Episode 14: Never Trust An Honest Man
Oct. 12th, 2025 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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aliassmithjonesWe open with a spoilerific teaser and I am at a loss to understand why, because the opening scene, when we finally get to it, is an absolute delight and grabs the attention far better than the teaser.
The short sequence where Heyes wakes the Kid up to tell him something he already knows says more about these two characters and the relationship between them than all the previous episodes combined. It’s funny and charming and for the first time the writers seem to really understand that the interaction between our two heroes can carry a scene all on its own. I love it to bits and if I were going to show an episode of ASJ to someone for the first time to try to convey what I love about the show, I think I might pick this one.
The action kicks off when the boys are voluntold to join a poker game in the private carriage of the owner of the railroad, one Oscar Harlingen, along whose tracks their train is currently running. The boys have gone 5 whole days without being pursued by anybody and Heyes is starting to worry that this means trouble is looming (statistics again). The arrival of the “invitation” is therefore naturally a trifle disconcerting. The boys point out that they can’t afford to play poker with a millionaire and the reply “You can’t afford not to,” is not calculated to reassure them. It turns out, though, that Harlingen likes to play poker for teeny weeny stakes, one hundred chips to the penny, and the boys end up owing him the colossal sums of 37 and 85 cents. I LOVE this conceit. It works both on the level of “Harlingen is too stingy to risk any actual losses” and “the love of the game is what counts, not what you win”, which in a way reflects the characters of Oscar and Allen Harlingen, and it’s also just a really lovely idea in its own right.
There’s a woman, Christine McNeice, sitting in a corner while the men play, sewing at some kind of womanly sewing thing, until Harlingen asks her to leave so he can tell his fellow players that her father used to be his business partner until he gambled away all his money. Quite why he still has Christine hanging around is never made clear, but perhaps he felt a sense of responsibility towards her. The name McNIECE implies some sort of uncle-like relationship (in the non-genetic sense), and the hint that she and Oscar’s son Allen were once closer than they currently are also fits this interpretation.
The next scene is set in Heyes and Curry’s hotel bedroom where, in an act of blatant fan service, the Kid is shaving topless. Or at least he’s trying to. His razor is blunt, so he asks if he can borrow Heyes’s and goes and rifles through his friend’s carpet bag, pulling out not a nice manly razor but a woman’s corset. Just like the opening, this scene is both extremely funny and made more so by the way the two of them interact. I fall about in hysterics at the way the Kid says “Gee, it sure looks like your bag,” and then, when Heyes has a rummage himself and pulls out a bible, “I’m convinced, it ain’t your bag.”
But then Heyes finds a hollow in the middle of the book. Inside it is a small pouch full of jewels. Sacrilege! A bible being desecrated with criminal intent! Although, hmmm, sarcasm aside, now I come to think of it, there is kind of a religious theme running through this episode, what with the inclusion of Preacher and his and Logan’s discussion of the Ten Commandments. And it’s notable that this episode explicitly addresses the fact that going straight has changed not just Heyes and Curry’s behaviour but also their characters. The whole sequence, from Heyes’s whole-body-wag when he looks at the jewels to “Your mother was a crook,” to the Kid’s mock-sorrowful “I never thought I’d see the day you turned against everything we used to believe in,” and Heyes’s defensive “I’m just trying to be practical!” is an object lesson in how to be funny while tackling a serious subject. And I’m intrigued that, on the evidence of this episode, Heyes is a little further down the path to true reform than the Kid, because I’m used to thinking of the Kid as Heyes’s moral superior.
Anyway, back to the plot. The bible belongs to Christine McNeice, so the boys decide they’d better break into her bedroom to confront her. Cue another funny scene where they’re trying to decide which one actually is her bedroom. Heyes climbs in through the window, Christine faints and ANOTHER funny scene follows, with Heyes ineffectually patting her hand to try to bring her round and the Kid fetching him a bottle of heavy perfume in lieu of smelling salts. It transpires that the jewels are in fact Harlingen’s, they’re worth $5 million, and he smuggled them across the border for what he claims were perfectly legal reasons. He offers the boys a paltry $100 reward – cheque, not cash - and they straight up blackmail him in return (“We’ll just tell the Federal Marshal it was reward money for returning millions in jewels.”) Heyes is genuinely quick-witted and persuasive in this scene, the Kid backs him up seamlessly, the dialogue covers lots of ground at a cracking pace and the whole succession of shady deals and even shadier revelations leaves me wondering whether the supposedly “honest man” of the title is meant to be Oscar Harlingen or those two “honest, forthright citizens”, Heyes and Curry. Or perhaps the title isn’t meant ironically. Perhaps the honest man is Allen Harlingen, Oscar’s son, who despite what Christine believes is absolutely nothing like his father. Allen has no interest in jewels or money, he believes in principles and in people, not property. On the other hand, no one actually tries to fool him, so I’ll go with the intent being ironic.
