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Episode # in order of airing: 44 Episode # in order of filming: 44 (aired January 6, 1967; production code 2-16) Apparent J/A intimacy: ******closerthanthis. Compelling plot holes to be spackled: The ending! Oh no: it’s girls!!! Importance of having this on a pimping tape: It’s pretty pimp-y. H/C & Angst potential: Nope: too much Victorian bliss for life itself. Jim beauty: ****** Artie beauty: ****** General bizarreness of episode/bad script writing: The whole thing is bizarre in the way that we like WWW to be. Fashion note: Jim’s suits cling to him like blood to a vein. Star Trek/WWW Drinking game: Oooh, look, it’s fabulous guest star Harry Townes. Let’s do the drinking game! See, Harry Townes also starred in Star Trek’s “Return of the Archons”. AND he’s from Huntsville, Alabama, just like me, you know! Yep, we’re all of us from Huntsville, Alabama, me, him, and Kim Dickens who plays the ineffable whore Joannie Stubbs in “Deadwood”. Hats off to the lazy Dixie ease my two homeys invest their roles with!!! Special Alert: My favorite line of dialogue ever appears in this ep. Recap: This episode is an intense dose of what we love about the Wild Wild West; Jim in a tight powder-blue suit (did he look naked on black and white television sets?); raging Victoriana out the ass; and a completely slashy ending where Ross is mad for it in every way. Okay, here comes Harry Townes and Jim. Jim’s protecting him, see, because, like this is so hard to explain, Harry Townes is a big brilliant weaponry scientist (which is cool -- Harry’s probably patterning himself on fellow Huntsville homeboy/munitions expert Werner von Braun). (Do any of you old-timers remember how Werner von Braun used to guest star on “The Wonderful World of Disney” to talk about rockets and Tomorrowland with Walt while they both smoked about a million cigarettes; but I digress). President Grant wants Jim to keep Harry alive, which is also pretty cool, but Harry has done an incredibly stupid thing: he has entered a tontine, which, as Artie explains later to the viewers at home, is a weird (and sure to be profit-free) investment plan where a group of people throw all their money in a fund and the last surviving one gets all of it. As Artie also notes, this scheme does nothing for the average life span. (I hate to keep digressing but I saw Elvis HIMSELVIS in concert at the Werner von Braun Civic Center in Huntsville). Although Jim tells Harry about the other tontine members who have suffered recent mysterious deaths, Harry Townes is like all “tut tut, nothing’s going to harm me” (hey, Harry, you haven’t even reached the credits). Okay, so Jim’s going to escort Harry to an annual stockholders meeting of the tontine. Suspiciously one of the other tontine members now shows up suddenly and, in a deeply weird segue to “Da Ali G Show”, this guy says, “Harry, don’t you like a certain smoke” and Harry’s all “oh yeh mon, dat Jamaica-me-crazy she-roots’a for me.” “Well, let’s just hit up The Man who’s dealing over there in that shop, okay,” says the other-tontine guy. This makes Jim escort Harry across cross the street in a manly and desperate way, and it’s also when he spots a weird wire coming from the tobacco shop. He leaps on it (fab butt shot) and stops a terrible explosion which surely would have killed Harry and must have been set up by the other tontine guy so Harry would die, but the other guy didn’t count on Jim’s supernatural abilities at protecting people. So, after he foils Harry’s death, Jim pulls out his gun and runs in the shop where the other tontine guy is now sitting all guilty-like. But when Jim touches him, tontine-guy falls over stone dead from a knife in his back!!!! Oh, does the plot ever thicken, and then we have credits. Okay, now here comes Artie in a buggy! He flips the driver two bits and then makes the girliest running motions ever towards Jim. If Artie’s running weren’t so funny, it would be sad. But then he gets to be all manly again when he rides ahead of the stage which contains Harry and Jim. Alas, Artie’s heroic manliness will need another mode of expression because a tree now falls on him!!!! Yes, a tree! A huge yet precisely aimed pine tree! (And clearly aimed by yet another devilishly clever tontine person). This tree breaks Artie’s arm and for some reason they go to a bar which is owned and operated by a kind of proto-Al Swearigen bully who’s also in on the tontine (where did they get these random tontine members? Were they in group therapy together?) Anyway the tontine-Al-Swearigen guy bullies his bartender and shoots all the bottles in his own bar, but he’s okay about it because, after all, he’s going to be the last survivor, baby, coz his shit is some way-bad together survivor-shit. Artie demurs and says, “yeah, I know you. You’re also the bounty hunter who shoots unarmed men.”