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The Lone Gunmen


Episodes

  1. Pilot
  2. Bond, Jimmy Bond
  3. Eine Kleine Frohike
  4. Like Water for Octane
  5. Three Men and a Smoking Diaper
  6. Madam, I'm Adam
  7. Planet of the Frohikes
  8. Maximum Byers
  9. Diagnosis: Jimmy
  10. Tango de los Pistoleros
  11. The Lying Game
  12. The Cap'n Toby Show
  13. All About Yves

Guide

01 - Pilot

We open at E-Com-Con, where they're revealing a new high speed processor, but Langly's heckling from the audience. Of course, he's only the diversion so Byers and Frohike can re-enact Mission Impossible and steal the processor. Except someone else has hacked their winch control software and breaks in to steal it themselves. The bearded man kisses Frohike before leaving with the chip... turns out she's a very attractive young woman in disguise!

Frohike knows the thief was Eve Harlow, and she bugged their office. Byers father takes that opportunity to die, having his ashes put in a rocket for the funeral. Byers' father's friend doesn't believe the accidental death story the police reported, and believes he was murdered, wanting the Gunmen to look into it. The car's been crushed, but Langley runs into Eve at a firing range. A search of the wreckage gives them a chunk of circuitry that could remotely control the car, and hacking Byers' father's wiped computer gives them a counter terrorism wargame file about an aircraft hijacking.

The Gunmen come to the conclusion that Byers father isn't dead - that he escaped the assassination attempt on his life and faked the fact that he was dead. Byers father approaches him, revealing that a small faction in the government has decided to turn the wargame into a real plan, bringing a fully loaded plane down in New York City, giving an excuse to increase arms sales. Turns out the 'friend' is in on the hit on Byers' father, so sidelinking him, Byers and his father board the suspect plane to look for a bomb. Unfortunately, on finding there's no bomb, Byers realises they intend to control the plane the same way they controlled the car.

Hacking the plane, they find it's being controlled from the ground, and it's going to be flown into the World Trade Center. I guess that explains why this episode was delayed after September 11th. The Lone Gunmens' computers have been locked out, so Frohike goes to Eve for help. Eva Del Harlow turns out to be an anagram of Lee Harvey Oswald (Where's the s? Ah, the packaging lists her as Yves Adele Harlow) and Frohike knows who she really is. Eve's Octium IV processor breaks the lockout on the Gunmens' computers and allows Langley to return control of the plane to the pilots. But Byers' father doesn't want to go public with the conspiracy. Fortunately for the Gunmens' front page, Frohike has the Octium chip, so they can run with their original "chip invades privacy" story!

02 - Bond, Jimmy Bond

We open with the school principal from Smallville tied to a chair in a room in Osaka. He's menaced by a guy with a knife, who wants to put him out of the whaling business. And then Frohike comes in to fight him? This is VR right? No, but it is staged, and it's really a way for the Gunmen to get the location of the fleet. And all would be fine if the businessman didn't free himself and diverge from the script!

And then we're at a house in Long Island, watching an unhappy guy play golf off his balcony. There are computers inside deleting everything, and a man comes in, unhappy about the reformatting, and shoots the guy on the balcony. The Gunmen don't have enough money to print their latest issue, but Yves is at the door. Turns out the dead guy was hacker D.B. and Eve wants the Gunmen to look into it.

Investigating his house, they find a cheque to the dead guy, Alex, from four days earlier, for one million dollars! The cheque leads them to the titular Mr Bond. Mr Bond is at a very odd American Football game with a beeping football and all the players have helmets that beep. Turns out they're all blind... and Jimmy's starting a franchise of a blind football league. But Jimmy funds it through a charity, and all the donors are anonymous. Langly noses around the offices of the charity, POE, and runs into the gunman from the start. Langly manages to talk his way into replacing Alex as the bad guy's hacker...

Fortunately, Yves sees the kidnapping and helps the remaining Gunmen follow Langly. Langly has to create a shell company stock buy to raise a whole bunch of money by midnight. The bloody golf club gives Langly an incentive. Byers and Frohike recruit Jimmy to help them out, as he's currently the fall guy for POE's activities. Jimmy gets himself grabbed so the Gunmen can get a communications device into the house so they can tell Langley about the nerve gas purchase. While the Gunmen get Langley and Jimmy out, Yves steals the money of the bad guys' government, and the 50 million Langley stole wasn't really stolen... she just made it look like it was.

