The Odyssey of Dr. Richard Kimble

Thanks to YouTube (here or here), I recently rewatched a television show my family enjoyed in the early 2000s: the third incarnation of The Fugitive, starring Tim Daly as Dr. Richard Kimble and Mykelti Williamson as Detective Phillip Gerard. The story begins when, after coming home to find his beloved wife Helen murdered, Kimble faces the false accusation that he, not the one-armed man who committed the crime, is the killer. A jury convicts him and sentences him to death. But when an accident happens in transit to death row, he escapes. Kimble’s odyssey to find his wife’s killer and clear his name begins. The irony of the injustice is a dramatic delight: the tender-hearted healer turned vicious murderer in society’s eyes. 

The setup is so gripping that the endings of The Fugitive’s various incarnations can never quite live up to the promise of the premise. To my great disappointment as a youngster, the 2000s series ended abruptly on a surprise cliffhanger after only a single season—thanks capitalism and CSI! But Kimble’s story is about the journey, not the ending, and it sparks the moral and spiritual imagination to ponder justice, suffering, and providence. 

Justice and Injustice

Roy Huggins had a hard time convincing network executives to produce his idea for the original show, at least in part because it dwelt on a wrongful conviction, potentially painting law enforcement and the justice system in a bad light. But the story is not a didactic, message-laden screed against law enforcement or the justice system. Kimble faces in his personal experience the terrible reality that such injustices do occur, despite our best efforts. A wanted man, Kimble feels the punishing power of the whole society set against him, a fearsome prospect when deserved and amplified when it is misplaced. Police officers and other law enforcement officials, agents of the community who seek to keep the peace, maintain order, and preserve justice are enemies to him, hunting him down at every turn. 

As with Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the pressure of society’s misplaced, merciless retribution against him threatens to harden and overwhelm Kimble. In one early episode, barnacles scrape him during an escape, causing hallucinated visions of his departed wife. In a final hallucinated conversation, he confides that he is losing hope: “I have nothing…The second you closed your eyes was the very same second that I started having to defend myself. The world believes I killed you, Helen, and worse than that, they want to believe it! You think that’s a world I want to live in?” 

Kimble is clearly in the right with regard to the substantive issue and the injustice he is suffering. But is he right to run from the authorities and seek justice for Helen on his own? The biblical answer is not so clear, given passages like Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17. We are not talking about systematic, intentional injustice of the type that might justify organized opposition, but an inadvertent miscarriage of justice, such as is bound to happen from time to time in any system. When all the appeals fail and the mistaken verdict remains, perhaps the duty of the citizen is to submit to governmental authority, even if that authority is wrong. On the other hand, perhaps Kimble could appeal to the ancient law of Genesis 9:6, that his wife’s blood calls out for justice. While Kimble’s claim against the injustice he faces is undeniable, his extralegal pursuit of justice, involving plenty of deceit and further disobedience to government authorities, is not as airtight as we might be inclined to think. 

Mistakes and miscarriages of justice are a tragic part of social reality. Yet, the fact that police officers, juries, lawyers, and justice systems sometimes produce wrongful convictions and otherwise fail to promote justice does not mean we do without them. Augustine discusses the tragic necessity of judgment in Book XIX, Ch. 6 of City of God (trans. Marcus Dods, D.D. [New York: Modern Library, 1950]). He describes how Roman judges might use torture to determine whether a suspect is truly innocent as he claims. The judges are inevitably left in ignorance even if a tortured suspect confesses; suspects might confess to get out of the torture! Judges must bear the knowledge that they may have both tortured and condemned innocents. There is no way to know. Even so, Augustine unhesitatingly says a judge must do his duty: “If such darkness shrouds social life, will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty.” A mistaken judgment is not a sin, but it is still a result and sign of the Fall: “But though we therefore acquit the judge of malice, we must nonetheless condemn human life as miserable.” 

Part of the brilliance of The Fugitive, especially in the film version and this second series, is thus that Kimble’s adversary, the Javert-like detective Phillip Gerard who embodies society’s judgment on him, is not only formidable but honorable, truly dedicated to justice and upholding the law. In the 1993 film, Tommy Lee Jones reworks the dogged character of the original show into a jovial and likable, but deadly serious marshal who, despite what he famously says to Kimble during their first confrontation, cares about the truth. 

Williamson’s Gerard has a past that haunts him. His own wife drowned after an accident caused by a drunk driver that sent their car into a river. He feels he could have saved her if he hadn’t gone up to get air. Bringing Kimble to justice becomes his way of making up for his failure to save her. In his unrelenting pursuit of the fugitive, he confronts bad actors who ignore the law or bend it to their purposes: Helen’s father, aided by Gerard’s superior on the Chicago police force, hires an unscrupulous bounty hunter to track down the doctor on the run. Gerard has no more tolerance for them than for the fugitive. 

