Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The Best Show Ever", December 15, 1999
"August 29th, the day the running stopped." A day I'll always remember because it was the end of my favorite TV show, still is today. "The Judgment" by today's standards, was done somewhat poorly, sort of put together on a whim to end the show. But to me, it is cherished and sacred !I didn't like how it ended. I would have liked for the one-armed man to have lived and been captured - and then have the courtroom proceedings that released Richard Kimble shown as a final episode. Bill Raisch was incredible in the part he played as the one-armed man. Couldn't have found a more believable actor for the role - He didn't need acting ability - he was a natural. No one could have played a better derelict drifter, at least in my opinion no one couldn't. David Janssen should have been a bigger star than he was. He should have been on the same level as Sean Connory - and today, would be a bigger star. He is the epitomy of "Cool." In the last 30 years, the only show close to "The Fugitive" as a continuing Drama was "Hill Street Blues."
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Classic Show, May 19, 2000
Some Fugitive fans refuse to watch this episode (the final one) because they don't want the closure. They want to imagine that Richard Kimble is still running. I understand how they feel -- but I say give the poor doctor a break!Go ahead and watch this episode. It's not the best example of the show, but it's still pretty darn good. There are lots of twists. (I still wonder why the one-armed man climbed to the top of the water tower to escape Kimble. Where was he going to go from _there_?) If you can, watch the other episodes, too. You get to see 1960s drama at its best. Back then, TV shows didn't have adult language, but they could still have adult plots. David Janssen's work in this show was underrated. So was the work of Barry Morse. There were lots of great supporting actors, from Angie Dickinson to Telly Savalas to William Shatner. This show had the highest ratings of any TV drama until the "Who Shot J.R." episode. I think this one far surpassed it. (The writers of "The Fugitive" respected their audience more -- they never had David Janssen come out of the shower and realize it was all a dream.) Anne M. Marble Reviewer, All About Romance
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Day the Running Stopped, July 8, 2002
THE FUGITIVE was the first drama that had a concluding episode that tied up the loose ends. For those who had watched the series faithfully for four years were generally satisfied with the closure, despite the several logical inconsistencies in the two-part finale. THE JUDGMENT allows Richard Kimble to regain his life by finally catching the man with one arm, but it is the manner that he did it that provides an emotionally satisfying end to a roller coaster of a series that millions of viewers religiously followed. The charm of THE JUDGMENT is that it encapsulates in one twin segment the very qualities that had stamped its high quality since the 1963-64 season. Many of the themes, ideas, character developments, and plot devices were combined with a surprise twist to justify the time America spent to get involved in the running triangle between Kimble, Lieutenant Gerard, and Fred Johnson, the one-armed man.
Director George Eckstein borrowed heavily from earlier episodes to frame a finale in a way that ties together a myriad of strands that had been left hanging from previous episodes. Gerard learns that a one-armed man has been arrested in Los Angeles and suspects that Kimble will read of it as well. His hope is that Kimble will try to see this man to verify his identity. This is exactly the same plot device that the show used in NEVER WAVE GOODBYE from the first season. It worked well then and works well now. Kimble does indeed read of this in a Tucson newspaper where he works. For viewers with long memories, Tucson was also the setting for the very first episode, FEAR IN A DESERT CITY. Gerard flies to Los Angeles and questions Fred Johnson in a manner that clearly shows the evolution of Gerard's certainty of Kimble's guilt to a doubt. Gerard shouts at him, 'Did you kill Helen Kimble?' From a dramatic standpoint, this doubt is required to make it plausible that Gerard would later believe in the possibility of Kimble's innocence long enough to give him twenty-four hours to find Johnson. Kimble arrives in Los Angeles where he is reunited with Jean Carlisle, played by Diane Baker, who was the court reporter at the trial and has long loved Kimble. She tips him off about the trap and hides him in her apartment. Gerard nevertheless suspects that she is hiding Kimble and tricks him into taking a taxi, where he arrests Kimble. While this is going on, the plot takes a surprise twist when Johnson is bailed out by a man who is later revealed as Lloyd Chandler, Kimble's next door neighbor in Stafford, who was right there in the living room when he saw Johnson kill Helen Kimble. But since he did not want to expose himself as a coward, he kept his mouth shut and left Kimble as the sacrificial lamb to his own shame. This surprise revelation of an eyewitness to Kimble's innocence was prefigured in an earlier episode, TRIAL BY FIRE, where an army captain also saw Johnson run out of the Kimble residence just moments before Kimble returns home in his car. Johnson seeks to blackmail Chandler, who intends to kill Johnson to insure his silence. At the closing reel. Johnson inextricably climbs a high tower with Kimble in pursuit. At the top, they battle, and in a scene of high tension, Johnson admits that he murdered Helen Kimble. Gerard saves Kimble's life by shooting Johnson dead. Using Chandler's account of Kimble's innocence, the case and the series close.
This last episode had the largest cast in the series' history. Besides the usual sterling acting of David Janssen and Barry Morse, Kimble's sister Donna, well played by Jacqueline Scott, reprises her continuing role as the emotional bedrock of support that she has provided for Kimble's entire run. Bill Raisch as Fred Johnson again radiates menace in every grimace of his brutal face. His lack of an arm in no way diminishes his aura of alarm. Diane Brewster, who plays Helen Kimble, is finally seen as more than just a corpse that lies on the floor with the opening scene that begins each episode. The flashbacks of THE JUDGEMENT portray her as a woman who loves her husband but has marital problems with him. Incidentally, her issues with Kimble are the only time in the show's four year run that show any woman as having relating problems at all with Kimble. In the show's last few minutes, when reporters swarm around Kimble and Jean Carlisle and ask him what he intends to do now that he is again a free man, Kimble replies, 'I want to start my life up again.' And part of this start is to shake the hand of the policeman who admits his part in putting an innocent man through four years of hell. Kimble and Jean walkoff into the sunset, ready to start their new life. Gerard walks off in the opposite direction, ready to do the same. And the viewer turns off his television, not quite ready to abandon the memories of watching one man seeking to reclaim a life that had been unfairly put on hold for that same four years.
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