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The Wild Wild West
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| Title: | The Night of the Human Trigger |
| Episode Number: | 12 |
| Season: | 1 |
| Season Episode #.: | 12 |
| Production Number: | 3224-0128 |
| Original Airdate: | Friday December 03rd, 1965 |
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Earthquakes have destroyed the Wyoming towns of Twin Rivers and Crown Point. Before the quake, fliers predicting it circulated in each town. Now similar fliers have convinced most residents of Sentinel to flee. Jim and Artie arrive in two, and once again an earthquake strikes. They must discover who can create earthquakes on demand and how he does it, before the entire Wyoming territory collapses into rubble!
| There are no foreign summaries for this episode
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| Corner Slides
Upper Right: Jim, eyeing Hercules and Thaddeus, two giants ordered to kill him!
Upper Left: Thaddeus looks down on West as he prepares to shoot the agent!
Lower Left: A rock crusher that will shortly crush Jim and Artie!
Lower Right: The Wanderer steams away.
| At one point Orkney mentions that vials tied to the agents’ feet contain glyceryl trinitrate. This powerful explosive has another, better known name: nitroglycerin.
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| Jim: Nice, peaceful place.
Artie: Nice, peaceful, spooky place. Ever hear about where angels fear to tread?
| Jim: Why didn’t you two leave?
Bartender: Because I heard there was an earthquake in Twin Rivers. And I heard there was an earthquake in Crown Point. All I believe is what I see…
| Sam: Orkney, you sure know how to make an earthquake!
| (The agents have come to Ellenville before an earthquake.)
Artie: We wouldn’t be leaving like those sensible people, would we?
Jim: No, we wouldn’t.
| Faith: Of course you’re lost. And I didn’t hear you knock, so that settles the gentleman question.
Jim: And the door was open, so that settles the shy damsel question.
| Orkney: (To his sons, about Jim West) She was to render him helpless, and you were to render him lifeless!
| Orkney: Between normal intelligence and genius lies a spectrum broad enough for the whole human race! Why were my sons omitted?!?
| Orkney: You have killed my sons. They may not have been much, but surely they deserve revenge. I’ll see that you die with a flair, sir!
| Orkney: Gently, citizens, gently. If you so much as sneeze, why, the involuntary shudder will cause you to move your feet, and that will kill you. You see, there is just enough glycerol trinitrate in those little vials tied around your feet to blow you balloon higher than an earthquake!
Artie: Oh, you do have a homesy humor.
| Orkney: I hate clever men.
| Faith: I can tell Papa to start his own secret service, and you can be in charge!
Jim: But, I don’t agree with what Papa is doing. You might even say, we’re here to stop him.
| (Artie goes to the Sawtooth Courthouse to evacuate the citizens.)
Aunt Martha: Then, you’re not a father. You’re just scared!
Artie: Believe me, Aunt Martha, I have every reason to be. Not for myself, but for everyone in Sawtooth!
| Aunt Martha: Young man, by the time you were born, I’d had six children, buried two, and killed twelve Injuns. That was across Main Street from here. My husband – God rest his soul – and I, and one other man, made Sawtooth.
| (Jim is trapped in a giant jaw trap)
Orkney: (maliciously) So, you want to know where the detonator is?
(Later, Jim has been laid atop dynamite and a mechanism rests on his chest.)
Orkney: You're the detonator, Mr. South. Now, if and when this little pendulum touches either contact, it will, uh, set off the earthquake, and blow you and Sawtooth out of the state of Wyoming. So, it’ll be better if you don’t breathe!
