User Reviews

As has already been recounted, the 1971 D. B. Cooper hijacking mystery was the inspiration for this BARNABY JONES story of big greed in a small town. The fun here is in watching Barnaby do his "Aw, shucks", down-to-earth, good ol' boy dance around the resident ne'er-do-wells, a shtick secondly only in entertainment value to Columbo's rumpled obsequiousness. Usually Barnaby employs it to disarm, but in this situation the intent is to unnerve, and it succeeds in spades; all of the bad guys are already going around acting as guilty as sin anyway! This is no brain trust of murderers: when it's decided that Barnaby has to be bumped off, they let the most nervous, most scatter-brained one of the bunch tackle the job; of course he blows it. Another moment of hilarity is when Claude Akins' character conveniently explains the entire backstory of the plot to his co-conspirators, telling them information with which of course they are already intimately familiar. The climax, in which the villains incriminate themselves in front of a hastily assembled group of townsfolk, worked a bit too smoothly to be very believable. High body count for an episode of BJ, coming in at three: The two hijackers and an auto mechanic who had attempted to blackmail the cabal. Barnaby's involvement in the whole thing is launched by the wife of the most-recently murdered hijacker, whose untimely end opens the episode; she wants to know exactly what happened to her husband during his brief stay in sleepy little Parker Junction, and--I thought this was funny--just as importantly, if not more-so, what happened to the money he said he was going there to collect! One of the clues that whets Barnaby's suspicions didn't ring true to me: he finds it odd that the real-estate agent (played by Neva Patterson) is driving a fairly expensive, brand new car; having grown up in a rural town with a population of 7,000, I can testify that even small-town realtors typically "do well", and are usually among the most affluent of citizens.

I bought the DVD set of the first season mainly to own my own copy of this episode. I watched the show from the pilot onward several years. Some of the later stories got to be pretty predictable, but this one is absolutely classic Barnaby.

Others have mentioned the basic plot, but the characters who are in on it - Dabs Greer, Lou Frizell, Claude Akins, et al, really own this episode every time they get together. And it's classic Barnaby too in the finale. The final "town council" meeting that has them all yelling at each other - and incriminating themselves - is a beautiful study in ensemble acting. Compare for instance, to the Monopoly game in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. I can watch it over and over and in fact I think I will just as soon as I submit this review.

All of the character actors in this episode are familiar faces for anyone who watched TV in the 60s and 70s. Having them all together with equal roles in the consipiracy was a beautiful thing. And it's perfectly written - in classic Barnaby style he just needles them until they incriminate themselves in front of the whole town. Absolutely the best episode of the show.