Suffering

Recognizing tragic truths like the faultiness of our justice systems is one thing, but The Fugitive portrays this misery in the particular experience of a decent man. Kimble is a Job, except Job’s wife was spared to nag and tempt him. In a moment, Kimble loses not only his closest companion, but his whole way of life and sense of himself. His upper-middle class, picture-perfect life, his status as a successful, respected professional, all die with Helen. 

Kimble suffers. Life as a transient indigent becomes a living hell. “I’m tired,” he tells the hallucinated Helen, “I’m so tired. I don’t want to do this anymore.” Unlike Odysseus, Kimble can’t hope for reunion at the end of his journey, at least in this life. At times, he wonders if his quest for justice is worth it and thinks about settling down off the grid. But Gerard and the law chase him back to his quest to find the one-armed man. Maybe if he can clear his name he can grieve, heal, and find peace. 

Kimble meets other people who suffer. Thrust out of his comfortable life, the world of doctors and professionals, he seeks refuge in the world of seedy motels, bars, and laundromats; of gamblers and loan-sharks; of day labor sites and illegal health clinics. This is a world of people in and out of jails and prisons, stuck in dysfunctional relationships, reliant on unstable jobs, a world of danger and desperation. 

The beating heart of The Fugitive is that Dr. Kimble continues to help and heal as he hides, searches, and suffers. He is a doctor, and he can’t help but involve himself in others’ lives. Often, he puts himself at risk to help and heal. In “Guilt,” he risks capture by going into a county jail to give a statement confirming a friend’s alibi and clearing him from being a suspect, echoing Jean Valjean’s willingness to own up to his offense. In “And in That Darkness,” when police confuse Kimble for a homeless person with serious mental illness and commit him to a psychiatric ward, his attempts to help a fellow patient continually get him in deeper trouble. In “Flesh and Blood,” he risks his freedom and life to make sure his sister receives a needed bone marrow transplant. 

Sometimes he can’t help. And so, he shares his own pain with others who suffer, and in the sharing, he and his temporary hosts, coworkers, and friends find mutual encouragement for a time. He journeys on, buoyed by unexpected moments of kindness and connection amidst the suffering. 

Like Job, Kimble is tempted to curse God. He says he has lost his Catholic faith. In “St. Christopher’s Prayer,” named for the patron saint of travelers, Kimble’s father calls him back to God from his deathbed, bequeathing his son his rosary. Soon afterward, Kimble finds sanctuary talking to a priest. He confesses his unbelief and anger at God for letting Helen die. The priest doesn’t have a good answer for why God’s plan included her brutal murder. But in another homage to Les Mes, he doesn’t turn the fugitive in when the cops come looking for Kimble in the cathedral. 

Providence

Kimble’s odyssey bears resemblance to Joseph’s: “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Gen. 50:20). In the pilot episode, Kimble saves the life of Laura, an inspector at the construction jobsite where he has found temporary work. In thanks, she invites him to her house for dinner with her and her daughter. She wants to know him better. Explaining why he can’t get closer to her, he says, “I wish I was different.” She immediately replies, “I don’t.” She doesn’t know the fullness of what she is saying, but Kimble does: she is alive and her daughter has not lost her mother because of Helen’s murder and his suffering. 

The doctrine of providence is comforting, but it is also hard. Why me? we ask when we endure suffering. In Book I, Chapters 8-10, Augustine suggests a number of reasons God allows suffering of good as well as evil people. He might be chastising the good for sin and for clinging too much to this life. Most likely, he is teaching us that our hope is not in this life: “The good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap.” Paul urges us to rejoice when we suffer, for “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5:3b-5). As with our attempts to pursue justice, we are often ignorant about the meaning and purpose of suffering. Yet, we can often see how God providentially brings good out of suffering and evil in our lives. 

Testing reveals and shapes character. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solshenitsyn, describing the possibility of the soul’s ascent even for someone unjustly imprisoned in Stalin’s camps, put it beautifully: “Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering.” Kimble’s struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive in his life is fierce. Kimble’s odyssey serves the last purpose Augustine lists for God’s allowance of suffering: “the reason which Job’s case exemplifies: that the human spirit may be proved, and that it may be manifested with what fortitude of pious trust, and with how unmercenary a love, it cleaves to God.” Dr. Richard Kimble’s odyssey is a thrill, but it’s more than that. It’s an exploration of a soul’s journey of suffering unjust ignominy and fear, a soul wrestling with God.