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Paramount / 720 Minutes / 1965 / Unrated / Street Date: October 27, 2009
My first experience with The Fugitive, as it was for many twenty- and thirty-somethings, was with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in the motion picture. I never fell completely in love with that 1993 film; something about it seemed just a little too serious for my tastes. But the concept is a slam-dunk of a plot device. An innocent man is on his way to prison on a train to serve a life sentence only to have the train crash, allowing the fugitive to escape so the wrongly convicted man could dedicate his life to finding the man who actually committed the crime.
This writer’s response to the first season of the TV series that inspired that film is that even if the action wasn’t perfect, they got the tone just right. Even though one is a relatively cheesy TV drama (by contemporary standards) and the other is a star-studded Hollywood summer blockbuster, they’re both impressively cut from the same cloth.
This first installment of the show’s third season doesn’t break the pattern established by the series’ first go-round, but for one reason or another, things here seem far less exciting and intriguing than seasons past. David Janssen reprises his role as Dr. Richard Kimble (the role Ford would eventually take over), the wronged-man-trying-to-do-good with equal parts de facto action prowess and Good Samaritan. But this third season gets off to a weird start with Wings of an Angel, in which Kimble tries to help nab a prison escapee on the same bus as Kimble, only to find himself strangely injured (the baddie seems to really want to hurt Kimble rather than kill him) and then set up in a prison hospital. That isn't all, though - after twenty minutes or so, this episodes ends up being more about the issue of morphine addiction than about Kimble getting the Hell out of there. After all, even if stickin’ around is Kimble’s dream (he seems to make some good buddies in the hospital), he’s got to ramble on.
This paradigm in which the show seems like it should be firing on all pistons, but never really goes anywhere continues throughout this Third Season, Vol. 1 set. Crack in a Crystal Ball involves a looney-tunes faux psychic who, after discovering Kimble working at a gas station, decides to use his infallible 'ESP' to direct authorities to him; Set Fire to a Straw Man has Kimble getting mixed up with some zany and over-the-top family melodrama, with his boss' wife at the auto parts store he's working at trying to convince Kimble to help her kidnap the son she had to sign away many years ago; and Strange in the Mirror involves Kimble helping to solve a wave of policeman murders in a small town (this episode is notable, however, for an excellent William Shatner performance) - these episodes are capable, and if you start one, you'll finish it, but The Third Season, Vol. 1 nevertheless showcases the show as being on autopilot.
At the end of the day, I'm still hooked - I've invested enough time in the series that I want to ride it out: I’m perfectly willing to devour the series’ DVD box sets until the end comes. But I'm hoping that the quality of The Fugitive's final episodes are a step up from the ones included here.
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