Episode 7: Return to Devil's Hole
Sep. 21st, 2025 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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aliassmithjonesThis episode? Sucks.
Complaining about the punishing shooting schedule, Pete Duel once said, “Ben and I are in every damn shot.” Well, not in this episode they aren’t. I hope Pete Duel enjoyed his time off, because I am about to pay a very heavy price for it.
We open (after the teaser) with a mysterious woman in a hat the size of a florist’s shop in search of Joshua Smith. She trails him from town to town in a carriage driven by six black horses that never need sleep and a coachman who can see in the dark, FINALLY catching up with him in somewhere called Garden City. The hotel receptionist won’t admit that a Mr Smith is staying there, even when offered a bribe, but the mysterious woman tricks him by saying he’s her brother. The receptionist tells her, like every other receptionist she’s asked so far, to try the poker game at the saloon. We get it, writers, Heyes likes to play poker .
The woman heads off, then turns back to say, “It’s been such a long time since I saw my brother – what does he look like?” Ok, this is a pretty funny line, but it makes absolutely no sense in the context of the story she subsequently tells Heyes, namely that Lom Trevors wants him to take her to Devil’s Hole to find her husband, who has run away for reasons too complicated to bother going into here. I mean, if there was even a grain of truth to this story, surely Lom would have given her a description of Smith/Heyes? I also notice she says “Lom Trevor” rather than Trevors, which I regard as suspicious. Heyes is deeply sceptical that Lom would give away their whereabouts (trust your instincts, Heyes!) but eventually accedes to her request, for three rather muddled motives, namely (1) He rather fancies her (the pre-Devil’s Hole writerly hints that he fancies her go absolutely nowhere and I don’t know why they bothered to include them); (2) as a favour to Lom; (3) she waves a big bundle of cash under his nose. I can’t decide, on the available evidence, whether the backstory is that Lom really did tell her how to find Heyes (but why? Especially given that the story about her husband fleeing turns out to be a barefaced lie and Lom would surely have known that) or whether she’s lying about Lom (but in that case, how did she know Heyes was using the moniker Joshua Smith and how did she know where to find him?). On the whole, I prefer to think she’s lying about Lom and just not worry about how she figured out who and where Heyes was. I don’t care about her anyway. She’s a horrible character with no redeeming qualities.
There then follows a scene with both Heyes and the Kid (thank heavens for small mercies!) which is equally muddled. Since Heyes has unwisely decided to take this woman – oh, her name is Mrs Philips – to Devil’s Hole, obviously the Kid would normally go with him. But Heyes wants him to stay behind so he can shoot the next episode – er, I mean, because some Colonel is due to contact them about a job. The Kid says the Colonel is already late and probably a no-show. Heyes says they need the money. But Mrs Philips has just given you $1000! Money you aren’t going to get to spend if you get shot by all the lawmen the Kid says are watching the trails to Devil’s Hole. Heyes still refuses to take the Kid, saying this’ll be the easiest $1000 they ever made, but then he suddenly gets all mournful and gives the Kid the $1000 to look after in a way that’s clearly intended to signal he might not make it back. Make up your mind, Heyes! Either it’s dangerous and the Kid should go with you, or it’s not and you don’t get to look all tragic. Who wrote this shite, anyway? The one bright spot is the Kid’s line “Heyes, there’s only one thing been keeping you alive all this time. Me.” On the evidence of this scene, I believe him.
Next we have to endure a montage of Heyes and Mrs Philips riding to Devil’s Hole, set to some dreadful 70s love song. The damn thing goes on for almost FOUR MINUTES and the awful voiceover dialogue that accompanies it could be interpreted as flirtatious/getting-to-know-each-other-better if Heyes’s lines weren’t delivered so flatly (whether this is because Duel resented having to come back from his time off to do the voiceover or whether the atrociousness of the dialogue had sent him into internal exile, we will never know. TBH, I get the impression he was in internal exile for most of this episode. As, indeed, am I).
Things could perk up a bit when we finally get to Devil’s Hole. We get to meet Heyes’s old boss! The other men anticipate tension between him and Heyes! We could potentially learn something about Heyes’s past! Fat chance. “Big Jim” Santana turns out to be a completely one-dimensional character played by a completely one-dimensional actor. Big Jim’s honest! He’s gentlemanly! He believes in mutual trust! He likes and respects Heyes! There is absolutely zero tension or friction or, well, anything, between him and Heyes. Their scenes together lack any kind of chemistry or spark of interest. It’s all flat, fat, flat. They do punch each other right at the beginning – ok, that’s another Heyes punch, he does it more often than I remembered – and that bit is actually pretty funny, but once it’s over, we never reach these heights again.
