Second day in a row where I’m referencing electoral-vote.com, but this is because they published a letter that I sent in.

On the Tuesday Mailbag (delayed from Sunday) they included the email I sent off where I talked about the series finale of The Fugitive TV series which aired as a two-parter in August of 1967.

I don’t think it needs any more introduction than that, other than that the Maryann that I reference is Maryann Shellhamer, one of my classmates at Elco High School. Oh, and for some reason they lightly edited my email to make it more, uh, conversational? I dunno. I don’t really object to their edits, but I had to stop a couple times and wonder, did I really write that? Actually, I did notice one of their edits because I knew I had not written that, because I never would have shortened Les Miserables to Les Mis. (That’s normally how people refer to the musical based on the novel, albeit with a “z”, and I loathe that musical.)

Anyway, here is my original, unedited text. 

The full mailbag can be found here in case you want to compare my text to their edited text or read any of the other letters.

This week’s Q&A was well worth waiting for. I was especially fascinated by the Dutch cultural list, and I found lots to agree with in some of the opinion answers (notably the Sondheim musicals) and disagree with in some others (TV series finales).

 

But as a septuagenarian, I thought I’d address the finale to The Fugitive TV series. It’s a show that I mostly followed during its initial run and have only watched a few episodes since then. I remember that back in the day it was often compared to Les Miserables, the book, not the musical which had not yet been written, because of the way Lt. Gerard relentlessly pursued Richard Kimble just as Javert pursued Jean Valjean in the novel.

 

But I could see it as a modern version of the Lone Ranger, where Kimble helped out a different family each week and then rode off into the sunset, or slinked away into the darkened alleyways. Of course, he did so for different reasons and without a trusty companion like Tonto, so the comparison wasn’t perfect, but then neither was the Les Miserables comparison.

 

In any case I recall watching the finale and loving it, but the next day my friend Maryann informed me that she was disappointed in it because they had brought in a ringer for Kimble to have a happy ending with, in this case Diane Baker, who was guest starring on practically every TV series in those days. After all the people he had helped and all the women he had nearly fallen into relationships with over the years, they didn’t bring any of them back. So Maryann didn’t think it was a satisfactory conclusion, and after thinking it over, I had to agree with her. They brought in a woman out of left field so to speak. It would have been better if they had brought back one of the women with whom he had already developed a relationship in a previous episode. Maryann had a candidate in mind, but I no longer recall who it was.