(Remember: Artie’s arm is in a cast.) Barroom-tontine-guy turns mean and points out that Artie’s got a good memory for a easterner with a broken wing and just who the hell is Artie anyway? NOW HERE IT COMES: THE GREATEST JIM-WEST LINE EVER. Jim says, “He’s Gordon, I’m his partner Jim West. I’ve got a good memory too.” < SOBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “There’s nothing wrong with my wings.” Oh, how I wish I could work that line into a poem, an engraving, a novel, an epic, a mountainside, and it’s so spectacularly true. *sigh* And the show pretty much stops dead for me as I contemplate Jim and wings, a winged Jim, Jim fluttering with the wind beneath his wings, because there’s nothing wrong with his wings. Say, have you heard of that great new ‘zine “Sin and Salvation”? There’s a gorgeous illustration in it by the incredibly talented Animasola that shows Jim WITH WINGS. What, my dear, you’ve never seen it! Why, you simply must order your copy today! Just write to islahope@aol.com and you’re on your way! Anyways, it doesn’t even matter when that stupid barroom-tontine-guy tries to shoot something and the gun shoots backwards and gets him right in the old brain. Yes, the gun has been tampered with by yet another crafty tontine member; this ep by now obviously an alternate version of the Agatha Christie ten-little-Indians thing. (Only slashy.) Well, after all this, Harry, Jim, and Artie get to the stockholders’ meeting which is being held at one of the other stockholder’s home. More booby traps! The door is electrified! Our gang escape that, and they finally get to the meeting, which is being hosted by the fat old tontine member who owns the house. Fatty’s an Egyptiana collector, which at first I found anachronistic, thinking that people didn’t get into Egypt til 1922 and the discovery of Tut. But WWW is right and I am wrong. Starting back when Napoleon shot the nose off the Sphinx, there was a huge interest in collecting Egyptian things all through the nineteenth century. (To add to your store of useless but verifiable information, John Wilkes Booth’s father Junius Booth was a big buddy with Andrew Jackson and once, out of pure generosity, had two Egyptian mummies sent to the White House as a present!!!) (And to further add to your store of useless knowledge, you can cut-and-paste anything about Napoleon off the Internet and then do a find-“Napoleon”-and-replace-it-with-“Elvis” riff and the passage will still make sense, sort of. Isn’t that odd!) Don’t know about the electrified door though. By the way, word on the cyber-street is that Artie’s costume here is stupid. He plays MacGordon, a Scotsman who is allegedly Harry Townes’s secretary; of course, Artie wears plaid and he’s all “canna do this” and “wee bairns that”. The main objection, it seems, to the costume is that nobody recognizes Artie before or AFTER he takes it off. Well, I have to say I don’t have a problem with it. Because how did Artie know who would be there and how would he know that one of them wouldn’t recognize him? Hmmmm? Answer me that, Mr. Internet-expert-type! Now we finally get to meet all the surviving tontine members: a) Harry Townes; b) Fatty the Egypt collector; c) totally homo crime novelist Edward Baring (Artie and Jim just squeal when they get to meet him. Gee, it’s all so gay; reading Edward Baring novels must be the nineteenth century equivalent of listening to Judy Garland records); d) an actress (complete with Tom-of-Finland style body guard/arm candy); e) an old bearded guy; and f) Maurice! (Doesn’t he speak of the pompitous of love!) Now take another drink: The incredibly dashing Henry Darrow plays the incredibly dashing Maurice. (See, Henry Darrow also played Chatokay’s dad on “Star Trek: Voyager” but he didn’t have the grillwork from a 1956 Crown Victoria tattooed on his face like Robert Beltran did). We also find out how they formed the tontine one stormy night at Cape