Episode 5: The Girl in Boxcar #3
Sep. 16th, 2025 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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aliassmithjonesIn this episode, Kid Curry comes out of Heyes’s shadow and gets to be the lead. This wasn’t so much a creative decision as a logistical necessity. TV in the 1970s was serious flying-by-the-seat of your pants stuff, with new episodes being written and shot only a couple of weeks before they aired (which I guess is a reasonable excuse for the sometimes terrible quality of the writing). According to the ASJ book, each episode took 8 days to shoot but the show aired every 7 days, meaning that in the absence of a time machine, and even with everyone working flat-out and non-stop for 4 months straight, the schedule wasn’t going to work. The solution was to write stories that only focused on one of the leading actors, so that two episodes could be shot simultaneously, with Ben Murphy working on The Girl in Boxcar #3 while Pete Duel was doing his scenes in The Great Shell Game. And thus the Kid gets his turn in the limelight.
He doesn’t do a bad job with it, either. The opening scenes set up the episode’s McGuffin, so they feature both Heyes and Curry, who are trying to lick the Governor’s arse by doing a favour for a friend of his. The favour is to transfer $50,000 dollars from a bank which has just collapsed to the Governor’s friend. It’s never explained why he needs the money, or even if it’s his money in the first place, but I suppose it’s fair enough that two wanted outlaws prioritise political expediency over ethics. Warned that it’s a dangerous job, and that the place is being watched, our two heroes sneak into a lawyer’s office in the wee small hours of the morning, where the lawyer gives them $50,000 to count and stuff into a saddlebag, then makes them sign a receipt. The two of them then ride hell-for-leather out of town with the watchers in hot pursuit, only to have the Kid slip off his horse and double back to the railway line with the saddlebag full of cash while Heyes, the decoy, gallops off with both horses.
It's a pretty good plan. The men follow Heyes, who very athletically jumps from one horse to the other when the first one starts to tire, but then, in a moment of startling realism that will never repeat itself in the entire series, falls off when his horse puts its hoof into a hole and crashes to the ground.
The men catch up with him, search his saddlebags, figure out the plan and demand to know where the Kid is. Heyes lies fluently and gets whumped for his pains. He lies again and gets whumped again. The leader, who is a bit of a psychopath, says if he lies one more time, he’ll shoot him. Heyes, obviously, gets ready to lie again, but is saved from a bullet by one of the henchmen who, as we shall see, is clearly used to having to stop his boss from killing people, and who points out that he can hear a freight train coming and the Kid must be aboard. They ride off, and this is the last we will see of Heyes till the end of the episode, barring a few long shots of him galloping (after the men?) with his two horses.
The Kid, meanwhile, has jumped aboard one of the goods wagons, where he meets Annabelle, a 17-year-old runaway, who claims she’s abandoned her super-rich fiancé to go and live with her super-rich father. I actually like Annabelle. The actress isn’t bad and the character is nowhere near as drippy as she could be. The Kid’s romantic interests unfortunately get progressively wetter, culminating in Sister Grace, who is damp enough to fill Lake Michigan, but at this early stage the babe of the week still has a bit of spunk. Unfortunately, she’s entirely orthogonal to the plot. She has her arc and the Kid has his, and though they spend a great deal of time together, the two arcs never really intertwine.
For various reasons, the two of them end up away from the train, riding bareback on a scruffy old nag called Princess, and have to seek shelter at nightfall with an elderly couple, the Lamberts. Both Mr and Mrs Lambert are played by actors who have been aged up, and the make-up is so bad it has a really creepy effect. The Lamberts don’t want to let them in, but Annabelle channels Heyes and delivers a sob story about how they’re on their honeymoon and now their buggy has broken down. I note that this is the point at which the show comes closest to passing the Bechdel test, as there are TWO named women at the door and at the dinner table, having a conversation about something other than a man. It doesn’t quite pass, though, as their interaction is heavily diluted by the presence of their respective husbands (or, in Annabelle’s case, “husband”).
The Kid and Annabelle get to sleep in the barn where there is ONLY ONE HAYSTACK! Haha, just kidding, it’s easily big enough for them to sleep apart, but it’s so cold, Annabelle ends up snuggling with the Kid anyway. The Kid is a gentleman and doesn’t try any hanky-panky, even though Annabelle’s clearly half-hoping he will, because, you know, she’s only 17 (and the virginal sort of 17, not the saloon girl sort).
The next day, the two of them ride off again on Princess, only to have the baddies catch up with them. The saddle bags are searched and the money found, but it turns out that most of it is scrap paper wedged between actual bills. The leader is furious and once again his henchman has to prevent him from shooting someone. They explain that they all lost money when the bank collapsed and they’re just trying to get some of it back, which once again raises the question of just why the Governor’s friend gets to keep $50,000 of it? The Kid doesn’t worry his little head about corruption in high places. He just tells them the lawyer must have pulled a switcheroo, and the men believe him and ride off.