The only exciting moment comes when Mrs Philips is presented with Matt Hamilton, the man she claims is her husband, and she whips out her pistol and shoots him. Way to go, Mrs P! I can respect that! Unfortunately, because she has two X chromosomes, one shot misses and the other is only a flesh wound, so the “husband” survives. Mrs P then admits that, yeah, she lied, he isn’t her husband, instead he seduced and abandoned her 17-year-old daughter, who had his baby and then killed herself. I am duly shocked by this tragic tale. Heyes, however, having been lied to all the way to Devil’s Hole, doesn’t believe a word of it. Big Jim is unsure. They question Hamilton, who says Mrs P doesn’t even have a daughter. The two of them had an affair, then he got bored and took off with 25,000 dollars’ worth of her jewellery. Hamilton is played as such an obvious baddie that it really doesn’t matter whether he merely nicked a few jewels or actually drove someone to suicide, he clearly deserves to be shot. And since he isn’t even dead, who cares about the ethics?
Well, Big Jim does. Temporarily, at least. Because so far we haven’t had enough scenes featuring NEITHER of our heroes, he sends Heyes back to Garden City to retrieve a photo of Mrs P’s daughter that she claims to have in her hotel safe. Produce the photo and he’ll believe Mrs P. We then have to sit through long tedious scenes of Big Jim and Mrs P falling in love. There’s no earthly reason we should believe she’s genuinely falling for him since everything else she’s said so far has been a lie, but given the way the story pans out, the writers sure seem to think this is LURVE.
I can’t stand it any longer and hit fast forward. Heyes finally comes back. Without, to his total lack of surprise, having found any photo of any daughter. Mrs P has been proven beyond a doubt to be a snake, and possibly a bit of a psychopath, given how blithely she tosses tales of trauma around and how carelessly she uses (and shoots) people. Big Jim is now thinking with his dick and basically goes “So what?” Heyes then convinces Big Jim to retire from outlawing instead of pulling one last job and the three of them hastily sneak out of Devil’s Hole before the mutiny Hamilton has been fomenting can succeed.
Mrs P and Big Jim wait for her stagecoach back to San Francisco. Mrs P complains about what a liar Matt Hamilton was (“He had it coming, he had it coming, he only had himself to blame”) and then adds, “I guess that makes me a liar too, because I never had a daughter.” You GUESS that makes you a liar? Lady, as far as I can tell every word out of your mouth has been a lie. You lie the way other people breathe. But I suppose it isn’t Mrs P's fault that the writers can't think their way out of a paper bag, let alone an ethical dilemma. Big Jim seems to have the same attitude. Instead of taking to his heels, he decides to go to San Francisco with her. He’d better not ever risk dumping her, is all I can say.
Heyes tells the Kid that now they’ve got a powerful friend in San Francisco, should they ever need one, but on the evidence of this episode I can’t see Big Jim and his snake of a wife organising a piss-up in a brewery to help anyone else. And speaking of less-than-helpful friends, that's quite a bone they've got to pick with Lom Trevors.
Complaining about the punishing shooting schedule, Pete Duel once said, “Ben and I are in every damn shot.” Well, not in this episode they aren’t. I hope Pete Duel enjoyed his time off, because I am about to pay a very heavy price for it.
We open (after the teaser) with a mysterious woman in a hat the size of a florist’s shop in search of Joshua Smith. She trails him from town to town in a carriage driven by six black horses that never need sleep and a coachman who can see in the dark, FINALLY catching up with him in somewhere called Garden City. The hotel receptionist won’t admit that a Mr Smith is staying there, even when offered a bribe, but the mysterious woman tricks him by saying he’s her brother. The receptionist tells her, like every other receptionist she’s asked so far, to try the poker game at the saloon. We get it, writers, Heyes likes to play poker .
The woman heads off, then turns back to say, “It’s been such a long time since I saw my brother – what does he look like?” Ok, this is a pretty funny line, but it makes absolutely no sense in the context of the story she subsequently tells Heyes, namely that Lom Trevors wants him to take her to Devil’s Hole to find her husband, who has run away for reasons too complicated to bother going into here. I mean, if there was even a grain of truth to this story, surely Lom would have given her a description of Smith/Heyes? I also notice she says “Lom Trevor” rather than Trevors, which I regard as suspicious. Heyes is deeply sceptical that Lom would give away their whereabouts (trust your instincts, Heyes!) but eventually accedes to her request, for three rather muddled motives, namely (1) He rather fancies her (the pre-Devil’s Hole writerly hints that he fancies her go absolutely nowhere and I don’t know why they bothered to include them); (2) as a favour to Lom; (3) she waves a big bundle of cash under his nose. I can’t decide, on the available evidence, whether the backstory is that Lom really did tell her how to find Heyes (but why? Especially given that the story about her husband fleeing turns out to be a barefaced lie and Lom would surely have known that) or whether she’s lying about Lom (but in that case, how did she know Heyes was using the moniker Joshua Smith and how did she know where to find him?). On the whole, I prefer to think she’s lying about Lom and just not worry about how she figured out who and where Heyes was. I don’t care about her anyway. She’s a horrible character with no redeeming qualities.