03 - Eine Kleine Frohike

Jimmy's causing them troubles, filing 'The Warren Comission' under W. Alan Dale comes to the door asking for Frohike's help in trying to catch the Poisoner of Alsace. The Poisoner has placed an advert looking for her long lost son, and Frohike's the spitting image of the son's father. So Frohike has to disguise himself as the son, to get into the house and find a birthmark shaped like Germany on the woman's backside to provide a positive I.D.

So Frohike plays the son of a real battleaxe, who runs him ragged. The maid dies from a poisoned pastry, and Frohike's convinced they've got the right woman. But Yves is equally convinced that Alan Dale works for the East German secret police, and it's all a set up, as he's the real son. Of course, when the neighbour turns out to be the real poisoner, Jimmy has to disguise himself as Alan Dale to draw out the truth.

04 - Like Water for Octane

Idealist, computer god, man of action, the Lone Gunmen thought big when they were young (even if Byers wanted to be a career bureaucrat!). We open with Byers making a freedom of information request thats actually been approved this time. He gets a box... but the only thing in it is a breezeblock... except for a sheet of paper that Jimmy shreds. The name on the paper, Stan Mizer, invented a water powered car, before he and the car mysteriously disappeared. Huh, and Yves is working for the oil companies.

The Gunmen enlist Stan's daughter to help them. Meanwhile Jimmy spots that the document was planted, and Yves seems to be working the FOI office. But when Langly and Jimmy get there, they find the guy dead (killed by the oil company guy who was tailing Yves). A photo in Stan's papers leads them to J.T. Guthrie. But a misunderstanding with a farmer leads Langley to having to rectally palpate a cow, also named J.T.

The farm leads them to a mostly abandoned air base, where Jimmy runs into Yves getting the uncensored document with the location of the car on it. Except it's at the bottom of a missile silo that is to be demolished the next day. The Gunmen go in to get it, while Yves and Jimmy watch the oil company guy drive off with the actual car from the stands above. It looks like curtains for our three heroes when the demolition goes ahead with them still inside!

Fortunately, an air shaft gets them out, where they find out the car was a decoy, and the water powered engine is still in the barn on the farm. Where a final confrontation with the oil company guy leads to Jimmy proving he learned a thing about cows after all, and the Gunmen realising the world isn't ready for water powered cars, as it would only increase the consumption of oil, not decrease it!

05 - Three Men and a Smoking Diaper

The Gunmen hijack a press conference with a Senator just before an election to try and get the scoop on how his mistress died mysteriously in a car accident. After getting caught and spending the night in gaol, someone leaves a prescription number for the dead woman written on the windshield of thier van. Frohike fakes illness to get into the doctors office so Langley can get prescription details. Meanwhile, Jimmy goes into campaign headquarters to get fingerprints from all the staff to find out who left the prescription number.

But a little accident with some glue gets Jimmy stuck to rather a lot of envelopes. It does allow him to overhear a conversation between two of the senator's aides in the bathroom though. Langley and Frohike find the apartment that the dead woman was using, and a baby there watching television. And the Gunmen are left holding the baby.

While Jimmy deals with a drunk senator, Frohike and Langley enlist Yves' help in dealing with the child. The campaign staff try to buy Jimmy off, shattering his belief in the Senator. Frohike accidentally lets slip the baby's origins to Yves at a parenting class, and Jimmy gets the fingerpring evidence they need by giving the entire campaign coffee. Turns out the campaign manager was the deep throat. The Senator, on finding that the child is his, and the mother died accidentally, decides to tell the press everything. And then he comes to the Gunmen to reclaim his child.

06 - Madam, I'm Adam

Surf City, Maryland, and two guys come home to the same house, managing to keep missing each other in some sort of French farce. Until they both end up in the same bed... and the first guy home wants to know who the other guy and the woman are, and what they're doing in his bed! And so he goes to the Gunmen - with a story of identity theft: his whole life has been erased, he doesn't know where his wife is, and none of his neighbours recognize him. He claims he's from a parallel universe and aliens brought him to this universe.

