The Devil's Disciples

Kimble, on foot, is being chased by police in cars and helicopters. Suddenly, he gets a break when Hutch (actor Bruce Dern), the leader of a motorcycle gang, takes him away and brings him to safety. Almost.

Hutch hangs on to Kimble. Kimble comes to be appalled by the way the other gang members allow Hutch to mistreat them and order them around.

When police come the gang hides Kimble, but they learn who Kimble really is. Kimble faces physical, moral and legal danger as Hutch develops a plan to force Kimble to participate in a violent revenge plot.

This episode is chock-full of actors who regularly appear in many roles in the series, including Bruce Dern, Crahan Denton, Diana Hyland, and Lou Antonio.

During the run of "The Fugitive", Bruce Dern appeared five times as five different characters. Well, they weren't exactly different-- every one of them turned out to be real jerks! So, when I saw him in this episode I pretty much figured he was a guy up to no good...which is exactly the case. The police are chasing Richard Kimble but despite their best efforts, he is rescued by two bikers (Dern and Lou Antonio) and a biker girl (Diana Hyland). They are NOT doing this out of any desire to help...they are up to no good. But how can they use Kimble to their own ends?

Compared to the biker films of the late 60s and early 70s, the biker punks in this one seem amazingly tame....and hardly a long-haired freak among them. Not quite 'The Mild Ones'...but certainly not the type folks you see in "Satan's Sadists" or "Werewolves on Wheels" or "C.C. and Company". However, Hutch (Dern) is a bit wacky and menacing...even if the rest of his gang doesn't seem all that gang- like.

So is this any good? Well, if you love Bruce Dern, you'll be in for a treat as he is much more of a villain and bigger presence in this than previous shows in the series. However, nearly everyone in the show is in their 30s and too clean-cut to be a credible biker gang. Nevertheless, it IS "The Fugitive"...and even for a slightly below average episode, it's still darn watchable.

There is not one likable character in this episode filled with a bunch of tough talking wannabe bikers. Bruce Dern's character was so over the top annoying that he made this the first Fugitive episode that I wound up fast forwarding through.

His character was so irritating that I couldn't sit through his wild eyed screaming without having the FF button handy. I didn't care about the other two partners in crime either who just as annoying as he was.

It's not the actors though, because I enjoyed each of them in their previous guest roles on this series, but here I just couldn't stand any of them and the plot was incredibly boring to boot. The Epilogue couldn't come fast enough with this episode.

It's also a distraction seeing the same guest star return numerous times in different roles. I kept wondering if there was a shortage of actors and actresses in the 1960's that they had to recycle the same ones over and over again for the guest roles. This occurs in this series too much not to notice it and I feel that it detracts somewhat from the storytelling. Not that this story was any good anyway. When you don't care if all of the guest characters fly off a cliff to their bloody deaths in the first act, it's just not a good episode.

I'm hoping for at least a couple of good episodes left before the series wraps up, but if not I always have seasons 1-3 to watch over again. Even the rare stinkers in those first three seasons were watchable and it's painful to see such a great show like this limping along to it's finish. I'm starting to think perhaps they should've wrapped it up at the end of season 3.

Biker films were very popular in the 60's, even becoming a minor movie genre. Bruce Dern, who was making his 5th appearance on the show, had just been in one of those movies, "The Wild Angels". Here he's the head of a gang that rescues Kimble form the police. But he has an ulterior motive. He wants Kimble to kill someone- a guy who called the police on them after a robbery, the father of a fellow gang member who agreed to take the blame for the robbery and then took a deal, (you could do that at the time) to do military service instead of jail time and wound up in Viet Nam, where he was badly wounded, (we never see this character but "there's not much left of him"). Dern wants Kimble to perform the deed because he's already been convicted of murder and "they can only kill him once".

Diana Hyland and Lou Antonio play gang members, each making their third appearances. The guy they want to do is played by veteran character actor Crahan Denton, (this is also his fifth appearance), who died of a heart attack two days before this episode was broadcast. He plays a very frightened man, who might not survive just being harassed by the bikers as they buzz around him with their bikes. You wonder what his family must have felt as they watched those scenes.