Hatteras when they (including all the ones already dead and gone before) thought they were going to be shipwrecked and decided to share all their possessions (not that that makes the tontine any more reasonable.) Then more things happen: 1) The electric door misfires and they all are locked in, sort of. 2) The bearded guy is mysteriously stabbed in the back and dies; they take his body to the wine cellar, but it comes back like a returning mummy I suppose, although the guy’s still dead. So Jim goes to explore the wine cellar and gets chased about by a bunch of guys wearing, well, frankly, they look like beekeepers gone wrong. The beekeepers capture Jim and propel him on a strange missile-sled surrounded by all these phallic rockets. However, Jim uses his handy shoe-knife to free himself, thus foiling this particularly preposterous plot. (Meanwhile, his skin-tight powder-blue suit stays immaculate). 3) Jim accuses the actress of being the murderer. (Oooooh, I absolutely love this actress. She looks just like Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Chicago”. I’m just sorry she doesn’t seem familiar with Artie; oh, wait, I bet she’s pretending to be fifteen years younger than she really is. “Artemus who? Oh, my, he must have been before my day! La La La.”) Anyways, her bodyguard/pool boy is really insulted and fights Jim. And fights Jim. And fights Jim some more. But that’s wonderful because the clothes are so tight and they’re both so hunky and they just launch into each other with such satisfyingly meaty thuds. 4) Maurice and Edward Baring reveal themselves to be the OTHER canon gay couple on WWW. Maurice sneaks up to Edward’s room with a bottle of wine and they exchange mildly racy repartee and then Maurice leaves and Edward is electrocuted by a book!!!!!!! 5) And then it gets REALLY complicated. The evil beekeepers throw Jim in a room that has a nailed wall which is going to crush him, but Jim uses his wrist/derringer/thingy to bust out of the ceiling of the room. 6) Somewhere in here they have a séance too. The actress says she can contact King Raffakhankhan (sic) and he’ll reveal the murderer. Artie is back to being Artie by this time (having ripped off his fake Scotch sideburns and moustache with, it is true, no noticeable affect on the people in attendance), and he loves the idea of holding hands with two hotties in the dark (Jim and the bodyguard/gigolo). Anyways, the crystal ball blows up, the murderer is revealed to be the guy who died before the credits (that was his identical twin brother who died, see, which is just cheating, I think), and the actress is in cahoots with him and they’re going to collect all the money, and then the beekeepers come back and stick Jim in a room with a) a bank of guns which fire at him and b) a nasty-looking spiked iron fan that lowers itself slowly on to Jim, but Jim ducks the gunfire and stops the fan with his jacket which makes the murderer mad so he runs in the room and gets caught all too graphically on the spiked iron fan. Whew. Okay, here comes the teaser. Artie and Jim have hired two total whores to come back and entertain them on the Wanderer. Jim’s whore, Whore # 1, is Southern and wonders what happened to all those little ole millions of dollars! Oh, the survivors started a scholarship fund! Yay! Then they ask Artie something, but Artie doesn’t answer because he’s looking down the front of Whore #2’s gown. I cannot believe how blatantly Ross is staring at her tits; where are my smelling salts because it is so simultaneously sexist and sexy. ROSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS is all I can say!!!! Anyhow, Jim and Artie bring out the exploding crystal ball from the séance and pretend it’s going to explode which makes the whores rush to their big strong wonderful-man arms. Meanwhile, Jim and Artie’s butts are touching and they’re smiling back at each other in the most preposterously slashy/complicit way. The end. Except for me. Me, I think they go back the kingsize bed in the stateroom and let these two girls put on a lil lesbian act for them; then Artie swats the girls on the ass, gives them fifty dollars, and tells them to put their crinolines back on and get lost. Then he rips Jim’s shirt off with his teeth and fucks him into nothing but pulse. ‘Cause nothing’s wrong with Jim’s wings. Tadah! Another great ep. |
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