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Episode # in order of airing: #61 (October 6,
1967) Episode # in order of filming: #56 Apparent J/A intimacy: ****** (also XXX) Compelling plot holes to be spackled: Well, none actually. Importance of having this on a pimping tape: ****** There are these two . . . moments (see below). H/C & Angst potential: * Cheerfully heartless, as often happened in the 1960’s. Jim beauty: ****** Artie beauty: ****** General bizarreness of episode/bad script writing: It makes total sense! Help! That’s the one thing I wasn’t prepared for! Fashion note: First we have the third season travel-togs (These are the best costumes ever: they’re all about delivering the package, whether via Jim’s black leather chaps or Artie’s tied-back suede jacket). But Jim then changes the mood on the runway with artfully crease-hugging tan trousers, brown chaps, and extremely open shirt, all topped by a careless bandana, while Artie takes a nicely evolved spin in crossed-bandolier super-bandito gear! Drinking game: Star Trek Sighting! Can a location be a Star Trek sighting? ‘Cause there’s a Wily Old Peasant who leads Jim all over the barren mountainside where Jim Kirk used common household items to defeat a nattily dressed representative Gorn as well as where some frontier-Vulcans (you’d really have to see the show for yourself) found Jean-Luc Picard and thought he was God (can’t say I blame them). Recap: Okeydoke, we start with the idea that Our Own Ulysses S.G. has sent el Presidente Jaurez of Meheeko a beautiful black thoroughbred horse (named Jack o’ Diamonds) as a token of his regard. I’ll buy that Mexico has its gracious Southern European brand of style and tradition while Grant was famous for his admiration for horses as well as his expertise with them. And Jim and Artie are, of course, the loyal facilitators of this deal. Great Moment #1 occurs in the first minute as Artie and Jim deliver the horse. A beautiful senorita smiles at Artie, and Artie allows as how this might turn out to be a pretty sweet mission. Jim says, forget it, Artie, she was smiling at the horse. Artie is indignant: “What’s that horse got that I don’t have?” SWOOON!!!! Jim just smiles knowingly and says, “Um, his pedigree.” So it’s CANON: Artie’s HUNG like a HORSE!!!!! And, you know what else, I also think that not only are Artie and Jim having this exchange, but the conversation demonstrates has a certain loving resonance, or nuance, or frisson, or whatever between Bob and Ross. SWOONTIMESTWO!!!!! Say, it took me a while to recover from this scene with their playful sexiness and utter infatuation with each other, but birds gotta fly and recappers got recap, so, alas, the plot thickens. Jim and Artie turn the horse over to the waiting Mexican guards led by the dashing Lt. Fortuna. Artie seems quite impressed by Lt. Fortuna (who is quite hot, no doubt about it) and goes on and on about how Fortuna represents Mexico’s golden future bla bla bla. I guess the joke is meant to be on Artie when it turns out that Lt. Fortuna is NOT really Lt. Fortuna, and when the real Lt. Fortuna turns up, it looks as if Jim and Artie have tricked into giving Jack o’ Diamonds to some wicked desperados led by the Wily Old Peasant I mentioned earlier. (However, I refuse to laugh at Artie; I think he was just polishing up his abilities to keep the bullshit coming. So there.) Anyway, there’s desperadoes and the Wily Old Peasant and shooting and stuff. Yum, very action-y! Still two cute guys can only search for a missing stallion for just so long, and, as night falls, we find ourselves in Jim and Artie’s hotel room. Uh-oh, there’s an associate Wily Old Peasant sneaking in through the window! Good thing Artie had just finished fucking Jim, or this Wily Old Peasant might have had the shock of his life. This is great moment #2. Jim is beautiful here, lying nude in the big hotel bed with the covers pulled fairly modestly up to his chest and his arms behind his head in a post-coital reverie (cleverly the camera never cuts to the right side of the bed for all we know Artie is over there pretending to sleep, but for safety’s sake let’s pretend he’s listening at the bathroom door in his robe with his derringer pulled to see what the alternate Wily Old Peasant is up