The Fugitive (TV Series) The Breaking of the Habit (1967) User Reviews

She's back!

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 29 April 2018]

In the first season, Eileen Heckart starred as Sister Veronica in the episodes "Angels Travel On Lonely Roads". Now in the final season, she's back, and as Sister Veronica once again!

When the story begins, Richard Kimble has sought out Sister Veronica because he's in trouble and needs to hide. She naturally hides him, as she's long believed in his innocence. The problem is that at the school where Sister Veronica is the principal is full of nuns and teens....none of which share Veronica's convictions!

I really did appreciate the continuity here. While quite a few actors made multiple appearances on "The Fugitive", they usually played different characters each time. While this was not a great episode, it's a good one...quite enjoyable and worth seeing.

So much to do and so little time to do them

[CCsito · 8/10 · 25 September 2013]

*SPOILER ALERT*

This episode involves Richard Kimble searching for the one armed man in the Sacramento area and he is shot and injured after encountering a roadblock by the police looking for him. Kimble then looks for Sister Veronica (Eileen Heckart from Season 1) who operates a school for girls in that area. He asks for her help in locating the one armed man because of his impaired mobility from being shot. However, Sister Veronica is dealing with a live-in student who threatens to run away and other matters (including her cancer). She has to choose between searching for the runaway girl and helping Kimble. In the end, she feels that she has failed on both sides. However, the runaway girl returns, but Kimble is too late to find the one armed man who has left the area. Sister Veronica later confides to Kimble about her terminal illness and they say their goodbyes for the final time. The sister realizes that Kimble has provided her "answers" to her doubts (from the Season 1 episode and this encounter) and can live her remaining time without any regrets. Linden Chiles and Antoinette Bower play a priest and nun who also work at the school for girls.

Kimble Prays For Sister Veronica - Again

[stp43 · 8/10 · 1 September 2017]

Writer-director John Meredyth Lucas had been The Fugitive's co-producer with Wilton Schiller for nine of the Fourth Season's episodes but decided to leave as co-producer when executive producer Quinn Martin was upset by the tone the series had begun to take. The irony is Lucas had begun to figure out the show's subtleties by the time he left as co-producer to where he submitted scripts later in the series, among them this superb sequel to the first-season two-part episode "Angels Travel On Lonely Roads." Among the series' best, this episode re-teams Richard Kimble with Sister Veronica.

The good sister is principal at a Catholic school for girls in Sacramento and as such has her hands full with budget concerns and also two troubled students - a gum-chewing blonde named Marie Dormond who harasses the school janitor for alcohol, and Dormond's friend, a brunette named Vicky who is promiscuous (her idea of lashing out at her mother for leaving her father) and already in trouble with local police. Kimble arrives at the school having been shot in the leg escaping a police dragnet - he'd been set up after acquiring information on Fred Johnson, who is in Tarleton, over a hundred miles away. He thus needs Sister Veronica's help, at a time when Veronica has to track down the wayward Vicky and also when Marie harasses Kimble - before recognizing who he is.

Kimble had helped Veronica travel to Sacramento and in the process restore her faith in life, and now Kimble winds up helping the overly stressed Sister find her strength to go on yet again. The interplay between David Janssen and Eileen Heckart is excellent, and also interesting is Kimble's encounter with Marie - Heather North plays the malicious student (and proves herself a capable dramatic actress) and an interesting irony is she encounters David Janssen here while under a week after this episode first aired North goes from David Janssen to David Jones in her appearance on The Monkees episode "Prince And The Paupers." Adrienne Hayes meanwhile plays Vicky, and nails it as a troubled teen even though she was twenty-nine years old at the time of filming.

The series' ability to draw in the viewer and leave the viewer emotionally drained at the end once again comes to the fore as Kimble and Sister Veronica finally try to track down Johnson.

1/31/67 "The Breaking of the Habit".