Byers dismisses him, but Jimmy's not so sure, and the strange implant stuck to the back of his neck leads to further investigation. The alien goo the guy gives them turns out to be udder lubricant for milking cows, but a homemade MRI shows a whole bunch of wiring throughout his brain! He knows everything about the neighbourhood he claims to live in, but there are no earthly records of him. Byers thinks the guy watched the house on TV and the images were fed through the implant to his brain... so they have to get in the house to look for hidden cameras.

A bit of property damage (the mysterious guy cuts a wall out of the house) leads to some breakdown in a VR feed at some secret lab. Once they're in gaol, Langley antagonizes the guy until he goes off the handle, acting like a violent criminal. An advert showing an electronics salesman called Maniac Marvin sets the guy off again for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, chief scientist comes to the Gunmen's door claiming to be the wife, Lois. But she's really his keeper and he's a lab rat, at least according to Yves.

Even midget wrestlers set the guy off. But the wrestler has a daughter, also a dwarf. She's married, but Marvin's been trying to persuade her to get a divorce. But the sight of Sadie, brings back the guy's memory - he has anger issues, and he's an alcoholic, and he has a whole bunch of other issues. The scientist brainwashed him, he signed his consent rather than spend 24 months in gaol for putting out Marvin's eye. But does the guy want to go back to his virtual life, or does he want to stay with his wife?

07 - Planet of the Frohikes

Behaviour Research Lab? Didn't we just do this episode? Oh no, we've got an infinite number of monkeys being played Hamlet... and one of them's successfully typing the words on his computer! Seems the ape is intelligent enough to fool the scientists by typing garbage when they're in the room, and carrying on his novella "A short history of my demeaning captivity" when they've left the room. The Gunmen have tracked down Yves via her obsession with anagrams, and they claim to have an email from her, but they've also blown her cover and now men with guns are trying to kill them!

The ape has sent them a voice message, clearly spliced together from Edward Woodward's performance of Hamlet. There's also a text attachment documenting an escape plan. Why does Yves want in on the rescue? The guards are suspicious, as the email was sent using the doctor's email and password... this ape's a hacker. Jimmy's the only one who wants to rescue the chimp when they find out it is a chimp, except Eve believes him as well.

The Gunmen (sans Jimmy, who Peanuts knocked out during the escape) try to question the ape, who clearly can't speak. Jimmy, meanwhile, is claiming responsibility for the Monkey Liberation Army! Yves realises that the ape needs a computer to communicate with, and he insists they call him Simon. And he's going to lead them to a super-intelligent Russian assassin chimp, named Bobo. The French minister of state is the intended victim, and he's visiting the zoo... where a certain assassin will be waiting in the primate section!

Frohike gets knocked out by Bobo the chimp, but Yves manages to catch him. But Bobo is a stupid monkey, and Simon was scamming them so he could rescue the female monkey from the zoo, also from the research lab. Fortunately, the military are stupid enough to fool for a trade of Jimmy, Langley, and Byers, in exchange for Bobo the chimp. But the doctor spots the fake, and Jimmy spills that Peanuts is at the zoo. But then, he's the only one who's seen through Simon's master plan...

08 - Maximum Byers

A cruise ship in the Pacific, and they're replacing an Elvis impersonator with Jimmy so they can check if the ship's fake is the real Elvis. But the fake is wanted for wire fraud, and Jimmy gets arrested during the act by a pair of U.S. Marshals. Back at the office, the old woman at the door wants them to prove that her son, on death row for murder, is innocent. However, he's pushing for a speedy execution, after previously pleading guilty and fighting tooth and nail to prove his innocence.

So Byers and Jimmy sneak into prison disguised as prisoners. But the convict they want to see is in the infirmary. Langley and Frohike want to get a message to the two inside, but they get caught by the guards, so they recruit Yves to visit Jimmy. Meanwhile, Byers comes up with a plan to get himself sent to the infirmary... where the convict tells Byers if he talks to anyone about it again, he'll slit his throat! Jimmy gets a toy surprise from Yves - a communications device allowing him to talk to Langley and Frohike.

Meanwhile, Langley and Frohike have discovered that the lawyer is setting up a huge land grab, and that the convict is really guilty, having been hired to perform the killing. But there's another convict that has been framed, who Jimmy's now going to set free. That is if Byers can persuade the guy on death row to give a full confession implicating the lawyer and freeing the real innocent man... and doing the right think for once. And the innocent man fulfills his lifelong dream of opening a cockroach hospital!