Oscar Harlingen discovers that the jewels Smith and Jones brought back are fakes and dispatches his right-hand man James Quirt to bring the boys back so he can question them. Allen makes a pass at Christine who fends him off, saying he reminds her too much of his father for her to return his feelings. She does look the teeniest bit regretful about this as he goes off, though.
Before setting off to find Heyes and Curry, Quirt goes to see a man about an ambush. The man’s name is Logan (did I subsequently hear correctly that his first name is Thaddeus? That has to be deliberate, though I don’t get why – is it some sort of parallel with the Kid, what he could have become if he hadn’t gone straight, or did I just mishear?) and Logan in turn goes and hires the town drunk, a superb marksman who goes by the moniker Preacher. As we know from the teaser, this will backfire because Preacher is an old friend of Heyes and Curry’s and at the crucial moment will refuse to shoot them. I really like the conversation between Logan and Preacher. They’re both very good actors and the swapping back and forth of commandments as a sort of code for crimes is excellent.
Quirt and his men capture Heyes and Curry and take them past the agreed ambush point, where Preacher puts a spoke in Quirt’s wheel by braining Logan with the butt of his rifle. He also nicks all his cash saying, with a glance heavenwards, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” This is an awful lot of Christian references for an ASJ episode, I’m going to have to start a tally. Quirt then dismisses his men and tells Heyes and the Kid that his conscience is troubling him (aha, yet another variation on the theme of people failing to live up to their professed moral standards, just like Harlingen, Preacher and, to a certain extent, Heyes and Curry); if they make a break for it, he’ll deliberately fail to shoot them so they can get away. Quirt is a pretty good liar but not quite good enough. The boys aren’t fooled and instead of riding off to get shot in the back, they spur their horses directly at him and escape. Quirt rides after them but BANG! Preacher shoots his horse from underneath him and he breaks his neck falling off. And serve him right. The wages of sin is death, as Preacher could have said but didn’t.
The boys break back into Harlingen’s house, and I appreciate that this time it’s Harlingen’s bedroom, not Christine’s, that gets invaded. Christian reference alert: when woken in his bed, Harlingen says “What in the name of all the saints is going on here?” I also note that a couple of scenes later, Heyes says they would have given Quirt a Christian burial and that Harlingen brushes off the need with a hasty "Let it wait." Curry and Heyes play Bad Cop, Good Cop and the three of them discuss who could have switched the real jewels. In order to find out, they agree that Harlingen will put out word that Quirt has disappeared.
Cut to Christine leaving Harlingen’s posh pad. She drives to a dilapidated house outside town where she looks inside the handle of a pump in the kitchen and discovers that the jewels are still there. It turns out that she stole them (with Quirt’s help) to avenge her father, who was cheated by Harlingen and so had his life ruined, but her father, who lives in the house, guiltily confesses that he actually gambled the money away and lied about Harlingen cheating him to save face with Christine. Christine gives him a hug which suggests she forgives him. Oh no, don’t tell me that’s why her name is CHRISTine?! That’s just cheap.
Harlingen wants to charge Christine with theft, but Allen defends her, saying her only crime was to have faith in her father. He threatens to run away forever if Harlingen père has her arrested. His threat must succeed because we cut Christine and Allen’s massive engagement party at the Harlingen estate, attended by Heyes and the Kid in their city suits. When I first saw this episode, I couldn’t understand Christine’s volte face, unless it was for purely mercenary motives, but on rewatching there are enough hints that she doesn’t dislike Allen for himself but only because she believes he’s so like his father that he’ll eventually turn into him (I guess that’s the reason for the stunt casting, although to my embarrassment I have to admit that it wasn’t until the very end of the episode that I started to ask myself “Is this the same guy?”, which rather undermined the point).
Oscar Harlingen is suffering greatly under his son’s profligacy with the champagne but will doubtless console himself with the thought that he cheated Heyes and the Kid out of claiming any reward for the return of the real jewels. There is another very enjoyable scene of mutual attempts at blackmail, but this time Harlingen wins. The boys leave, dejected, but they’ve actually come out of this with $2,000, and if it had been much more than that the Gods of Narrative would have been forced to deprive them of it to prevent them from absconding to Mexico, so I consider this a very happy ending to an all-round excellent episode. I really liked the lightness of touch with which it dealt with the issue of conscience and going straight and the various ways in which the characters fail or succeed at living up to their own moral standards.