[schappe1 · 1 March 2016]

Eileen Heckart returns as Sister Veronica, the character she played in the season one two-parter "Angels Travel On Lonely Roads". She's the only character besides Kimble, his sister and brother-in-law, Gerard and the One Armed Man who appear in more than one episode. She's working at a church school for troubled girls. Kimble has found out there is a one-armed man who works for a local gambling operation as a courier. He wants to determine if this is Fred Johnson, his one- armed man, and alert the authorities to his involvement in the gambling operation so that Johnson can be arrested. Then Kimble will call Gerard and tell him to arrest Johnson for the murder of his wife. But the man who told Kimble all this has turned him in to the police and he is on the run and injured. He knows Sister Veronica, who promised to help him if he needed it, is working at nearby school and goes there.

Sister Veronica wants to help him but she has her own problems: a girl has run away from school and she wants to get her back. She can't very well ignore her without producing suspicion. She puts Kimble in the janitor's quarters. The job is open and she has Kimble pretend to be an applicant for the job. One of the girls comes onto him and when he rejects her advances, she calls the police. Meanwhile Sister Veronica cannot find the missing girl. She agrees to drive him into the city where the one armed man is supposed to be. They find out he's left town with the gambling receipts and the local syndicate is after him. Now Kimble has to move on but he notices some signs of something wrong with Sister Veronica.

Despite the typically complicated situation, this, like the previous episode, is more of a character study and we see Kimble actually smiling when he's with his old friend. This episode is a little more lean and logical than the first one with Sister Veronica, which was a two-parter.

The return of Sister Veronica

[jsinger-58969 · 9/10 · 17 February 2023]

Dick takes a slug in the leg as this one starts. Being shot is his hardest habit to break. This wound seems to come and go. After being hit, Kimble hops on the back of a convenient truck. Even more conveniently, this truck is headed to Sacramento, where his old friend, Sister Veronica, heads a church school for troubled girls. See, Dick has saved up enough money to buy a picture of the one-armed man. Apparently, there are people who sell such pictures. Old Fred is a numbers runner in Tarlton, about 100 miles away. Dick is pushy about asking for help, but it's understandable. One of the girls comes onto him, and calls the cops when he rebuffs her and she sees his picture in the paper. Sometimes you gotta take one for the team, Dick. So now the cops are all over the place. Dick wants the sister to go to Tarlton and ID the OAM, since he's not well enough to go himself. If it's really him, Veronica should call the cops and have him picked up, and then Dick will turn himself in. But then Dick decides to go with her by hiding in the trunk. He says he can't stay at the school because his prints will come back and his identity will be revealed, but everyone already knows who he is. His picture is all over the front page. Now, Kimble has been shot 8 times on the show, and apparently digs the lead out himself most times, but this time the bullet seems to be still in his leg, alternating between being a serious wound and not bothering him at all. They have some close calls with the police, as Dick has moved into the front seat. The sister finds out that Johnson was indeed there, but he has now gone. No worries, since Fred becomes almost a regular in season four. The sister, who has a terminal brain tumor, returns to the school where one of the wayward girls has returned. Richard Kimble's leg apparently heals, and he continues to be......a fugitive.

Plot summary

[ynot-16 · 7/10 · 3 December 2006]

Kimble is shot while being chased by police. He flees 100 miles to Sacramento to see Sister Veronica (from the episode Angels Travel on Lonely Roads) at the St. Mary Magdalene School. He needs her help to track down Fred Johnson (the one-armed man), whom he has a photo of in the city of Tarleton, from which he just fled. However, Sister Veronica, played by actress Eileen Heckart, is not only ill, but has a full set of problems with the troubled girls in her school.

She gives Kimble a job as janitor, and tries to help him, but the pressure of a renewed police search means danger for Kimble. Sister Veronica misleads police about Kimble without actually lying, while trying to help him accomplish his mission.

Didn't like Kimble here

[Christopher370 · 5/10 · 20 April 2023]

"Angels Travel on Lonely Roads" is one of my favorite episodes of this series so I was thrilled to see Sister Veronica appear again, but I felt this story could've been done a lot better.

I didn't like how pushy Kimble was getting with the Sister to travel 100 miles away just to ID the one armed man for him. She's an older woman, a nun to boot and he saw first hand that she had her hands full at the moment with her duties at the convent. To just show up unexpectedly and expect her to drop everything at a moment's notice for him was pretty selfish.