09 - Diagnosis: Jimmy

We open on the Canadian border, with Langley and Byers in the van buried in snow. They're tracking a poacher and want to photograph some meet with two guys of asian extraction, but the poacher skis off rather than make the meet, and Jimmy gives chase. Unfortunately, he can't take photos and ski at the same time, so skis into a tree and gets spotted, letting the bad guys expose the film. Jimmy wakes up in hospital, but doesn't remember anything from the mission.

Ah, they're after a guy who kills grizzly bears and smuggles their gall-bladders to the Triad to sell on the asian black market! He's got a hot nurse (Shawn Batten - played Sarah Cummings in one episode of Sunset Beach, and looks a lot like Meg, which'd explain playing her sister) throwing herself at him, but he's oblivious to it. Byers seems to be taking the poaching personally. Jimmy gets an argumentative room mate, who's determined to hog the television rather than let him watch America's Most Wanted about a knee surgeon who poisons his patients... methinks there's another case here...

Yeah, America's Most Wanted is loose in the hospital Jimmy's staying in! Jimmy's trying to re-enact his accident with cotton wool and tongue suppressors, in the hopes it will jog his memory. Yves is in the hospital, visiting Jimmy, and the nurse isn't happy about it. Byers had a crush on Gentle Ben, but a rogue grizzly on a camping holiday that he witnesses the shooting of led him to realise that one day they'd all be extinct, and he has to stop it.

The Gunmen won't believe Jimmy's tale of a killer surgeon, so Jimmy tries to get Yves to help him get the evidence. The irascible roommate is likely to be the next victim, and he won't even let his son visit him. The Gunmen get their evidence on the poacher, or at least the address he's going to make the deal at. Jimmy accuses the wrong guy at the hospital, and hurts his knee in the process, leading him to receive surgery... but the murderer is still at large!

10 - Tango de los Pistoleros

There's a rather cutthroat tango contest taking place, and Yves seems to be undercover as one of the dancers. The Gunmen are looking at an Argentinian death squad, and make a connection to a businessman who's suspected of being a smuggler. But the businessman has already made contact with Yves in the dance class. The Gunmen try to get into the dance class, but they're not exactly qualified! The smuggler's bodyguard clearly doesn't trust Yves, and finds the chemical that eliminated the smuggler's former dance partner in her bag.

Langley's accidentally got hacker friend Kimmy involved, who crashes their hotel claiming to have information on the smuggler. The military have developed a composite which is completely invisible to radar, and a sample of this is in the hands of the smuggler. The smuggler confronts Yves about the perfume bottle containing the chemical, but she's clearly on to them and palms the bottle containing the chemical, leaving the bad guys with just the perfume.

Frohike can apparently get into the dance contest. 'El Lobo'? Apparently he was something of a dancer before, although his former dance partner isn't too happy with him! Langley and Jimmy break Yves cover, preventing her from attending the dance contest. And the smuggler was going to make the exchange at the dance... so how are they going to make him believe that Yves is on the level and can dance with him? She claims Langley's a reporter wanting her to betray the smuggler, and she has to kill him - wanting to use a gun, but the henchman insists she use a knife...

Faking the stabbing gets the henchman out of the way, and Jimmy's bad camerawork gets them the smuggler amongst the other dance couples. The other couple get themselves tapped out so they can claim the music CD that the smuggler supplied. Fortunately, Frohike snatches it off them during the dance. The henchman spots the deception and goes back to the dance to kill Yves... but the smuggler puts himself in the way of the knife throw, saving Yves life at the expense of his own...

11 - The Lying Game

We're in a club with Mr Memory, a man who remembers hundreds of useless facts, and one of the audience, a Mr Larry Rose, is being blackmailed by another customer. Rose tells the other guy to follow him into the bathroom, where the blackmailer is assaulted and shot by Walter Skinner! Meanwhile, Jimmy's missed a payment on his car, so they towed it. Byers introduces Carol Strode to the Gunmen, who are going to help her catch a marderer - she's the sister of the dead guy, and the dead guy was Byers' college roommate. The body was accidentally cremated, but there's an email from beyond the grave... unfortunately, the website it links to has been wiped...