The short sequence where Heyes wakes the Kid up to tell him something he already knows says more about these two characters and the relationship between them than all the previous episodes combined. It’s funny and charming and for the first time the writers seem to really understand that the interaction between our two heroes can carry a scene all on its own. I love it to bits and if I were going to show an episode of ASJ to someone for the first time to try to convey what I love about the show, I think I might pick this one.
The action kicks off when the boys are voluntold to join a poker game in the private carriage of the owner of the railroad, one Oscar Harlingen, along whose tracks their train is currently running. The boys have gone 5 whole days without being pursued by anybody and Heyes is starting to worry that this means trouble is looming (statistics again). The arrival of the “invitation” is therefore naturally a trifle disconcerting. The boys point out that they can’t afford to play poker with a millionaire and the reply “You can’t afford not to,” is not calculated to reassure them. It turns out, though, that Harlingen likes to play poker for teeny weeny stakes, one hundred chips to the penny, and the boys end up owing him the colossal sums of 37 and 85 cents. I LOVE this conceit. It works both on the level of “Harlingen is too stingy to risk any actual losses” and “the love of the game is what counts, not what you win”, which in a way reflects the characters of Oscar and Allen Harlingen, and it’s also just a really lovely idea in its own right.
There’s a woman, Christine McNeice, sitting in a corner while the men play, sewing at some kind of womanly sewing thing, until Harlingen asks her to leave so he can tell his fellow players that her father used to be his business partner until he gambled away all his money. Quite why he still has Christine hanging around is never made clear, but perhaps he felt a sense of responsibility towards her. The name McNIECE implies some sort of uncle-like relationship (in the non-genetic sense), and the hint that she and Oscar’s son Allen were once closer than they currently are also fits this interpretation.
The next scene is set in Heyes and Curry’s hotel bedroom where, in an act of blatant fan service, the Kid is shaving topless. Or at least he’s trying to. His razor is blunt, so he asks if he can borrow Heyes’s and goes and rifles through his friend’s carpet bag, pulling out not a nice manly razor but a woman’s corset. Just like the opening, this scene is both extremely funny and made more so by the way the two of them interact. I fall about in hysterics at the way the Kid says “Gee, it sure looks like your bag,” and then, when Heyes has a rummage himself and pulls out a bible, “I’m convinced, it ain’t your bag.”
But then Heyes finds a hollow in the middle of the book. Inside it is a small pouch full of jewels. Sacrilege! A bible being desecrated with criminal intent! Although, hmmm, sarcasm aside, now I come to think of it, there is kind of a religious theme running through this episode, what with the inclusion of Preacher and his and Logan’s discussion of the Ten Commandments. And it’s notable that this episode explicitly addresses the fact that going straight has changed not just Heyes and Curry’s behaviour but also their characters. The whole sequence, from Heyes’s whole-body-wag when he looks at the jewels to “Your mother was a crook,” to the Kid’s mock-sorrowful “I never thought I’d see the day you turned against everything we used to believe in,” and Heyes’s defensive “I’m just trying to be practical!” is an object lesson in how to be funny while tackling a serious subject. And I’m intrigued that, on the evidence of this episode, Heyes is a little further down the path to true reform than the Kid, because I’m used to thinking of the Kid as Heyes’s moral superior.
Anyway, back to the plot. The bible belongs to Christine McNeice, so the boys decide they’d better break into her bedroom to confront her. Cue another funny scene where they’re trying to decide which one actually is her bedroom. Heyes climbs in through the window, Christine faints and ANOTHER funny scene follows, with Heyes ineffectually patting her hand to try to bring her round and the Kid fetching him a bottle of heavy perfume in lieu of smelling salts. It transpires that the jewels are in fact Harlingen’s, they’re worth $5 million, and he smuggled them across the border for what he claims were perfectly legal reasons. He offers the boys a paltry $100 reward – cheque, not cash - and they straight up blackmail him in return (“We’ll just tell the Federal Marshal it was reward money for returning millions in jewels.”) Heyes is genuinely quick-witted and persuasive in this scene, the Kid backs him up seamlessly, the dialogue covers lots of ground at a cracking pace and the whole succession of shady deals and even shadier revelations leaves me wondering whether the supposedly “honest man” of the title is meant to be Oscar Harlingen or those two “honest, forthright citizens”, Heyes and Curry. Or perhaps the title isn’t meant ironically. Perhaps the honest man is Allen Harlingen, Oscar’s son, who despite what Christine believes is absolutely nothing like his father. Allen has no interest in jewels or money, he believes in principles and in people, not property. On the other hand, no one actually tries to fool him, so I’ll go with the intent being ironic.