Actually, though, he thinks Annabelle did it, or possibly the Lamberts. He’s nasty to Annabelle and positively bullies the poor Lamberts, who under their creepy make-up are sweet people – he needs to take a leaf out of Heyes’s book and learn how to talk nicely to people he’s pissed off with. But he gets his comeuppance when he finds a locked door that the Lamberts insist can’t be opened. Convinced the money must be in there, he shoots the lock off, only to discover a little girl’s bedroom, covered in cobwebs as Halloweeny as the Lamberts’ make-up. The Kid feels terrible, and so he should. However worried he may be about having signed the receipt for $50,000 he no longer has, it’s a dreadful faux pas to start shooting up the house of people who offered you shelter, not to mention digging up their deepest traumas.
Luckily, this socially awkward situation is interrupted by the arrival of the baddies, who had their doubts about the Kid’s lawyer story and have trailed him to the Lamberts’. A fight breaks out, in which Annabelle very spiritedly seizes a shovel and is about to brain the Kid’s attacker, when Heyes appears in the doorway holding a gun, and we’re back to The Hannibal Heyes Show. The way he says “Hi!” is so funny, I don’t care that it’s obviously been dubbed in.
The boys and Annabelle get off a train at their destination and are met by the lawyer who set the whole ball rolling. He explains that he decided to use them as decoys and has delivered the money himself, having switched the saddlebags while they were signing the receipt. Infuriated, the Kid is about to deck him, but is stopped by Heyes, who gives him an object lesson in how to talk sweetly to someone you hate, and then suddenly punches the guy himself. Really, this is an awful lot of violence for an ASJ episode! I don’t believe Heyes hits anyone else, unless he’s attacked first, in the entire series. And there’s more to come! Annabelle, presumably inspired by Heyes’s punch, wallops the Kid for calling her a thief.
Now that the air has been cleared by all this violence, they check into a hotel, where Annabelle, who has previously had to admit that her super-rich fiancé is in fact a wheat farmer, discovers that her super-rich father is really an impoverished gambler. Heyes’s face during this revelation is so cute – he’s both really sorry for her and really determined not to get involved. Annabelle decides to cut her losses and go back home on the next train, but not to get married (phew!), at least not yet (and presumably not to the wheat farmer, who appears to have had the conversational repertoire of Mr Rushworth).
She and the Kid suck face on the station platform (she’s still only 17, Kid!) and then she gets on the train, with her hair all down like the hussy she is, to go back home with a train full of people who’ve all seen her snogging a man she’s clearly not married to. Seriously, show, if we’re going to pretend there was no policing of women’s sexuality in the 1880s, why can’t they get out more and actually do stuff? If you let them do stuff, they can even be interesting!
It's no wonder I was so enamoured of next week’s episode, The Great Shell Game.
He doesn’t do a bad job with it, either. The opening scenes set up the episode’s McGuffin, so they feature both Heyes and Curry, who are trying to lick the Governor’s arse by doing a favour for a friend of his. The favour is to transfer $50,000 dollars from a bank which has just collapsed to the Governor’s friend. It’s never explained why he needs the money, or even if it’s his money in the first place, but I suppose it’s fair enough that two wanted outlaws prioritise political expediency over ethics. Warned that it’s a dangerous job, and that the place is being watched, our two heroes sneak into a lawyer’s office in the wee small hours of the morning, where the lawyer gives them $50,000 to count and stuff into a saddlebag, then makes them sign a receipt. The two of them then ride hell-for-leather out of town with the watchers in hot pursuit, only to have the Kid slip off his horse and double back to the railway line with the saddlebag full of cash while Heyes, the decoy, gallops off with both horses.
It's a pretty good plan. The men follow Heyes, who very athletically jumps from one horse to the other when the first one starts to tire, but then, in a moment of startling realism that will never repeat itself in the entire series, falls off when his horse puts its hoof into a hole and crashes to the ground.
The men catch up with him, search his saddlebags, figure out the plan and demand to know where the Kid is. Heyes lies fluently and gets whumped for his pains. He lies again and gets whumped again. The leader, who is a bit of a psychopath, says if he lies one more time, he’ll shoot him. Heyes, obviously, gets ready to lie again, but is saved from a bullet by one of the henchmen who, as we shall see, is clearly used to having to stop his boss from killing people, and who points out that he can hear a freight train coming and the Kid must be aboard. They ride off, and this is the last we will see of Heyes till the end of the episode, barring a few long shots of him galloping (after the men?) with his two horses.
