Episode 4: Wrong Train to Brimstone
Sep. 14th, 2025 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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aliassmithjonesThe episode opens with the Kid congratulating Heyes on being a great horse trader, the two of them having just sold their horses for a poker stake. They walk towards the entrance of a hotel and the Kid spots a deputy he recognises coming out, so he sticks his arm through Heyes’s and wheels him around smartly to march off the other way. That makes two steps forward in characterisation for the Kid – the physically easy-going relationship between the two is no longer wholly dependent on Heyes, and the Kid initiates an action and even briefly takes the lead. So far in the series he’s been frankly a bit of a sidekick, but now he’s starting to come into his own. The boys can’t afford to buy their horses back to ride out of town – Heyes once again shows his alienation from capitalist values by turning out to be lousy at horse trading – and the only stagecoach doesn’t leave for a few days, but there is at least a train departing that evening. The boys head for the station only to discover that there are no seats available, not even when Heyes offers the man in the ticket office a ten-dollar bribe. The next train doesn’t leave for days, so things are looking desperate, when they overhear two men, Grant and Gaines, successfully buying tickets for the train. They approach them in the washroom – my, my, our boys are such innocents, as will be confirmed by later events – but not only do Grant and Gaines refuse to sell them their tickets, they pull a gun on them. Heyes reveals his normally well-hidden streak of steel by jumping them, ably backed up by the Kid. This is clearly not the action of outlaws trying to go straight, but I guess they’re desperate, and luckily for them Grant and Gaines will turn out to be baddies themselves, so there are no consequences to the boys’ temporary deviation from the path of righteousness.
The train turns out to be filled with an usually large number of female passengers – I don’t believe we see so many women on screen in any other episode – but then the “ladies” start taking off their wigs and the train turns out to be a sausage fest after all. Heyes’s face when he watches the transformation is hilarious. Clearly the boys, for all their long years on the margins of society, have never encountered a cross-dresser before. In fact, though, all these men are Bannerman detectives on a mission to capture Kid Curry and Hannibal Heyes. I have to say, this is a set-up with a lot of comic potential, and Heyes holds his end up with his reactions. The Kid might also have a hilarious expression on his face, but it’s hard to tell because Heyes is in grade A hottie mode in this scene, a fact the cameraman seems well aware of, because no matter where they sit in this episode, Heyes is always the one closest to the camera. This makes it very hard to look anywhere but at Heyes’s face.
The one woman on the train, a slightly slimy blonde with a Southern accent, explains that she’s there with all these men because she’s the only person who can actually identify Heyes and Curry in person. Given that the Bannerman plan is to slaughter the entire Devil’s Hole gang, I’m not sure why there’s any need to identify Heyes and Curry specifically. They could just pick out one random brown-haired corpse and one curly-haired one and that would be enough for the reward. Plotting, alas, is not this episode’s strong point. Its other weak point is that it’s our introduction to Harry Briscoe. According to the ASJ book, Harry Briscoe was a character the showrunners loved, played by an actor they thought was hilarious. All I can say is that tastes in comedy have evidently changed since then. Harry Briscoe is as wearyingly over-the-top and moronic as the Devil’s Hole gang. Let’s have Heyes be brilliant by actually having clever ideas, shall we, rather than by surrounding him with people with the brains of a chicken?
The slimy young woman, Sara Blaine, is understandably keen to get to know Heyes and Curry, as they are easily the best-looking people on the entire train. Especially Heyes, who is wearing his hat right on the back of his head like a black halo. The boys seize the opportunity to ask her how she knows Heyes and Curry and she spouts some self-insert fanfic about being rescued by the two of them after they robbed a train. Heyes must have been more impressed by her tale than I am, because he files away the details and reuses them later when he tells Briscoe how he and Mr Jones happen to know what Curry and Heyes look like. I assume he doesn’t worry about Briscoe noticing the parallels with Sara’s story because by then he knows Briscoe couldn’t find his arse with his elbow, let alone spot a Clue.
The audience learns that Sara and a Bannerman agent, Delaney, are up to something and that Grant and Gaines were their inside men. Heyes and the Kid hop off the train during a stop at station and intercept the telegram they know must be coming to inform Briscoe that Grant and Gaines were ambushed before joining the train (the telegraph operator surprised me by being Father Mulcahey from MASH). Since Smith and Jones are the last to get back on the train, they’re randomly assigned guard duty in the goods wagon where the gold intended to lure out the Devil’s Hole gang is being stored. Now they can’t be overheard, the boys discuss what to do. The Kid is quite sure that they need to warn their old friends but can’t come up with a way to do it. Heyes could, but he’s conflicted. He’s not sure his amnesty is a price he’s willing to pay for saving his friends. But then Briscoe comes in, rifle barrels first, and Heyes jumps him, impressing Briscoe with his swift reaction. I’m not sure why the rifles are necessary as Briscoe has an absolutely massive machine gun brought in and everyone else shoots, as we see, with pistols. Whatever. Faced with what is clearly going to be a wholesale massacre, the better angels of Heyes’s nature win out and he resolves to rescue his former brothers-in-arms. He’s even come up with a way to do it without losing their amnesty. If you can pull that off, the Kid, declares, “you really are the genius you think you are.” Let’s hope the Kid’s better at spotting a genius than he is at spotting a good horse trader.