Oscar Harlingen discovers that the jewels Smith and Jones brought back are fakes and dispatches his right-hand man James Quirt to bring the boys back so he can question them. Allen makes a pass at Christine who fends him off, saying he reminds her too much of his father for her to return his feelings. She does look the teeniest bit regretful about this as he goes off, though.
Before setting off to find Heyes and Curry, Quirt goes to see a man about an ambush. The man’s name is Logan (did I subsequently hear correctly that his first name is Thaddeus? That has to be deliberate, though I don’t get why – is it some sort of parallel with the Kid, what he could have become if he hadn’t gone straight, or did I just mishear?) and Logan in turn goes and hires the town drunk, a superb marksman who goes by the moniker Preacher. As we know from the teaser, this will backfire because Preacher is an old friend of Heyes and Curry’s and at the crucial moment will refuse to shoot them. I really like the conversation between Logan and Preacher. They’re both very good actors and the swapping back and forth of commandments as a sort of code for crimes is excellent.
Quirt and his men capture Heyes and Curry and take them past the agreed ambush point, where Preacher puts a spoke in Quirt’s wheel by braining Logan with the butt of his rifle. He also nicks all his cash saying, with a glance heavenwards, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” This is an awful lot of Christian references for an ASJ episode, I’m going to have to start a tally. Quirt then dismisses his men and tells Heyes and the Kid that his conscience is troubling him (aha, yet another variation on the theme of people failing to live up to their professed moral standards, just like Harlingen, Preacher and, to a certain extent, Heyes and Curry); if they make a break for it, he’ll deliberately fail to shoot them so they can get away. Quirt is a pretty good liar but not quite good enough. The boys aren’t fooled and instead of riding off to get shot in the back, they spur their horses directly at him and escape. Quirt rides after them but BANG! Preacher shoots his horse from underneath him and he breaks his neck falling off. And serve him right. The wages of sin is death, as Preacher could have said but didn’t.
The boys break back into Harlingen’s house, and I appreciate that this time it’s Harlingen’s bedroom, not Christine’s, that gets invaded. Christian reference alert: when woken in his bed, Harlingen says “What in the name of all the saints is going on here?” I also note that a couple of scenes later, Heyes says they would have given Quirt a Christian burial and that Harlingen brushes off the need with a hasty "Let it wait." Curry and Heyes play Bad Cop, Good Cop and the three of them discuss who could have switched the real jewels. In order to find out, they agree that Harlingen will put out word that Quirt has disappeared.
Cut to Christine leaving Harlingen’s posh pad. She drives to a dilapidated house outside town where she looks inside the handle of a pump in the kitchen and discovers that the jewels are still there. It turns out that she stole them (with Quirt’s help) to avenge her father, who was cheated by Harlingen and so had his life ruined, but her father, who lives in the house, guiltily confesses that he actually gambled the money away and lied about Harlingen cheating him to save face with Christine. Christine gives him a hug which suggests she forgives him. Oh no, don’t tell me that’s why her name is CHRISTine?! That’s just cheap.
Harlingen wants to charge Christine with theft, but Allen defends her, saying her only crime was to have faith in her father. He threatens to run away forever if Harlingen père has her arrested. His threat must succeed because we cut Christine and Allen’s massive engagement party at the Harlingen estate, attended by Heyes and the Kid in their city suits. When I first saw this episode, I couldn’t understand Christine’s volte face, unless it was for purely mercenary motives, but on rewatching there are enough hints that she doesn’t dislike Allen for himself but only because she believes he’s so like his father that he’ll eventually turn into him (I guess that’s the reason for the stunt casting, although to my embarrassment I have to admit that it wasn’t until the very end of the episode that I started to ask myself “Is this the same guy?”, which rather undermined the point).
Oscar Harlingen is suffering greatly under his son’s profligacy with the champagne but will doubtless console himself with the thought that he cheated Heyes and the Kid out of claiming any reward for the return of the real jewels. There is another very enjoyable scene of mutual attempts at blackmail, but this time Harlingen wins. The boys leave, dejected, but they’ve actually come out of this with $2,000, and if it had been much more than that the Gods of Narrative would have been forced to deprive them of it to prevent them from absconding to Mexico, so I consider this a very happy ending to an all-round excellent episode. I really liked the lightness of touch with which it dealt with the issue of conscience and going straight and the various ways in which the characters fail or succeed at living up to their own moral standards.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 06:31 am (UTC)It's true that the Kid is more impulsive, and certainly more responsive to the needs of people who are right in front of him, whereas nicking jewels that belong to a millionaire isn't going to hurt anyone, it's only immoral in an abstract sense. But I do think this is a turning point for Heyes (assuming it doesn't get turned back in subsequent episodes). He does specifically say that going straight has changed him and the shift to practical reasons for returning the jewellery comes after the Kid doubles down on disagreeing with him.