User Reviews

Note: In syndication, the title shown for this episode is "The Bullet: Part II."

Part two of this three-part story begins with a severely injured Matt Dillion on a train bound for Denver to see a surgeon that specializes in spinal injuries. Doc Adams, Kitty Russell, Festus Haggen, and Newly O'Brien are accompanying the Marshal.

The train is also carrying an Army gold shipment. A gang of outlaws led by one-handed -- thanks to a previous encounter with Marshal Dillon -- Jack Sinclair have stopped the train to rob the gold.

Near the end of the first part, Festus Haggen had escaped the train and attempted to take a horse to go for help, but Concho -- one of Sinclair's men -- caught him. When Festus refuses to tell Sinclair where he came from, Sinclair tells his men to search the rest of the train. When Doc allows them to enter the freight car where he and Matt are located, Doc has Matt's body fully covered and tells the men Matt is a man named Walters. In one of the few lighter moments in the three parts, Doc manages to convince the men the covered body was killed when the train stopped abruptly by challenging them to feel the dead body. "He's as stiff as a board!"

Sinclair solicits some of the male passengers to help his men offload the gold onto a wagon. Meanwhile, there is a despicable, desperate woman named Beth Tilton on board who is being taken back to Denver as a prisoner by a Pinkerton agent. She faces a prison sentence once the train reaches Denver, and she intends to do everything she can to avoid reaching the intended destination. She also knows the man in the baggage car is Marshal Dillon, and she knows he is not dead -- information she plans to use to her advantage, given the opportunity. Beth makes the unwise decision to confront and threaten Kitty with details of her plan.

Just as the last of the gold is loaded into the wagon, Newly and Festus successfully get away from their captors with the wagon. They astutely take the gang's horses with them. However, the wagon loaded with gold pulling several horses makes the progress quite slow. Sinclair and all but two of his men set out in pursuit of the slow-moving wagon on foot.

Leaving behind only two men to guard the train proves to be costly for Sinclair, as Matt manages to kill one, and the other is rendered harmless by Captain Darnell with Doc's help. Now that the captain has control of the train again, they can try to get it moving to get help.

Unfortunately, Matt's condition worsens. He completely loses all feeling in his legs, and Doc realizes the situation has become even more critical.

At the ten minute point of this episode, Amada Blake starts what may well be the best soliloquy in Hollywood TV history. She tells the story of how she arrived in Dodge City and hated the place, and then -- the man walks in! The poignant part of the narrative she provided in character is that no other TV series could have referenced something that happened, "seventeen years ago to the month," without that statement being fiction. This episode was taped in the seventeenth season, and so it was literal fact!

This unique reality is what gives the soliloquy such power. The audience can go along individually and recount the details of entire episodes brought back by brief references in the two minute soliloquy. The short rejoinder given by Arness at the end, in character, is priceless, and must be seen in the context of the scene to be enjoyed.

The scene brings a tear to one's eye simply because of how fresh it remains in the timeless nature of film, but uttered by two people who both passed away years ago, Amanda Blake before James Arness. The mortality of two people, brought together to form Hollywood history in an immortal TV series, is laid before us.

Seventeen years is a long time in anyone's life, and the words spoke in character might just as well been a symbol of their own lives in reality, especially given that this three-part series was the first return of Milburn Stone from his medical hiatus due to heart bypass surgery.

The story of Matt and Kitty is laid out plain to see in a short two-minute scene, and it isn't merely that it's the only TV series in history that could have laid down seventeen years of real life behind it, but that the story sums up how life's simple moments often form the basis for all other things so much more complicated and meaningful.

A man walks in, and eats his "eggs and biscuits," and the life of a woman is forever altered, so that life without the man seems impossible to ponder, for both her and the man, but also for the audience who grew up over the course of two decades watching the story unfold!

And what a beautiful story it was!

This is part two of a three part episode. > From part one we learned all the characters and their intended deeds. We know that some bandits, lead by Jack Sinclair, are robbing the train that has a critically wounded Marshal Dillon laying in the back train car.

In this part the bandits have found Matt but Doc gives them a false name and tells them that he is dead. -- The woman prisoner being taken to Denver, Beth Tilton, knows that the name is false because she saw Kitty with the Marshal and just may tell Sinclair that Marshal Dillon is really in the back of the train. But after Kitty gets through smacking Beth around, she may want to keep her mouth shut.-- Finally, after a distraction, Newly and Festus are able to drive away with the wagon filled with gold and take all the horses belonging to the bandits. But with a heavy load of gold it will be 'slow go' as the bandits are trying to catch up to the stolen wagon.

With Matt losing feeling in his legs it looks like part three cannot get here quick enough.