Why is Mr Memory wearing the dead guy's glasses? And why is Skinner meeting with Larry Rose? The dead guy had a wireless camera in his glasses, and the Gunmen track down a backup computer with the video files on it, including a single frame of Skinner's face. Byers wants to get confirmation before running with the Skinner story, and calls in Yves to examine the evidence. Turns out there's a Russian mob boss on the footage. When the Gunmen spy on a meet between Skinner, Rose and the mob boss, Carol gets snatched by the mob, and Skinner spots the Gunmen.

The dead guy isn't really dead. Skinner has him at a safe house. But Carol has no proof of identity, as she used to be Byers' college roommate Carl, so the mob think she's an agent. Meanwhile Yves and Jimmy decide to bring Skinner down. But at the club meet between Rose, the mob and Carol, Jimmy (disguised as Skinner) triggers the FBI bust accidentally... just before the real Skinner comes back with the dead guy. The story sells really big in Russia, and the Gunmen use the profits to reacquire his car.

12 - The Cap'n Toby Show

Saltville, Nebraska, and Langley's childhood on a farm, and his memories of watching Cap'n Toby on TV after doing his chores. But back in the modern day, Toby's just been busted by the FBI. Meanwhile, a blonde woman, Agent Blythe (Cyia Batten - Ziyal, DS9) has a fight in a parking garage with two guys - she's got a pretty good spin-kick, and the dart-firing wrist device is handy! But the heart attacks it gives the guys attacking her rouse the interests of the Gunmen.

Byers and Langley are at the filming of the Cap'n Toby show, where a new writer/producer, Ben Bass (Javier Vachon - Forever Knight), has overhauled nearly everything about it. Frohike, analysing one of the darts, gets stabbed by it and Jimmy is trying to suck out the poison just as Yves comes in! Chinese poison, and the FBI are looking into it, and they're also surveilling the Cap'n Toby show, looking for a Chinese spy. The rest of the Gunmen want to pin the spy rap on Toby himself, but Langley doesn't want to believe it.

Looking for the blonde with the wrist darts, Jimmy goes undercover in the hot dog suit at the mall. The blonde claims the two dead guys were double-agents, but she won't confirm any other details, and wants information from them... and she seems to know rather a lot about Yves! Frohike finds a message in chinese at the studio, but the FBI raid the place on Jimmy's information, and arrest Cap'n Toby based on evidence found in his dressing room.

Ben Bass spots how messages are being sent to the Chinese - through the magic porthole sketch which Cap'n Toby comes up with on his own every week - but Agent Blythe shoots and kills him when he tries to tell her. Cap'n Toby dodges the crowds and wants to put on a show all of his own devising, with the press as his audience. Yves spots an invoice from the copy shop at the studio, and gets the evidence - pictures from the porthole that show chinese writing under her special sunglasses - but Blythe is there, and Yves and Jimmy realise she's the traitor and she framed Cap'n Toby.

13 - All About Yves

A hotel bar in Washington, and the Area 51 agent who swapped lives with Mulder - Morris Fletcher - is chatting up an attractive blonde, but dropping his wedding ring on the bar ruins that plan. And then he's abducted by aliens in the parking lot... or possibly by the Gunmen in a set-up to look like he's been abducted by aliens! The alien wants to know what Maheron is - it's the codename for a weapon system taken off the Roswell ship. Unfortunately, the Gunmen's getaway is ruined by a military roadblock.

The Gunmen blab that they got an email telling them where Morris would be and who he was... and that they backtraced it to a server with the name Romeo 61. Fortunately that saves them from being shot, so they call in Kimmy to help them find the mysterious Romeo 61. Hacking the Department of Defence, gives them a list of terrorist attacks and disasters that are all marked as successful. Kimmy takes that opportunity to bolt. The list includes the JFK assassination... but wasn't that CGB Spender? The Gunmen go back to Morris to get more information. Meanwhile, Jimmy asks Yves for help, and she warns him off the story... and that she won't get involved.

Seems the Maheron project has been stolen from Morris by some exotic woman... whose name happens to be an anagram of Lee Harvey Oswald! Morris jumps to the conclusion that Yves is a member of Romeo 61. Yves has performed a vanishing act, and they have to pull out all the stops to track her down - hacking each CCTV camera throughout the city in turn to track her movements back to her apartment. Jimmy, upset over what they're doing, walks out on them rummaging through Yves' room, just before Langley finds evidence of a Swiss bank account she opened the previous day.