I think it was wrong of him to guilt the poor woman into helping him and going so far as to say that she owes him. Why couldn't he just contact his sister to do this for him, or his brother in law? Or any number of people who've wanted to help him from the past. Why guilt this poor old nun who obviously was incredibly busy and also quite frail.

When she finally says she'll do it after he laid a huge guilt trip on her, he returns to her the next morning, and while she tries to explain to him how her duties at the convent prevented her from actually going the night before, he doesn't even listen to her. He repeatedly interrupts her asking "What happened in Tarrelton?" She continues to try and explain, but he interrupts again "What happened in Tarrelton?" I couldn't believe how rude he was being to her in that scene. And when he finally shuts up long enough for her to have the chance to explain what happened, he doesn't even hide how mad and upset he is with her. I actually wanted her to slap him.

I felt it was really out of character for Kimble to act this way. And even after he learns of her terminal brain tumor and she nearly faints right in front of him at 5 in the morning from being up all night searching for one of her troubled students, he STILL expects her to stay up all day in her condition and drive 100 miles away to ID the one armed man for him. And she does!! Who cares if she has a brain tumor that's about to explode in her brain any minute. She's got some driving to do!

And while stopped at a gas station where Kimble looks in a phone book for the diner that was in the photo, after finding the possible address of it, he barks at her "Get in the car Sister". Geez, he was just so rude to her. I'm surprised her tumor didn't pop right there at the gas station.

By the way, the one armed man could be there or not. This is all just a chance he's taking, and now he's risking Sister Veronica's health for it, knowing that she's terminally ill and should be resting.

And even if he is there, it's still going to be just his word against the one armed man's. So I don't understand how Kimble thinks he can just call Gerard after that and give himself up, because nothing would change without concrete evidence. Why he thinks everything magically changes if the one armed man is in custody makes no sense. It's not like he's going to automatically confess his crime to police.

I feel Kimble was asking way too much from the Sister and I hated that they wrote him this way....basically pushing her to play detective for him even after learning that she's frail and terminal. I don't believe for a second that he would have treated her this way after what we've seen of his character and of their prior friendship in "Angels Travel On Lonely Roads". I blame it solely on the terrible writing.

She was up all night until 5am looking for her troubled student but rather than let her sleep and rest in her terminal condition, he makes her stay up all day to drive him hours away for a man that may not even be there. I don't think Kimble would do this to her or even expect her to after learning about the tumor, and that she's past her 3 month time to live....she could pop at any minute!

And the final nail is when they part ways in the end. It was done so terribly and cold. Kimble doesn't even act grateful in the slightest to her. He just takes off the coat she loaned him, hands it back to her and basically says "Well, see ya" and walks away since he has no use for her anymore, making her take that 100 mile trip back to the convent all alone with a brain tumor that can burst at any moment---and a leaky car exhaust that could kill her before the brain tumor does. He could have at least made sure she had someone to get her back home safely! I think this whole episode should have been rewritten differently.

And surprisingly, in the Epilogue it's Sister Veronica who says she's grateful to Kimble! Um no Sister, it's Kimble who should be grateful to YOU!! She went well out of her way for him here and the poor woman STILL felt it wasn't enough because of that stupid guilt trip he laid onto her. I'm sorry, but Kimble was a huge jackass in this episode and completely out of character.

And then there's the leg he was shot in.... A student mentions that cops said they'll find him easy because of his leg bleeding, but there's never any blood shown. None!

More incredulously, Kimble is shown scaling the convent building and leaping off roofs as if his leg was never shot. Heck, he doesn't even limp and he runs too. No way a man shot in the leg would have been able to do all the footwork he did when he was hiding from the cops. And through it all there's not a drop of blood on his wounded leg or his clothes. With the show in color now, you'd think they'd have invested in some red paint.

I'm still giving this episode a 5 rating because of the return of Sister Veronica who is one of my favorite characters of this series. I just wish it was a better story to go with her return appearance and I was so appalled at the way Kimble treated her in this episode. I feel she deserved so much more compassion, understanding and respect than she received from him. She only proved to this viewer that she truly is a Saint which made me love her even more and I think she deserved a better return episode than this.

I'm going to erase this episode from my memory and make believe it doesn't exist in the series so I can enjoy repeated viewings of "Angels Travel On Lonely Roads" which is imo one of the series best.