In fact, Heyes can’t quite pull it off. They hop off the train when it stops for water and steal two horses (again, not very law-abiding, is it, boys? I guess at this stage they’re still figuring out what going straight actually means and consider a little light horse theft to be - like their spot of breaking and entering two episodes ago - a minor peccadillo in the grand scheme of things). Then they ride like the clappers to the spot where Heyes figures the gang will attack, but get there too late. They fire their pistols in warning and the gang reverses their headlong rush towards the train, but two of the outlaws get killed. Their corpses are brought aboard the train. Heyes and the Kid give themselves up to an incandescent Briscoe, saying that they can explain. I guess the horses they stole are brought on board, too, somehow, as they ride off on them at the end of the episode.
In the corpse storage wagon, Briscoe starts to interrogate the boys, who admit they aren’t Grant and Gaines and tell him their real names are Smith and Jones. At this point, Sara Blaine shows up and pretends to identify one of the bodies as Kid Curry so that Briscoe will serve his men whisky in celebration. And at this point, too, I start wondering whether this is a major plot hole, or whether Heyes deliberately showed up just a little too late to stop the attack so there would be a corpse to be brought on board, because I don’t see how he could ever have persuaded Briscoe that Blaine and Delaney were the real bad guys without the kind of corroborating evidence provided by her fake identification of the corpse. Happily, however, there IS a dead body for her to misidentify and for Heyes to correctly identify as one Henry Maxwell Jenkins, who conveniently enough always wears a ring with his initials carved in it. Heyes doesn’t seem too cut up about Maxwell’s death, but then neither does the Kid. Harry Briscoe is plunged into melancholy by the loss of the bounty, but Heyes promises him that in return for $500 he will reveal what Blaine and Delayney are really up and make Briscoe a hero.
Briscoe summons Delaney to the wagon, where Heyes acts the part of a tough Bannerman agent and gets Delaney so tied up in knots by his rapid-fire questions and accusations that Delaney accidentally confesses. It’s nice to see Heyes getting to play a part again, even if it isn’t as entertaining a role as his little bank clerk in the pilot. The plan, as Heyes had figured, was to get all the Bannermen men blind drunk while celebrating their elimination of the Devil’s Hole gang and then have the train attacked again while no one is any condition to resist.
Briscoe gives the boys their $500 and they ride off on their stolen horses, but not before they’ve used their status as the only people who know what Heyes and Curry look like to update their descriptions for the Bannerman files. Heyes restrains himself with evident difficulty from getting too fanciful but can’t resist adding a gold tooth to “his” scar, while the Kid can’t come up with anything more misleading than a stooped shoulder. Honestly, in this episode Heyes is like a one-eyed man in the country of the blind.
Still, for an ok episode there sure is a lot of pretty Heyes. On the other hand, the best shots all crop up on Youtube in RHCInderella’s vid “The Gambler”, where there’s no need to sit through an excess of Harry Briscoe to appreciate them.
The train turns out to be filled with an usually large number of female passengers – I don’t believe we see so many women on screen in any other episode – but then the “ladies” start taking off their wigs and the train turns out to be a sausage fest after all. Heyes’s face when he watches the transformation is hilarious. Clearly the boys, for all their long years on the margins of society, have never encountered a cross-dresser before. In fact, though, all these men are Bannerman detectives on a mission to capture Kid Curry and Hannibal Heyes. I have to say, this is a set-up with a lot of comic potential, and Heyes holds his end up with his reactions. The Kid might also have a hilarious expression on his face, but it’s hard to tell because Heyes is in grade A hottie mode in this scene, a fact the cameraman seems well aware of, because no matter where they sit in this episode, Heyes is always the one closest to the camera. This makes it very hard to look anywhere but at Heyes’s face.
The one woman on the train, a slightly slimy blonde with a Southern accent, explains that she’s there with all these men because she’s the only person who can actually identify Heyes and Curry in person. Given that the Bannerman plan is to slaughter the entire Devil’s Hole gang, I’m not sure why there’s any need to identify Heyes and Curry specifically. They could just pick out one random brown-haired corpse and one curly-haired one and that would be enough for the reward. Plotting, alas, is not this episode’s strong point. Its other weak point is that it’s our introduction to Harry Briscoe. According to the ASJ book, Harry Briscoe was a character the showrunners loved, played by an actor they thought was hilarious. All I can say is that tastes in comedy have evidently changed since then. Harry Briscoe is as wearyingly over-the-top and moronic as the Devil’s Hole gang. Let’s have Heyes be brilliant by actually having clever ideas, shall we, rather than by surrounding him with people with the brains of a chicken?
