User Reviews

This Big Valley story has the Dunnigan Brothers played by Russell Johnson and Charles Grodin robbing the Stockton Bank and killing two people and wounding Jarrod Barkley. That sends Peter Breck and Lee Majors after the two Dunnigans to the place they call home.

Where Johnson and Grodin are looked at as Northern California's version of the James Brothers. Where they hail from is a Southern sympathizing town where the Dunnigans have bought a lot of good will among the populace. It will not be easy for Nick and Heath to get these two out without blood being spilled, mainly their own.

Even Hitler has a fan club as this episode proves. Russell Johnson is miles from playing the amiable and ever helpful Professor on Gilligan's Isle. He's smart and shrewd, definitely the brains of the outfit. He proves too smart for his own good. There's a limit to which even the blindest and dumbest people will swallow.

Check this one out.

Two men are killed and Jarrod is badly wounded in a robbery at the train depot. Jarrod recognizes the culprits as the Dunigan brothers from the town of Sunflower, in another state. The Stockton sheriff can't go after them, so Nick and Heath do.

Russell Johnson and Charles Grodin play the Dunigan brothers. Johnson is awful, overplaying the part badly with the worst southern accent ever faked on TV. Grodin is more restrained but he really could have played it more nasty than he did. The story is pretty predictable once you realize the Dunigan boys buy their way into being loved in Sunflower and the townsfolk will forgive them anything as long as the money keeps rolling in - well, almost anything.

The only thing I found unusual about this episode is that for once, the regular who gets injured in the beginning (Jarrod) is just beginning to get up and around at the end despite time going by. Usually the heroes in westerns bounce back overnight, but at the end of this episode Jarrod is going back to bed - okay, maybe he's malingering a bit, but it's a bit of realism in an episode that had to fight to get the people in it to get real.

This takes the tired, old "corrupt town" plot and puts a slight twist on it. I'm giving all the stars for Grodin who is hilariously strange. He is an excellent actor. I love the bit of business near the end with his suit jacket. Johnson's acting suffers in comparison but I do like the small touches he adds like his idly playing with the ribbon.

The end is the best part. I liked seeing the strategy between smart adversaries. There's even a fleeting moment of, "Okay, how are they going to get out of this one."

The theme of the episode was summed up in the warning about what people will do when you destroy their gods and the statement about hero worshipping the wrong hero. It might have been a statement about the political situation of the day.

It looks as if that I'm in the minority according to the ratings above, but I really think that this episode is mighty poor.

For one thing, Russell Johnson (the beloved Professor Roy Hinkley of "Gilligan's Island") plays such a phoney character and his acting/accent is likened to a cartoon character - which never works in Barkleyville.

(Nobody talks like that - but then, I never met a gal speaking like Kate Hepburn, either!)

A really odd-ball episode, it hardly fits inside the package of such a great TV series.

The theme is a corny Robin-Hoodish one: about two thieving brothers who 'help' the locals....

Try something more substantial than this rot.