The Kid, meanwhile, has jumped aboard one of the goods wagons, where he meets Annabelle, a 17-year-old runaway, who claims she’s abandoned her super-rich fiancé to go and live with her super-rich father. I actually like Annabelle. The actress isn’t bad and the character is nowhere near as drippy as she could be. The Kid’s romantic interests unfortunately get progressively wetter, culminating in Sister Grace, who is damp enough to fill Lake Michigan, but at this early stage the babe of the week still has a bit of spunk. Unfortunately, she’s entirely orthogonal to the plot. She has her arc and the Kid has his, and though they spend a great deal of time together, the two arcs never really intertwine.
For various reasons, the two of them end up away from the train, riding bareback on a scruffy old nag called Princess, and have to seek shelter at nightfall with an elderly couple, the Lamberts. Both Mr and Mrs Lambert are played by actors who have been aged up, and the make-up is so bad it has a really creepy effect. The Lamberts don’t want to let them in, but Annabelle channels Heyes and delivers a sob story about how they’re on their honeymoon and now their buggy has broken down. I note that this is the point at which the show comes closest to passing the Bechdel test, as there are TWO named women at the door and at the dinner table, having a conversation about something other than a man. It doesn’t quite pass, though, as their interaction is heavily diluted by the presence of their respective husbands (or, in Annabelle’s case, “husband”).
The Kid and Annabelle get to sleep in the barn where there is ONLY ONE HAYSTACK! Haha, just kidding, it’s easily big enough for them to sleep apart, but it’s so cold, Annabelle ends up snuggling with the Kid anyway. The Kid is a gentleman and doesn’t try any hanky-panky, even though Annabelle’s clearly half-hoping he will, because, you know, she’s only 17 (and the virginal sort of 17, not the saloon girl sort).
The next day, the two of them ride off again on Princess, only to have the baddies catch up with them. The saddle bags are searched and the money found, but it turns out that most of it is scrap paper wedged between actual bills. The leader is furious and once again his henchman has to prevent him from shooting someone. They explain that they all lost money when the bank collapsed and they’re just trying to get some of it back, which once again raises the question of just why the Governor’s friend gets to keep $50,000 of it? The Kid doesn’t worry his little head about corruption in high places. He just tells them the lawyer must have pulled a switcheroo, and the men believe him and ride off.
Actually, though, he thinks Annabelle did it, or possibly the Lamberts. He’s nasty to Annabelle and positively bullies the poor Lamberts, who under their creepy make-up are sweet people – he needs to take a leaf out of Heyes’s book and learn how to talk nicely to people he’s pissed off with. But he gets his comeuppance when he finds a locked door that the Lamberts insist can’t be opened. Convinced the money must be in there, he shoots the lock off, only to discover a little girl’s bedroom, covered in cobwebs as Halloweeny as the Lamberts’ make-up. The Kid feels terrible, and so he should. However worried he may be about having signed the receipt for $50,000 he no longer has, it’s a dreadful faux pas to start shooting up the house of people who offered you shelter, not to mention digging up their deepest traumas.
Luckily, this socially awkward situation is interrupted by the arrival of the baddies, who had their doubts about the Kid’s lawyer story and have trailed him to the Lamberts’. A fight breaks out, in which Annabelle very spiritedly seizes a shovel and is about to brain the Kid’s attacker, when Heyes appears in the doorway holding a gun, and we’re back to The Hannibal Heyes Show. The way he says “Hi!” is so funny, I don’t care that it’s obviously been dubbed in.
The boys and Annabelle get off a train at their destination and are met by the lawyer who set the whole ball rolling. He explains that he decided to use them as decoys and has delivered the money himself, having switched the saddlebags while they were signing the receipt. Infuriated, the Kid is about to deck him, but is stopped by Heyes, who gives him an object lesson in how to talk sweetly to someone you hate, and then suddenly punches the guy himself. Really, this is an awful lot of violence for an ASJ episode! I don’t believe Heyes hits anyone else, unless he’s attacked first, in the entire series. And there’s more to come! Annabelle, presumably inspired by Heyes’s punch, wallops the Kid for calling her a thief.
Now that the air has been cleared by all this violence, they check into a hotel, where Annabelle, who has previously had to admit that her super-rich fiancé is in fact a wheat farmer, discovers that her super-rich father is really an impoverished gambler. Heyes’s face during this revelation is so cute – he’s both really sorry for her and really determined not to get involved. Annabelle decides to cut her losses and go back home on the next train, but not to get married (phew!), at least not yet (and presumably not to the wheat farmer, who appears to have had the conversational repertoire of Mr Rushworth).
She and the Kid suck face on the station platform (she’s still only 17, Kid!) and then she gets on the train, with her hair all down like the hussy she is, to go back home with a train full of people who’ve all seen her snogging a man she’s clearly not married to. Seriously, show, if we’re going to pretend there was no policing of women’s sexuality in the 1880s, why can’t they get out more and actually do stuff? If you let them do stuff, they can even be interesting!
It's no wonder I was so enamoured of next week’s episode, The Great Shell Game.