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| The earthquakes are fairly unconvincing. The scenery shakes violently back and forth but the characters barely move, only swaying a little bit. It seems clear the characters swayed on cue, and the rest of the "effect" was added by simply shaking the camera or the post production printing equipment.
| A load bearing beam falls from the ceiling and comes to rest atop a flimsy table. Such beams, made from a single log or occasionally planks sistered together with wooden pegs, weighed hundreds of pounds. A beam falling on a flimsy table of the sort shown would crush it to kindling.
| Horizontal pendulum seismometers of the sort Professor Cadwallader uses did not appear until 1880. One might allow that he designed the instrument himself ahead of the general advance as the mad genius Miguelito Loveless commonly did. Even so, the subtle vibrations he detects with it – approaching trains and even approaching riders on horseback – would be impossible with the device resting on a table. To detect such subtle vibrations it is necessary to mechanically couple the instrument to the earth and mechanically isolate it from the lab lest the footsteps of those near it contribute seismic noise sufficient to obscure all but the strongest seismic waves.
| Wyoming did not become a state until 1890, although it is referred to as such in dialog. A few counties of the Wyoming territory incorporated as early as 1868, but most did not form until closer to statehood, and none of them have the names Cadwallader mentions.
| Cadwallader states clearly that his cultural utopia will require no taxation. But in fact, federal taxation did not begin until after ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 – about forty years forward of the show’s setting. Various attempts to levy taxes were proposed and passed, but without the amendment the government lacked the Constitutional authority to implement them. The territory of Wyoming and its successor the state of Wyoming do not and have never imposed taxes. One wonders exactly what prompted Cadwallader’s ire about taxes, although the comment is consistent with his character (see Analysis).
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| Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, a line Artie uses to describe the agents' visit to Sentinel just before an earthquake, comes from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, a poem containing Pope’s commentary on literary criticism and critics, the literary ideals of the early eighteenth century, and advice for writers. The line presumes that those who go where wise angels will not must be the worst of fools, and perhaps responsible for the baneful consequences of their behavior.
| Antigone was the daughter of King Oedipus of Thebes. After Oedipus discovered that Iocaste, the mother of his children, was also his own mother, he struck out his own eyes and Antigone accompanied him into exile. He left the throne of Thebes to his sons Eteocles and Polynices, who first agreed to alternate the throne but then fell out when Eteocles refused to surrender the throne. In the resulting war, each brother killed the other. Because Polynices’ attack brought ruin on Thebes, its new king Creon (Iocaste's father) issued a decree forbidding Polynices' burial. Antigone disobeyed this edict and buried her brother. Orkney compares his daughter to Antigone when she must bury her brothers, whom Jim West killed; Orkney had little use for them alive and less now that they’re dead.
| Electra, another character Orkney compares to his daughter Faith, helped her brother Orestes murder their mother in retaliation for their mother and her loving murdering their father King Agamemnon after his return from Troy. The parallels between Electra and Faith’s burgeoning hatred of her father Orkney are not exact.
| Mario Puzo and others will use a similar plot a dozen years later in Superman (1978). In the film, Superman nemesis Lex Luthor plans to use an atomic bomb to destabilize the San Andreas fault and cause much of the West Coast to slide into the Pacific Ocean.
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| Orkney Cadwallader is another well-drawn character whose story and motivations clearly drive his behavior. One can see that greed motivated him powerfully throughout his life, and in fact eventually brought him to ruin. It is even possible that cattle baron Luke Sorrel noted and exploited this aspect of Cadwallader’s personality to his own benefit. What Sorrel probably wished he’d noted in retrospect was how tenuous Cadwallader’s grasp on sanity really was. The reversals Cadwallader suffered in Wyoming and his abuse at the hands of the ranchers loosed the grip entirely, and from that flowed everything else that happened. Some of what Cadwallader does suggests anti-social personality disorder, at least in part, and clearly anyone who would conceive and execute plans to employ earthquakes as weapons would be insane. Burgess Meredith’s acting skill makes these facets of Cadwallader’s character diamond clear.
| One can only wonder why Orkney so readily accepted Artie as a visiting scientist from Vienna. This “scientist” somehow finds Orkney in the middle of nowhere and coincidentally has deduced what no one else has, that Orkney can manufacture earthquakes. And Orkney never questions it. The likely explanation is that Artie played into Orkney’s lesser motivation (greed was clearly his chief motivation): a craving for recognition. At the time of the Wild Wild West, Vienna stood among a handful of world centers of academic and cultural excellence; to be recognized there was to be recognized anywhere.
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