The slimy young woman, Sara Blaine, is understandably keen to get to know Heyes and Curry, as they are easily the best-looking people on the entire train. Especially Heyes, who is wearing his hat right on the back of his head like a black halo. The boys seize the opportunity to ask her how she knows Heyes and Curry and she spouts some self-insert fanfic about being rescued by the two of them after they robbed a train. Heyes must have been more impressed by her tale than I am, because he files away the details and reuses them later when he tells Briscoe how he and Mr Jones happen to know what Curry and Heyes look like. I assume he doesn’t worry about Briscoe noticing the parallels with Sara’s story because by then he knows Briscoe couldn’t find his arse with his elbow, let alone spot a Clue.
The audience learns that Sara and a Bannerman agent, Delaney, are up to something and that Grant and Gaines were their inside men. Heyes and the Kid hop off the train during a stop at station and intercept the telegram they know must be coming to inform Briscoe that Grant and Gaines were ambushed before joining the train (the telegraph operator surprised me by being Father Mulcahey from MASH). Since Smith and Jones are the last to get back on the train, they’re randomly assigned guard duty in the goods wagon where the gold intended to lure out the Devil’s Hole gang is being stored. Now they can’t be overheard, the boys discuss what to do. The Kid is quite sure that they need to warn their old friends but can’t come up with a way to do it. Heyes could, but he’s conflicted. He’s not sure his amnesty is a price he’s willing to pay for saving his friends. But then Briscoe comes in, rifle barrels first, and Heyes jumps him, impressing Briscoe with his swift reaction. I’m not sure why the rifles are necessary as Briscoe has an absolutely massive machine gun brought in and everyone else shoots, as we see, with pistols. Whatever. Faced with what is clearly going to be a wholesale massacre, the better angels of Heyes’s nature win out and he resolves to rescue his former brothers-in-arms. He’s even come up with a way to do it without losing their amnesty. If you can pull that off, the Kid, declares, “you really are the genius you think you are.” Let’s hope the Kid’s better at spotting a genius than he is at spotting a good horse trader.
In fact, Heyes can’t quite pull it off. They hop off the train when it stops for water and steal two horses (again, not very law-abiding, is it, boys? I guess at this stage they’re still figuring out what going straight actually means and consider a little light horse theft to be - like their spot of breaking and entering two episodes ago - a minor peccadillo in the grand scheme of things). Then they ride like the clappers to the spot where Heyes figures the gang will attack, but get there too late. They fire their pistols in warning and the gang reverses their headlong rush towards the train, but two of the outlaws get killed. Their corpses are brought aboard the train. Heyes and the Kid give themselves up to an incandescent Briscoe, saying that they can explain. I guess the horses they stole are brought on board, too, somehow, as they ride off on them at the end of the episode.
In the corpse storage wagon, Briscoe starts to interrogate the boys, who admit they aren’t Grant and Gaines and tell him their real names are Smith and Jones. At this point, Sara Blaine shows up and pretends to identify one of the bodies as Kid Curry so that Briscoe will serve his men whisky in celebration. And at this point, too, I start wondering whether this is a major plot hole, or whether Heyes deliberately showed up just a little too late to stop the attack so there would be a corpse to be brought on board, because I don’t see how he could ever have persuaded Briscoe that Blaine and Delaney were the real bad guys without the kind of corroborating evidence provided by her fake identification of the corpse. Happily, however, there IS a dead body for her to misidentify and for Heyes to correctly identify as one Henry Maxwell Jenkins, who conveniently enough always wears a ring with his initials carved in it. Heyes doesn’t seem too cut up about Maxwell’s death, but then neither does the Kid. Harry Briscoe is plunged into melancholy by the loss of the bounty, but Heyes promises him that in return for $500 he will reveal what Blaine and Delayney are really up and make Briscoe a hero.
Briscoe summons Delaney to the wagon, where Heyes acts the part of a tough Bannerman agent and gets Delaney so tied up in knots by his rapid-fire questions and accusations that Delaney accidentally confesses. It’s nice to see Heyes getting to play a part again, even if it isn’t as entertaining a role as his little bank clerk in the pilot. The plan, as Heyes had figured, was to get all the Bannermen men blind drunk while celebrating their elimination of the Devil’s Hole gang and then have the train attacked again while no one is any condition to resist.
Briscoe gives the boys their $500 and they ride off on their stolen horses, but not before they’ve used their status as the only people who know what Heyes and Curry look like to update their descriptions for the Bannerman files. Heyes restrains himself with evident difficulty from getting too fanciful but can’t resist adding a gold tooth to “his” scar, while the Kid can’t come up with anything more misleading than a stooped shoulder. Honestly, in this episode Heyes is like a one-eyed man in the country of the blind.
Still, for an ok episode there sure is a lot of pretty Heyes. On the other hand, the best shots all crop up on Youtube in RHCInderella’s vid “The Gambler”, where there’s no need to sit through an excess of Harry Briscoe to appreciate them.
