Favorite TV Show Episode Blogathon: 

I Spy: Home to Judgement 

The Story 

Government agents Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott are on the run. They’ve botched an assignment, been captured – likely tortured – and escaped. Now they scramble through cornfields and countryside as silent, faceless enemy agents track them. Kelly wears a shackle around one ankle. He’s wounded and feverish. 

They stumble across a farmhouse that Kelly realizes belongs to his Uncle Harry (Will Geer) and Aunt Alta (Una Merkel), whom he hasn’t seen for 27 years. He and Scott hide out in a hayloft. 

Kelly is in bad shape, and as he recites the names of the comic strips he read during his teenage summers on the farm, Scott comes out of hiding and offers to help Uncle Harry with his chores in return for food, which he sneaks back to Kelly. Their trackers, meantime, are closing in. 

Will Geer and Robert Culp

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta realize something is amiss and Kelly is discovered. Uncle Harry, suspicious of these two strangers, tries calling the sheriff, but the telephone is dead. He asks his wife to bring the car around; he’ll drive them to the sheriff himself. Kelly stops his aunt, and a search confirms that the stalkers have wired dynamite to the car’s starter. 

AUNT ALTA: Who are you? What’s your name? 

KELLY: It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t possibly know me. If you remember me at all it would be as a child – who doesn’t exist anymore. (Holding up the dynamite sticks). This is what I am now. And this is what I brought you. 

With the farmhouse now completely cut off, the truth is that the enemies coming after Kelly and Scott will wait until dark, then storm the house and kill everyone. 

Taking inventory of his uncle’s firearms, Kelly asks about a .22 that once belonged to him, and in doing so, reveals himself. 

KELLY: It was mine. But I couldn’t take it back to the city with me and boarding school, so at the end of summer, I left it here, with you. 

UNCLE HARRY: Kelly? Why, it’s Kelly. 

KELLY: You put two nails on the wall in the kitchen. And your 30-30 (Winchester) was on it, for me to take down, when I was tall enough to reach it. The next summer. I would have made it too, because I was tall and skinny the next summer, but that winter my mom died. Next summer never came. And now I’ve come and wished I hadn’t. 

Aunt Alta tears up and Kelly chokes back a sob. His training won’t allow for emotional breakdowns, but what’s implied is that the price for “swingin’ on the Riviera one day,” as Johnny Rivers sang on Secret Agent Man, is emotionally immense. “We’re poison,” Kelly says. “Everything we touch gets contaminated.” 

But it’s getting dark, and this isn’t a time for self-reflection. Working with what’s on hand – two hunting rifles, some barbed wire, homemade explosives in plastic bags, hurricane lamps, fuses for blasting tree stumps and the dynamite sticks taken from the car, Kelly, Scott, Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta prepare to defend themselves. And wait. 

It’s night and the sound of the cicadas give way to footsteps on the roof and in the storm cellar. 

As the intruders try to break into the darkened house, the climax of Home to Judgement is a crescendo of violence and intensity – as much as the networks might allow back then. Electrified barb wire. Explosions. Gunshots. Lit by car headlights or flares. Even the family Dalmatian gets into the action going up against a snarling hound used to hunt down Kelly and Scott.  

Since this is network television, you can guess the outcome. In the final scene, Kelly and Scott walk back to the highway, Kelly holding the rifle his uncle promised him as a teen. He’s smiling for the first time. You can go home again. 

The Script

Robert Culp’s script for Home to Judgement was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing Achievement in a Drama.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta are based on Culp’s own grandparents, whose farm was in Idaho. “The story Kelly tells about the two rifles is true,” Culp said. “My children and grandchildren will always have this little magic carpet to take them back to a better time, the way I remember it.”

Synchronicity

Home to Judgement was broadcast as the networks’ fascination with secret agents was running on fumes. One week after it aired on Jan. 8, 1968, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. broadcast its final episode. I Spy survived until April 1968. 

One of the comic strips Kelly remembers in the hayloft is Terry and the Pirates. At the time of his death in 2010, Culp was working on a film adaptation of Terry and the Pirates that he was to direct. It was his favorite boyhood comic strip. 

Straw Dogs

Culp originally wanted Sam Peckinpah to direct Home to Judgement. They had a long relationship working on television projects together. 

One could guess that Peckinpah saw Home to Judgement and may have had it in the back of his mind when he directed Straw Dogs (1971). Both share a common reference point of a violent finale of homemade traps in a darkened house and a hero redeemed. 

You can also draw a straight line from Home to Judgement, through Straw Dogs, to Home Alone (1990). While they take different routes to get there, they share similar final acts, even if the violence in Home Alone is more along the lines of a living Warner Brothers cartoon. A crew member on Home Alone said, “I kept telling people we were doing a kids version of Straw Dogs.”