slung across his body, and from it he pulls spikes to make himself a path up the wall.
Guard nearly shoots the pretty owl. Boo! Hiss!
The wall looks to me to be a bit too crumbly for the spikes to get a firm hold. Um, and as Jim climbs the first spikes and goes to drive in the next ones, you can see the next two holes are already there in the wall!
And there's Lafe's line: Every time I get a good hand! as the gang leaves the poker game to investigate the noise of Jim knocking a guard down off the wall.
Dr Kirby says Artie has a brain, albeit in a rudimentary state of development. Oh, how kind of him!
The fight in the lab that ends act three is exciting, and the music when Kirby and West come face to face (not to mention, the look on each man's face) makes it clear they've met before -- but not onscreen anywhere in the episode. Cal Gal was the first to point that out to me. There must have been a scene where the two of them saw each other earlier that was deleted for unknown reasons. Wish we could read the script! (Well... *shameless self-promotion* I will be posting a deleted scene story next Monday...)
And now the daughter bursts in and cries out, 'Jim!' And then she gets an 'oops' look on her face as her father gets upset with her. As she says Jim wants to help, Artie shoots Jim such a look! As if he's thinking, 'Oh, trust Jim to always find a pretty girl in the middle of a case!'
Kirby is so upset that his daughter hid Jim West before, but really, how was she to know this man was her father's enemy? If she really believed she and her father were Coley's prisoners, then of course she would have helped him against Coley. So did she know her father was working with -- even using -- Coley's gang or not?
Kirby prepares a syringe and tells Anna she will inject these men with his new culture. Whatever she may believe about the working relationship between her father and the gang, she clearly knows what his new culture will do! It's nasty of him, in my opinion, to force his daughter to do such a thing. But she agrees.
The next thing we see is statue Jim and statue Artie being hauled into the cage room where Jim hid before. Once the gang leaves, Jim starts moving, but Artie is scared to try. Turns out, Anna only pretended to give them injections. I suppose she figured if she refused, her father would inject them for real, so agreeing was her only way to save them. Oh, and reusing the needle like that -- very pre-AIDS. Artie wanders the room making cute remarks, even trying to talk monkey.
Coley is starting to see what sort of a business partner he really has in Dr Kirby.
Artie, in trying to escape the cage room, pounds on the door and declares it solid. Um -- didn't that risk someone coming to see what the noise was about and finding them mobile? Then Jim outlines Artie on the door to the accompaniment of more smart remarks from his partner. Now Jim mixes a substance and applies it to the outline, followed by him burning out the outline. So... kinda Looney Tunes, isn't that? An outline to show where the character busted through? (By the way, the outline wasn't complete at the head when Jim finished drawing it, but is complete by the time he starts applying the substance.)
Coley's had it with the doc and gives his men orders to clear out -- and of course just as Lafe has a good poker hand again! Whitey is sent to take care of the two agents. Boy, does Whitey get a big surprise! Kick! and the shape of a man gets knocked out of the door.
Kirby 'bout has a heart attack when he sees Jim come into the lab. Jim chooses to let the doctor believe his bacteria didn't work. Understandable. If he thinks it doesn't kill, maybe he'll stop trying to kill people with it.
And now the full extent of Kirby's paranoia manifests itself. And as he has his final meltdown, Coley and Lafe burst in. Jim starts fighting Lafe, and as Coley scrambles to retrieve the gun Jim knocked from his hand, he sees Kirby fire a gun, so Coley fires back. End of doctor. More fight, then Jim gets the upper hand. He sends Coley and Lafe out with Kirby's body, then sets fire to the lab. It's a pity about the animals, but if they were infected with the deadly bacteria, they wound die soon anyway, poor babies.
It's funny that Artie speaks of the possibility of some good coming from Kirby's discoveries, considering the then-unknown use botulism would eventually be put to -- Botox.
Question: how does Anna manage to suddenly sprout a fiancé? But I love Jim holding up the fourth glass for the absent John Chiang to join the toast.
The end -- finally! It took me a week to finish this review. Seriously, I started last Thursday and here it is Thursday again and I've finally written the whole thing. I think I'm getting burnt out on doing these reviews. So now that I've completed the first season, I plan to take a break for a while.