In the early 60s there were two medical shows on TV, Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey. I watched the first one which was on in the early evening, but I couldn’t watch the latter which was shown at 10 o’clock, as that was past my bedtime for a school night.

However, Ben Casey was rather famous for a couple things. Its opening consisted of Dr. Zorba intoning the words “Male, female, birth, death, infinity”, while drawing the appropriate symbols on a blackboard: “♂, ♀, ✳, †, ∞”.

Dr. Zorba, of course, was played by the nonagenarian Sam Jaffee:

Well, ok, he wasn’t 90 years old. He simply seemed incredibly old to me at the time because he was married to Bettye Ackerman—

—who was about thirty years his junior. He seemed so wrinkly and old to my eyes in those days.

Now, in my late youth, his example gives me hope.

I only recall ever seeing one episode of Ben Casey and not caring for it at all. Perhaps it was an anomaly. Perhaps not.

The reason I bring it up is that for the fourth season of The Fugitive, Quinn Martin had the bad sense to hire two fellows who had worked on Ben Casey, Wilton Schiller and John Meredyth Lucas, to replace the departing producer Alan Armer, and based on the first few episodes of that season, they must have been idiots. The plots have more holes than Swiss cheese.

To take just one example. In the fourth episode there is a murder in the building where Kimble has become the super. A woman has been killed by a blunt object. The police are called to the scene, and while they are conducting their preliminary investigation, Lt. Gerard calls. Somehow he has heard about the killing. He gets the details and claims that it matches Kimble’s MO, so he hightails it to the scene of the investigation and makes it there within minutes!

This means that Kimble had gotten a job just minutes from where Gerard was stationed, which makes no sense. How would Gerard have even heard about the crime so quickly? And in earlier episodes Gerard had defended Kimble, saying that he has not even attempted to kill anyone since escaping. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. I couldn’t even finish watching that episode, it was so awful.

That was not the only Schiller and Lucas episode that I couldn’t finish watching.

There was another one where Kimble was a bartender and glances up at the TV where a news bulletin has come on about a fire in the town. The camera pans around to show the spectators, and there is the one-armed man! What a coincidence! Kimble just happens to be tending bar in the same city where the one-armed man is working as well?

But unhappily, I have a lot more episodes of season four to get through before the series finale, and although supposedly the quality improves after bit, the emphasis in the fourth season is still on melodrama, where Kimble is in jeopardy of being caught, rather than the kind of episodes that I like where he helps the people he briefly meets up with.

Plus these episodes are all in bright, vivid color more suitable for something like Hawaii Five-O.

I so decided to skip to the series finale.

Which turned out to be a fitting and suspenseful conclusion to the series with lots of good plot twists.

David Jansen had been run ragged by the grueling shooting schedule, where he was in 90% of the scenes, and he couldn’t take it anymore, so the series came to an end after only four seasons even though everyone else, especially including the network, wanted the highly rated show to continue. Oh, well, you can’t always get what you want.

The finale was a two parter with an appropriate cliff hanger at the end of part one. I still agree with Maryann’s opinion that they should have brought back one of the women that Kimble had met previously, rather than introduce an entirely new potential love interest, but other than that and a couple of moments that required a huge suspension of disbelief, it was a strong ending, the first time a TV series had featured an actual finale that brought the show to a conclusion.