The Big Valley (TV Series) Showdown in Limbo (1967) User Reviews

Heath helps an old friend with a prisoner and understanding

[kfo9494 · 7/10 · 1 October 2012]

Heath happens to be passing through the town of Jubilee to see an old friend Marshal Frank Sawyer. Frank has a son named Chad that seems unable to live up to his father's reputation as a tough lawman. Chad is more interested in drawing than becoming the next Marshal of Jubilee.

Heath helps Frank and Chad with an arrest of a drunk, Earl Vaughan, who happens to be a family member of an outlaw gang. With the threat of the Vaughan family trying to free Earl, Frank decides to take Earl to the better equipped Stockton jail. And Heath decides to tag along with the Marshal and his son on the trip.

With Chad making errors at every turn, the group and their prisoner make it to an abandon town named Limbo. Soon the Vaughan family catches up group with the idea of freeing Earl and killing everyone else. And like all good westerns- the town of Limbo has that wind sound and tumbleweeds as the gunfight breaks out. Chad has a chance to finally be his own man but will he have the guts to take that chance.

Good Character Study

[summerfields · 7/10 · 15 April 2010]

A finely mounted episode which concerns an old pal of Heath's who's something of a hero. The man's son Chad is a rather withdrawn, perhaps book-ish type who has a talent for drawing fine etchings of horses, for instance.

This does not go down well with tough and macho Papa.

Heath doesn't think there's anything wrong with the young man's artistic talent and the kid looks up to Heath, who wins him over for being genuinely helpful instead of critical.

Not a great episode but a good one in which fans of the genre should relish.

An unofficial deputy

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 12 April 2016]

Given Heath's illegitimate birth and his having a different background from the other Barkley siblings who grew up at the ranch. This allowed the writers a whole range of different situation material for episodes.

Such as this episode where Heath who we learned worked as a Deputy US Marshal for Arch Johnson. When Johnson has to escort a very dangerous prisoner in L.Q. Jones to Stockton, Lee Majors becomes an unofficial deputy because Johnson only has his tenderfoot son Tom Lowell to help.

Lowell has been brought up in Boston by his mother when the parents separated. Johnson is not convinced he has the right stuff.

Watch the episode and see if he has.

Caught in a string of "Heath" episodes

[mlbroberts · 5/10 · 2 December 2020]

This was one in a string of "Heath" episodes that were just flat out dull. Heath helps a sheriff and his son, who is not sheriff material, keep a prisoner from being sprung by his accomplices. At least L Q Jones was here to liven this one up but for the third straight time, it was all "Heath" and Lee Majors just didn't have the chops so early in his career to make something interesting out of a dull script.

Not as manly as his father?

[jarrodmcdonald-1 · 24 September 2016]

Is the son in this story a gay character? Television writers in the late 1960s were probably limited in terms of what they could show or imply when it came to homosexuality. In a way, the son appears less manly than his father, and there's a point where Heath talks about many types of people in the world. But what exactly does it mean in this particular episode?

Maybe instead of it being a story about a homosexual young man, it is more about eastern civilization versus the untamed west. Since he has been brought up away from his father in a refined society, he has great difficulty adjusting to life on the frontier. He doesn't know how to approach it the way Heath and the others do. If so, the conflict wouldn't necessarily be about him trying to fit into a "straight" world. Nor would it exactly suggest the father is trying to make the son more like himself. Instead, the drama could just as well come from a father who is only trying to overcompensate for missing all those years when his son was growing up; and the son wanting to forge a relationship with his father but not really understanding how.

If you look carefully at the ending, the writers leave it fairly ambiguous-- there is no guarantee after Heath's speech that the young man will return east and go back to the way he lived before. There is a hint he may stay and prove himself as someone who can adjust and survive in the west.

It's too bad the writers didn't bring these characters back on the show for another episode, so we could see how they had evolved.