PHENOMENALITY: (1) *naturalistic* (2) *naturalistic,* (3) *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *poor*, (3) *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological, metaphysical*
Episode 4, “An Eye for an Eye,”
provides a counterpoint to the previous episode, which stressed activism. “Eye” takes its title from a Biblical
justification for revenge, but the episode’s purpose is to renounce retaliatory
violence, in keeping with one of the guiding maxims of Caine’s Shaolin
upbringing: that death can have no dominion in the hearts of those who are at
peace.
Caine encounters Annie Buchanan and her
consumptive father Amos. Along with Annie’s brother Samuel, the three of them have moved to the West
after being dispossessed of their home during the Civil War—the first time the "Kung Fu"
series grounds itself in a definite time-period. The family’s change of location does not save
them from further pursuit by Yankee hostility.
Because the father flies a Confederate flag on his farm, three marauding
cavalry soldiers break into the farm when Annie is alone, and one of them, Sergeant Straight, rapes
her. Annie and Amos find the
cavalry outpost where the soldiers serve, but the commander won’t prosecute the
men because Annie has no corroboration, except for the growing child in her
womb. Apparently it’s taken several
months for the Buchanans to find the outpost, for slightly later in the story Annie gives birth to a healthy, viable child.
Samuel challenges Staight to a duel in spite of Caine’s protests as to the futility of
revenge. Straight backshoots Samuel, but Samuel manages to kill his murderer before he too perishes. Losing her brother deprives Annie of a satisfying
revenge. She’s already alienated against her unborn child, and her fruitless
rage causes her to have an accident that may not *be* accidental. Caine helps Annie birth her child and protects
her against a tribe of marauding Indians.
The child perishes after Annie refuses to nurture him, and she later regrets
turning against her newborn son. Caine
helps Annie to come to terms with her anger and sorrow, but Straight's
buddies, feeling a need for revenge themselves, come after Annie and Amos. Caine doesn’t manage to prevent
Annie being shot, though she survives.
The episode ends with Amos demanding revenge, and Caine’s refusal
to take part in the cycle of violence.
Caine performs no uncanny feats
here. He does master two Indians,
despite their attacking him on horseback with their spears, but this battle
remains within the domain of the naturalistic.
“The Tide” presents Caine with his
second love-affair. Using one of the
letters acquired in “Dark Angel,” the Shaolin seeks out a town where drifter Danny Caine
briefly worked on a ranch. Caine is recognized as a fugitive
from Chinese justice by a reward-hunter and a corrupt sheriff named Boggs. Boggs kills his accomplice in order to keep
the whole reward. Caine, though wounded
by Boggs, escapes the sheriff’s custody but finds sanctuary with Su Yen Lu, a
Chinese immigrant living alone on a small nearby farm. But Su has a secret. She tells Caine that her father, a venerable
author whose works Caine esteems, has been imprisoned in China for
sedition. She does not tell Caine that
she enlists her brother Wong and his henchmen to take Caine prisoner, to trade for
her father’s freedom. Due to his
feelings for her—both indebtedness and potential love—Caine surrenders to Su’s brother. Boggs shows up, still
seeking the reward. He kills Wong
and Su kills the sheriff, after which she learns from her dying sibling
that their father has died in China. Su forswears any possible link between Caine and herself, and he moves on.
Again, none of Caine’s actions pass the level of the naturalistic.
“The Soul of the Warrior” is one
of the first season’s strongest episodes in terms of opppsing the ethos of the
Old West with that of the mysterious East.
Caine’s quest for his half-brother leads him to the ranch of Ed Rankin, where Rankin rules his fiefdom with an iron hand, barely recognizing the authority of the sheriff in the neighboring town. Caine learns that Danny incurred the wrath of
Rankin’s only son Breck by running off with Breck's woman—presumably with her
consent, though Breck doesn’t see things that way. As Rankin explains to Caine, this action
violates the Western code of “private property,” which sentences thieves to
death for such violations. Caine also
meets Sheriff Toms in town, a man who feels himself close to death from having
experienced so much of it, and who seems to intuit that death hangs over the
entire town. “I know that it ends,” he
says. “We struggle and we grow, and it ends—and it is black inside that
box.” Against this, Caine assets,
“Nothing dies that was ever something.”
Ironically, Toms is responsible
for keeping Caine in town a little too long after Caine intends to leave. Toms,
intrigued with Caine’s strangeness, invites him to dinner in the saloon. Breck sees Caine and tries to shoot the
“slanty man” (linking the mania for personal property with xenophobia). This forces the sheriff to protect Caine by
shooting Breck dead. Toms seeks out
Rankin to reason with him, while knowing that the rancher is likely to take
vengeance for the loss of his only son, an extension of the rule of “private
property.”
Caine seeks to protect Toms. From
his previous encounter with Rankin, Caine recognizes that the tough, self-made
rancher is no less afraid of death than Toms.
Rankin incarnates his fear of death by the practice of “snaking,” of
capturing rattlesnakes and keeping them in a pit on his ranch. Caine recognizes that this signifies Rankin’s
desire to master what is strange and suggestive of death, referring to the pit
as the “temple” where Rankin worships the thing he fears. Playing “king of the mountain” in his
uniquely Shaolin way, Caine makes a bet with Rankin: to keep Toms alive, Caine
will walk amid the snakes in their pit. Caine does so and emerges from the pit without harm, having internalized the harmony of nature expounded by Master Po:
"That prevails which refuses to know the power of the other. Where fear is, does not danger also live? And where fear is not, does not danger also die? Where the tiger and the man are two, he may die. Yet where the tiger and the man are one there is no fear. There is no danger. For what creature, one with all nature, will attack itself?"
Having saved the sheriff's life and made his point, Caine takes his leave, having shown
the Westerners the value of transcending both the attachments of property and
the fears of one’s own demise.
Caine's feat of walking unharmed amid the snakes, like Caine’s gentling
of a wild horse in “Dark Angel,” ranks as an uncanny act of animal-mastery,
even though the priest does so more in a spirit of communion rather than actual command
of lesser beasts. The episode has the
strongest mythicity of any of those survyed thus far, bringing forth the
death-oriented myth of the West even as it evokes the life-oriented myth of the
East. I could probably do a longer essay
exploring the way Ron Bishop's script included interesting meditations on the
symbolism of snakes and of the idea of the “fool” (with which Caine is compared
with those who cannot yet understand his ways).
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