Yves, meanwhile, is meeting her buyer. But she's picked up a tail. Meanwhile, Jimmy mistakes an email from Mulder as an email from Yves (well, how many foxes does he know?!). The Gunmen track Romeo 61's base of operations, giving them a top-flight security system and a massive vault that might have all the evidence they need. Jimmy gets the meeting just in time to delay Yves tail, but he catches up with her to tell her the Gunmen are going to die unless she goes with him... so what happened to Jimmy? Ah - he made the meeting with Mulder... hopefully he'll be able to get htem out of trouble - as it appears Morris is double crossing the Gunmen.

Mulder has a phone number for Frohike, but Kimmy traces it back to Martha Stewart Living, which is Yves' cover. Yves takes that opportunity to fill Jimmy in on the Romeo 61 fake out, and that the disc is really details of how the Area 51 goons abduct people. Morris is looking for Yves to get his disc back, but he's also in the employ of someone who's been looking for Yves for a very long time. But Jimmy and Yves together manage to gather enough information to track the Gunmen down, and Jimmy volunteers to go in after them alone, but Yves drugs him and enters herself. Yves manages to get herself captured by Morris and the Area 51 guys, as do the three Gunmen... fade to "To be continued".

Jump The Shark

Opens with a recap of the Lone Gunmens' history. Then, Morris Fletcher's out on a boat with a beautiful woman. Then three guys show up in a motor boat, grab the girl, set fire to his boat, tell him that his employer has fired him, and drive away. Morris manages to jump overboard at the last minute, and luckily the coast guard manage to fish him out. At this point Doggett and Reyes show up, having been requested by name.

Morris wants to tell them everything, but his blueprint of the Jupiter 2 doesn't inspire confidence. It seems he was trying to sell it to a foreign billionaire, who wants to kill him now he's found out it's a fake. Morris drops "super-soldier" into the conversation, to keep the FBI interest, claiming he can help them get their hands on one. The Gunmen seem to be lacking in equipment... but Doggett and Reyes want help tracking their supersoldier - Yves. Yves appears to be attending university! Or at least meeting with her mysterious Professor friend from "All About Yves". Yves makes a run for it rather than be discovered, but the Professor's left with a hole in his chest.

Morris is bored with the Gunmens' attempts to track Yves by her aliases, and spills Lois Runce as her real name. Then Jimmy shows up at their secret door... having toured the world and now run out of money. He already knows Yves' real name - his world tour was to track Yves wherever she went... and he was at the college where she murdered the Professor. Whatever she pulled from the guy's chest, she's just incinerated it...

The Professor was an immunologist, studying sharks and rays as they've got a fantastic immune system. Kimmy gets called in to help the Gunmen, to hack a military satellite so they can track Yves real time. The coroner is confused by the bioluminscence of the Professor, and the cartilage grafted into him (which held the thing Yves took). Turns out the Gunmen are broke - they spent every dime trying to find Yves after Morris took her. And there she is, in a hotel being surveilled by the Gunmen. Yves' going to kill a guy, but the Gunmen burst in to stop her and he gets away.

Yves isn't particularly happy with Morris' involvement, especially when they find the tracking device on him. Morris works for an international arms dealer... who happens to be Yves' father. Seems the Professor and the guy that got away are carrying a virus that will release in 5 hours time. It could potentially kill tens of thousands of people if released, and they've got a hard time tracking it. Frohike's considering retirement, but Byers wants to go out never having given up.

The guy they're tracking has gone to the college the Professor was at, but Doggett and Reyes manage to catch him, but after every test they can imagine, they fail to find anything. So who's the second man? And how will they find him in one hour? Morris spots that they've been chasing the decoy, so the guy they need is out in plain sight - clearly the Professor's associate who spotted Yves at the start. The guy's at a conference, and they have a little security issue getting in. But they manage to get him to flee, and the Gunmen are chasing him.

So they've got him cornered with two minutes to spare... and no way to stop the virus. So they pull the fire alarm, trapping themselves in a corridor with him... an airtight corridor. Why are the Gunmen being buried at Arlington? Ah, Skinner pulled some strings. And a touching send-off it is.


Cast