Quinn becomes a folk hero when he stumbles his way into a gunfight and kills the most feared gunslinger in all of Texas. In this America, violence is an accepted means of conducting business and lawyers have been replaced with sharp shooters. The dead man’s company, Drexel Bullock, immediately attempts to recruit a guilt-ridden Quinn. The only trouble is that Quinn missed by a country mile; Priscilla Hardaway, a woman with motive and opportunity did the shooting. Her husband had been killed by Drexel Bullock’s men, and now she’s fighting off a hostile takeover. While Rembrandt fights to keep the company solvent over a game of poker, Wade tries to convince the authorities to do their jobs. Quinn must show Priscilla’s son Jamie that violence is not the answer, especially as he has no chance at winning a showdown with Drexel’s newest attorney, one Billy “the Kid” Gates.
All meals come with either rice or potatoes and salad.
“Forewarned is forearmed.” — his take on the value of a gun in an armed world.
The Lone Star State. Bring thoughts of Texas to you? It should. But not here – it might be more appropriate to call it the Lone Star Country. Why? Because Texas is its own nation, and it’s taken a couple states with it.
During the Civil War, when the North was embroiled in bitter fighting with the Southern States, Texas, which was barely a state and was still hotly contested territory with the Mexicans, solidified its hold as a sovereign nation and began gobbling up land north and west of its borders. Without the troops to stop them, the United States and the Republic of Mexico let this formidable country expand in size and power to the state it is today.
In this San Francisco, legal battles have taken on a whole new level, as lawyers settle their difference with the Code of the West — basically, a gunfight. The fastest on the draw is the winner. If a man shoots another man, a preemptive move, they must go before a district judge while the Bar Association gets a hand in the matters. Lawyers are called ‘negotiators.’
The largest employer in the company, Drexal-Bullock, has 1,300 gunfighters on his staff with offices in Houston, Austin, Los Angeles and is headquartered in San Francisco. Industrialist Bullock put more people back to work during an unspoken depression than any other in his region — including Silicon Valley.
Bullock’s risk arbitrage division is dubbed the ‘Outriders’ because they always are on the lookout for the best companies to take over. The S.E.C. (Securities Exchange Commission) holds power and jurisdiction over the lawyers.
Lawyers man the stock exchange by playing poker by betting equities and stocks. At the present, Compaq Computers sells for $35 a share while Pacific Richfield sells for $16.20 per share.
A magazine called “Texas Business Day” has the story about Billy the Kid, and the main source for news on this world is the Business News Network (BNN).
It seems as if Texas has its own senate, as evidenced by Billy the Kid saying he testified before a Senate Subcommittee in Austin (Texas).
On this world, instead of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers television series, it’s the Mighty Morphin Texas Rangers.
“‘The Good, the Bad and the Wealthy’ was a show we just didn’t pull off that well production-wise,” says Tracy Tormé. ” Was it a Western world or a modern world? The idea of corporate gunslingers looked really good on paper, but it just didn’t work as well as we had planned.”
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This episode’s parallels to the classic film Shane are no accident. Tormé says that he added them to the screenplay.
“It wasn’t initially based on Shane,” he says. “All the Shane stuff was stuff that I specifically put into the existing script — especially the ending — after the first draft.”
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Tormé adds that one interesting plot line that was never fully developed for the screen was to have the Billy the Kid character as an alternate of Microsoft C.E.O. Bill Gates. In fact, a Fox press release even bills Lochlyn Munroe’s character as “Billy ‘the Kid’ Gates,” but the idea was never brought to the screen.
“Originally we were going to see if Bill Gates would do it himself and then we realized that he probably wouldn’t,” Tormé laughs. “Then we were going to get a look-alike for him and the idea was that this guy with glasses and kind of near-sighted… gets off the train and it’s Bill Gates!”