User Reviews

Damn fine two-part episode has a well cast Stuart Whitman as an ex-Ranger appearing at a shooting competition trying to find the murderer of his cop son, Shelby Valentine (Jonathan Banks). Whitman's Laredo Jake Boyd (what a name!) doesn't realize that the man in a photograph with a stripper isn't the killer, later discovering (much to his fate) that it is someone else entirely: Shelby, a professional hit-man who loves to use a particular knife to puncture the kidneys from behind of victims before using it on their heart so that they die from internal bleeding! Banks can do heavy as good as anyone, and a cold-blooded hired assassin is just his forte. The episode also has RG Armstrong and LQ Jones as retired Rangers, also, buddies with Noble Willingham's CD Parker. So the show is packed with faces, but Whitman and Banks are all that it really needed in regards to guest stars. Even a gut bullet doesn't stop Whitman from his mission and Walker is right there with him hoping to find Shelby who masquerades as a Kansas City cop in town for the competition, paid by a racist megalomaniac, Miles Douglas (William Prince) to assassinate a Presidential hopeful (Ben Masters, a cocky Senator with eyes on Alex). Even as early as 1994, the show was hinting at Walker and Alex's potential as a couple as he doesn't wish to talk about how feels to Laredo who notices his pain as she escorts Masters' Senator Knox around (he doesn't exactly hide his interest in her). On Walker, Texas Ranger, hit men targeting folks was nothing new so the episode's appeal derives from Banks' effortless ability to be a chilling killer with a face of a snake and icy resolve. Whitman's grace is such a blessing to the episode and his wounded heart, driving him to see the blood spilled from his boy doesn't go unpunished, gives "On Deadly Ground" (or also known as "The Reunion") an emotional potency it desperately needs to keep it from being just another "assassination plot". Whitman's swan song at the end of the episode is powerful and touching. The shooting competition might remind Dirty Harry fans of Magnum Force (1973).