The Night of the Moving Wound

My very first Wild Wild West story was a rather ambitious one. Usually I begin writing for a series with a oneshot story, but this was a multi-chapter.

I felt it had to be written, because I honestly could not accept that James Jeffers, Richard Anderson's character in The Night of the Headless Woman, was the Big Bad. He just didn't come across as a bad guy. Naturally, we're supposed to accept that he was putting on a good act. But when I noticed that the wound on the left side of his forehead is suddenly on the right side of his forehead during the scene where he reveals his duplicity, that costuming mistake became a great way for me to justify an idea that there was an evil double and the real James Jeffers is good.

One of the things I love about the series is when Jim puzzles out complicated mysteries and comes to the solutions. Arte is very good with technology, but it seems like Jim's specialty is people and how they think. To that end, I had it be Jim who realized about the changing position of the wound and what that might mean.

Making James Jeffers a good guy meant I needed a new Big Bad, someone to be pulling the strings behind the evil double. I chose Dr. Loveless, because really, doesn't unleashing boll weevils all over the country to eat up all the crops sound like a Dr. Loveless plot?

I also described the weevils as beetles, which is what they're really supposed to be. I don't understand why they were depicted as huge worm-like things in the episode. It wasn't just larvae, but the adults being depicted as such, and that's just not the way of it.

Every now and then I enjoy having a cat around in the stories to get close to someone in the cast. The time-travel series definitely has that with Jane. For this story, I chose an orange, homeless tom cat. Most of my cats are female, so it was interesting writing for a male one. He's just as affectionate as his female counterparts, and very protective of the real James Jeffers.

Jeffers' daughter Betsy also plays a large part in the story, being determined to believe her father is not a criminal. An unnamed aunt was mentioned in the episode, and I gave her a name and brought her into the story as well.

I also brought in a couple of oneshot characters from an episode of Bonanza: Carl and Claire Armory, a brother and sister. They live in San Francisco and I depict them as friends of James Jeffers. In the Bonanza episode, Carl is an invalid and a chronic gambler who can never seem to get on his feet. Claire feels duty-bound to look after him and clean up his disasters, but in addition, she is codependent on Carl, as he is on her. After weathering life together since their parents' deaths when they were children, they are extremely close and cannot bear the thought of trying to get by separately. In a story I still need to finish, Jeffers meets Carl during a particularly low time in his life, when Claire is injured and he has no access to money to help her. Jeffers helps them both and finally manages to get Carl on his feet. They only play minor roles in Moving Wound, but are very distressed about the news of Jeffers being a criminal and cannot believe it.

Carl is played by Wesley Lau, who of course also played Ray Norman, one of the key players of the time-travel series. Jim and Arte take note of the fact that Ray and Carl look quite a bit alike.