to.) The main thrust, alas, of all this is that the main Wily Old Peasant kind of becomes the hero of this ep. So there are trees, betrayals, soft tacos, counter-betrayals, Artie pretending to be a beeg eemportant bandeeto named Pancho but he gets busted, and Jim and the Wily Old P. running around the famous Gorn mountains. At the end, the correct Lt. Fortuna gets to take Jack o’ Diamonds to President Juarez, Jim and the W.Old P. defeat the Imperialistas (zey are zee bad hombres who want to get reed of the Mexican republic and so steal the horse. Oh.) And when Artie and Jim are finally reunited, it looks like everything’s cuddles for Artie and Jim as the Wily Old Pe. lies dead in the dust. But, oh, no! He awakens! For he is not dead! And he steels Jeem’s horse! See, he had told Jim earlier, “I have a bad habit, seenyore. I always weeen.” And so he does: he weeens again! He defeats Jeem! He defeats Arteee! He even shrugs as he defeats zem! But you know what: I have WOPRF (Wily-Old-Peasant-Related Fatigue). Why? Because I live in Alabama, where I assure you Wily Old Peasants abound and they’re always about two skin cells away from being Randy Quaid in “Brokeback Mountain.” I’m not just being hypersensitive; Wily Old Peasants are rarely fabulous in real life. (You know, I said a terribly smart thing at one time: I can’t quite remember how I put it, but it was awfully cunning and to the effect that “The reason Alabama is beginning to look like the rest of America is only because all of America is starting to look like Alabama.” Only I put it much more cleverly.) (“So, Sunbeam, why don’t you leave this hellhole placed squarely in the Heart of Dixie with its gay-bashing evangelist-haired governor?” Well, because of Sunbeam’s Rule of Order Number One: You learn more about life at a leper colony than you do at the mall.) Hey, guess what I would do if I weren’t so goddamn lazy and hypersensitive!!! I’d write a WWW/Brokeback Mountain X-over fic where, okay, we all agree that Jack and Ennis have their big sex-reunion in a motel in 1967, right? Well, Jack’s been living with his rich wife and her color television and his own buried lusts and has become the biggest closeted Robert-Conrad fan imaginable. So after they fuck, Jack turns on the ratty motel b/w television and says, “hey, it’s that show!” “Whut show?” mutters Ennis. “It’s that Wild Wild West.” “Oh, yeah, that cowboy thing,” and it turns out that this very ep, “TNOT Jack O’ Diamonds”, is the exact ep they watch as they lie entangled on the love-damp sheets, back together after four years of unimaginable kicked-out-of-Eden deprivation. At the tag, Jack says, “cool, huh? I want to be Artie”. “Jack fucking Twist,” Ennis says indulgently as he runs his knuckles across Jack’s still stiff nipples. “I guess that makes me Jim West, which is fine with me, cause I can whip your butt.” Now stay with old Sunbeam on this. So it’s time for Jack and Ennis to leave the motel, and, as they do, a ratty truck is going by with its window down and its radio blaring, and suddenly Jack and Ennis hear a familiar old tune, “Ghost Riders in the Sky”. “An old cowpoke went ridin out one dark ‘n’ windy day.Jack and Ennis gaze at each other in stunned revelation. And the song continues. “Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel.Ennis narrows his eyes while Jack’s grow wide as dark coins. “Their faces gaunt, their eyes were blurred, their shirts all soaked with sweat.Jack shudders as if a sudden wind has caught him. “As the riders loped on by him, he heard one call his name.“We’re fucking doomed, Ennis Del Mar.” “It don’t mean nothing,” Ennis growls and pulls Jack into an rough ‘n’ musky embrace. *sigh* Oh, wait, where was I? Oh, yes, in Full Cowboy Penetration-ville. So the last part of the ep which Jack, Ennis and I have just seen shows the Wily Old Peasant riding away and laughing his wild peasant laugh. Then Jim and Artie have the last little bit of dialogue. “How far will do you think he’ll get, Jim?” “As far as the hangman’s noose, but not today, Artie, not today.” Which is a much heavier last line than WWW usually lets us have, even if it isn’t exactly “Jack, I swear . . . “ And stay tuned to this channel for more on the WWW/BBM front. |
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