User Reviews

This episode has Dr. Kimble looking for work and getting hired at a construction company. The owner knows about Kimble's identity and decides that having him as a worker would help him medically because he has a heart condition which he has kept private from others. The construction owner has a past tragedy that involved a newly constructed building which collapsed and killed several children and left his young daughter mentally damaged from the experience. He secretly tries to camouflage a building project for a motel, but is really for a children's hospital. It appears that he is doing it to atone for the building accident tragedy from his past. The construction owner has to deal with city protestors as well as his combative spouse and copartner. In the end after his death, his wife continues his project for building a hospital. This episode had a more interesting plot development than the episode just before this one. The prior episode with Anne Francis and Charles Bronson went by at a boring pace with little urgency. Also, Bronson as an undercover federal agent was not that credible in my opinion. The only aspect of this episode that did not quite make sense was the interaction between the construction owner's wife (Celeste Holm) and Doctor Kimble. She tries to get rid of him, but Kimble refuses to leave unless the construction owner tells him to. In some of the other episodes, when the situation became inhospitable for Kimble, he would just high tail it out of there since he was a transient worker.

This episode (part of the 4th season airing in the fall of 1967 and the spring of 1968)was one of the coolest ones of the entire series and had two other celebrities besides David Janssen. It DID NOT include the cop (played by Barry Morse) who was chasing him, which I never liked anyway. He was in too many of the episodes and contributed very little to the stories. I saw and loved every episode of this series multiple times including re-runs all through my teenage years. I am 60 now and am still watching them every time I see one is going to be aired on cable. There were two other character actors who were quite famous in their day and they were actor Jack Warden who was great in so much 60's television and long-time veteran movie & stage actress Celeste Holm, both of whom I liked very much in almost everything else that they did in movies and on TV.

For starters, when Kimble is hired by the owner and the co-owner, his wife or ex wife (i'm still unsure which she was to him) immediately tells Kimble to pack up and split, but instead Kimble digs his feet in and says he's staying. Why?

This was well before the owner revealed to Kimble that he knew his identity and forced him to stay, so why would he willingly want to stay somewhere where he's going to cause trouble and make waves? Especially for a temporary job like this when he's just going to move on in a few weeks anyway?

It made no sense for him to defy her and stay there knowing his presence would cause business/family strife. In reality, I think he'd have gladly gotten far away from that situation since he has bigger problems to deal with and wouldn't want to get embroiled in someone else's mess.

Another thing that made no sense was Pat hiding the fact he was building a children's hospital instead of a motel, especially from his wife (or ex wife). His excuse was that he thought she would leave him if she knew it was going to be a children's hospital, but that makes no sense at all.

It's clear that he didn't intentionally kill those kids in the accident years ago. And it's also pretty clear to everyone that he used barely passable, though still legal, building materials for the theater that fell down.

So building the hospital is hardly an admission of guilt, but rather a gesture of atonement for his feeling responsible for the tragedy. I think anyone would understand that, so his secrecy was really confusing and made no sense to me.

Then there's the ending where the wife (or ex wife) finds out Kimble's identity and tells him to get the hell out of town in one hour or she calls police. And you know that this woman means business.

But what does Kimble do instead? He takes an employee truck to go see her husband (or ex husband) after she specifically told him to stay away from him. Kimble didn't know he had the heart attack at that point and he had to have known that she would see him take the truck and call police.

Why would he take such a stupid chance like that after what she said to him?! It defies all logic. Just get the hell out of there. Even after he gets to the construction site and sees Pat keeled over, he's not at all worried that the cops are most likely on the way at that moment to get him.

It wasn't until the wife (or ex wife) comes and coldly tells Kimble "I called the Sheriff", that he scurries into the building under construction to hide. There's a small bit where the cops look for him, but it's treated as an afterthought and lacks any excitement or suspense and is over in 2 minutes.

This is definitely one of the weaker and more confusing installments of this series that the final season seems full of. When I finally finish the series i'm going to watch the first three seasons again, but I have no desire to return to this uneven and weak season 4. This episode gets 1 star from me for so many things happening in it that were just too illogical to believe.