There then follows a scene with both Heyes and the Kid (thank heavens for small mercies!) which is equally muddled. Since Heyes has unwisely decided to take this woman – oh, her name is Mrs Philips – to Devil’s Hole, obviously the Kid would normally go with him. But Heyes wants him to stay behind so he can shoot the next episode – er, I mean, because some Colonel is due to contact them about a job. The Kid says the Colonel is already late and probably a no-show. Heyes says they need the money. But Mrs Philips has just given you $1000! Money you aren’t going to get to spend if you get shot by all the lawmen the Kid says are watching the trails to Devil’s Hole. Heyes still refuses to take the Kid, saying this’ll be the easiest $1000 they ever made, but then he suddenly gets all mournful and gives the Kid the $1000 to look after in a way that’s clearly intended to signal he might not make it back. Make up your mind, Heyes! Either it’s dangerous and the Kid should go with you, or it’s not and you don’t get to look all tragic. Who wrote this shite, anyway? The one bright spot is the Kid’s line “Heyes, there’s only one thing been keeping you alive all this time. Me.” On the evidence of this scene, I believe him.
Next we have to endure a montage of Heyes and Mrs Philips riding to Devil’s Hole, set to some dreadful 70s love song. The damn thing goes on for almost FOUR MINUTES and the awful voiceover dialogue that accompanies it could be interpreted as flirtatious/getting-to-know-each-other-better if Heyes’s lines weren’t delivered so flatly (whether this is because Duel resented having to come back from his time off to do the voiceover or whether the atrociousness of the dialogue had sent him into internal exile, we will never know. TBH, I get the impression he was in internal exile for most of this episode. As, indeed, am I).
Things could perk up a bit when we finally get to Devil’s Hole. We get to meet Heyes’s old boss! The other men anticipate tension between him and Heyes! We could potentially learn something about Heyes’s past! Fat chance. “Big Jim” Santana turns out to be a completely one-dimensional character played by a completely one-dimensional actor. Big Jim’s honest! He’s gentlemanly! He believes in mutual trust! He likes and respects Heyes! There is absolutely zero tension or friction or, well, anything, between him and Heyes. Their scenes together lack any kind of chemistry or spark of interest. It’s all flat, fat, flat. They do punch each other right at the beginning – ok, that’s another Heyes punch, he does it more often than I remembered – and that bit is actually pretty funny, but once it’s over, we never reach these heights again.
The only exciting moment comes when Mrs Philips is presented with Matt Hamilton, the man she claims is her husband, and she whips out her pistol and shoots him. Way to go, Mrs P! I can respect that! Unfortunately, because she has two X chromosomes, one shot misses and the other is only a flesh wound, so the “husband” survives. Mrs P then admits that, yeah, she lied, he isn’t her husband, instead he seduced and abandoned her 17-year-old daughter, who had his baby and then killed herself. I am duly shocked by this tragic tale. Heyes, however, having been lied to all the way to Devil’s Hole, doesn’t believe a word of it. Big Jim is unsure. They question Hamilton, who says Mrs P doesn’t even have a daughter. The two of them had an affair, then he got bored and took off with 25,000 dollars’ worth of her jewellery. Hamilton is played as such an obvious baddie that it really doesn’t matter whether he merely nicked a few jewels or actually drove someone to suicide, he clearly deserves to be shot. And since he isn’t even dead, who cares about the ethics?
Well, Big Jim does. Temporarily, at least. Because so far we haven’t had enough scenes featuring NEITHER of our heroes, he sends Heyes back to Garden City to retrieve a photo of Mrs P’s daughter that she claims to have in her hotel safe. Produce the photo and he’ll believe Mrs P. We then have to sit through long tedious scenes of Big Jim and Mrs P falling in love. There’s no earthly reason we should believe she’s genuinely falling for him since everything else she’s said so far has been a lie, but given the way the story pans out, the writers sure seem to think this is LURVE.
I can’t stand it any longer and hit fast forward. Heyes finally comes back. Without, to his total lack of surprise, having found any photo of any daughter. Mrs P has been proven beyond a doubt to be a snake, and possibly a bit of a psychopath, given how blithely she tosses tales of trauma around and how carelessly she uses (and shoots) people. Big Jim is now thinking with his dick and basically goes “So what?” Heyes then convinces Big Jim to retire from outlawing instead of pulling one last job and the three of them hastily sneak out of Devil’s Hole before the mutiny Hamilton has been fomenting can succeed.
Mrs P and Big Jim wait for her stagecoach back to San Francisco. Mrs P complains about what a liar Matt Hamilton was (“He had it coming, he had it coming, he only had himself to blame”) and then adds, “I guess that makes me a liar too, because I never had a daughter.” You GUESS that makes you a liar? Lady, as far as I can tell every word out of your mouth has been a lie. You lie the way other people breathe. But I suppose it isn’t Mrs P's fault that the writers can't think their way out of a paper bag, let alone an ethical dilemma. Big Jim seems to have the same attitude. Instead of taking to his heels, he decides to go to San Francisco with her. He’d better not ever risk dumping her, is all I can say.
Heyes tells the Kid that now they’ve got a powerful friend in San Francisco, should they ever need one, but on the evidence of this episode I can’t see Big Jim and his snake of a wife organising a piss-up in a brewery to help anyone else. And speaking of less-than-helpful friends, that's quite a bone they've got to pick with Lom Trevors.
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