User Reviews

Whenever I see a Barkley or a Cartwright getting serious about a woman I know the poor thing is a dead duck, a gone goose. The fact that this one lived long enough to elope with Jarrod is a departure from the norm.

These women were veritable bullet magnets! If there was a bullet in the area you can bet it ended up lethally lodged in them! He's lucky she wasn't shot before the wedding night--at least he had that. lol

Victoria was the best mother-in-law in the world. She wasn't the least upset over missing the wedding and welcomed Beth with open arms. I suppose after welcoming Heath this seemed like an easy one.

I don't think this is out of character for Jarrod. He has always seemed to be wound a bit too tight. He's probably been "the little man," since childhood, the one who made sure he didn't put a foot wrong through college and law school, the one who sometimes acted more like a father than a big brother to the rest. They could remain a bit immature but Jarrod had to be the voice of reason, too old too young. But underneath that restraint was a Barkley and the Barkleys were one and all passionate and protective, seeking justice on their own when they believed the powers that be wouldn't do the job. It must have felt really good, to both Jarrod and Long, to stop being the perfect elder son for awhile.

The sheriff's actions at the end were very believable. As was Victoria's advice--the show does well with pre-Freudian methods of coping, ie try to forget about it.

Beth's comment about feeling she was in another dimension was jarringly anachronistic but perhaps she was a scientist or a philosopher and thought in those terms. I won't take off a star for that. It's not a perfect episode but I really enjoyed it.

The theme as stated was if Jarrod kills the man he is after, how does that make Jarrod any better than him? And that Jarrod was not the man he thought he was. He was humbled and brought low. He will have a different view of life now, a less arrogant and judgmental view, perhaps.

In one of the earlier episodes, Victoria says in the presence of all her sons that she could not believe any of them had it in him to be a cold-blooded murderer. I thought it was a great idea of the writers to make Jarrod - the sensible, legal-minded, level-headed son - to be the one who had it in him.

Having his wife murdered in his arms makes Jarrod completely lose it and go looking to kill the man who killed her. By the end of his search, he is unshaven, dirty, bloody from having be shot himself, and so completely consumed by his need for revenge that he is in the process of drowning the man and would have finished it had his brothers not arrived to stop him. Even then, Jarrod pulls his gun on his brothers, as if he doesn't even know it's them. He is out of character yet in character. You can believe that the cold-blooded murderer was there all the time, under the surface of the tightly wound lawyer, and that of all Victoria's sons, he really would be the one to commit a cold-blooded killing.

Richard Long pulled out all the stops on this, as brilliant as I've ever seen him, perfectly believable as both a level-headed man of the law and an out-and-out murderer. The only off- notes in the episode were a couple lines from Peter Breck (Nick), delivered a little too flippantly IMO, but easily overlooked.

Made you look at Jarrod a bit differently through the rest of the series. Great episode.

A piece of irony - Richard Long and Kevin Hagen, who played the sheriff of Rimfire who let Jarrod have at the murderer of his wife because he too had lost a young wife to a killer who was never punished - in real life, both these men lost their wives young after being married only a short time. Long's loss of his wife, actress Suzan Ball, was the stuff of Hollywood romantic legend in the mid 1950s and so heavily followed by newspapers and tabloids in those days that throngs filled the streets at their wedding and at her funeral. In a way, both Long and Hagen were playing a piece of themselves in this episode.

A lot has already been written about this episode by other people. I think it would have worked just as well if Jarrod's love interest in the story was simply a fiancée and not yet his wife. The main point is she was someone he had become very close to, and in the blink of an eye, she was taken from him. He becomes vengeful when she's killed because love has been ripped away from him-- so it's more than her having become his wife or a member of his family. However, the writer probably thought the stakes would be higher if she was Mrs. Jarrod Barkley. So within record time Jarrod meets the gal on a train, falls in love with her and marries her. The marriage itself is a very quick plot development and actually occurs off-screen.

The newlyweds have barely had time to settle into their life together at the ranch, when an outside threat wipes away their happiness. We're told the outsider is a man Jarrod helped send to jail, and he has vowed to get even. He's been pardoned, is now back in Stockton and meets the couple one day in town. A thought I had was this-- Jarrod is not a prosecutor-- he's a defense attorney. So unless he had defended the man, which doesn't seem likely, he probably wouldn't have had anything directly to do with the man's conviction. That aside, there is also no mention as to how the governor came to issue the pardon. If the man's conviction had been overturned, there must have been some evidence of his innocence. But the story ignores those points, because it's been decided he must be a villain, a killer on the loose who will murder Jarrod's wife and send Jarrod over the edge.

After they get back from town, there's a beautiful scene where Jarrod takes his bride to the spot where he intends to build a house for them to raise their children. But the moment is interrupted when shots are fired. The wife has been hit and down she goes. The sudden and unexpected nature of her death, following the whirlwind courtship, indicates how much the writer was trying to cram into the beginning portion of a 48-minute episode. It might have worked better as a two-parter. As it is, we don't really get enough time to know the wife, and therefore we cannot feel her loss too deeply. Victoria seems to be speaking for the viewers in a scene after the death has occurred where she admits she didn't know Beth Barkley very well, except that the young woman loved Jarrod.

The rest of the plot kicks into high gear. Against the advice of his mother and brother Nick, Jarrod goes off hellbent to instill his own vigilante justice. He doesn't even know if the man the governor had pardoned, whom he suspects to be his wife's murderer, is the actual culprit. All he has is a hunch. The search soon leads to a nearby town called Rimfire, and after an altercation where Jarrod is left for dead, the suspect winds up in jail on another unrelated charge. This causes Jarrod to have a long meaningful conversation with the sheriff who had experienced the death of his own wife years earlier. Jarrod and the sheriff then toy with the idea of making a Faustian bargain that will set the man free, so Jarrod can kill him out on the street. And that's what begins to happen. Of course, the final showdown is halted by the arrival of Nick and Heath but not before we see how far Jarrod is willing to go on such a scant amount of evidence.

I enjoyed the whole episode, but was especially caught by a piece of dialog from Jarrod's new wife when discussion of building a home came about. She said "promise to build a house without a roof." Why? Because she was so happy and didn't want anything blocking the beautiful sky. Made me wonder is Pharell Williams had a western fan in his family and somewhere in his subconscious, this phrase was always with him?

Anyway, to the show, as another reviewer noted, Victoria was welcoming and got right down to teaching Beth how to be a good wife to Jarrod, including showing her how to prepare J's favorite meal.

Before any eating could be done, J comes in and sweeps Beth off to a beautiful spot, where he's prepared to build the aforementioned house. As the lovely young wife leans across J to pick a flower, a shot rings out and she's gone.

Jarrod immediately has his suspicions of who did the deed and why. A man he had put in prison, was in town the previous day. J wastes no time saddling up and going in pursuit.

What we're left with is a wild wild ride as J goes deranged and I mean that in the best possible way. I'm sure this episode ended up on the reel presented to the various acting award committees, really, it was that good. A perfect blend of a man with a broken heart, set to right the wrong. I believed it every step of the way.

J would have finished off the guy in the last few minutes (apparently with the sheriff's blessing) if the other brothers hadn't ridden in and stood between J and Cass, who had just about met his maker, with his head in a horse water trough.

The coda has J humbled and feeling low. Now he knows what it's like to take after the fiery side of Victoria, not sure he even had it in him. Well worth a watch. I didn't notice any of the awkwardness lamented by another reviewer.