User Reviews

Fast paced episode with a good script and performances. It shows how much story and character you can pack into a half hour--with commercials- show. The supporting characters all work and avoid the cliché. There is even a moral center to the episode.

Some have said that this series was a warm up toe Star Trek in terms of a Kirk like character being sent from situation to situation as an outsider and making or helping those involved to either resolve or make moral decisions. If you want to see Star Trek origins in an episode like this you can, but it's a solid show on it's own, proving that Roddenberry was a skilled writer.

Back in the day when you could guilt someone into reacting and doing the right thing, we get a story about Paladin trying to get an execution postponed by a few hours.

The Warden's son got killed, and Roy Carter (Scott Marlowe) was convicted. His father pays Paladin 5 large to keep his son from hanging. $5,000 in 1870 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $117,078.63 today, an increase of $112,078.63 over 154 years.

For that kind of money, Paladin breaks Roy Carter out of the gallows, right before he hangs. Roughing up the guards, Paladin and Carter run back into the prison! Back into Carter's jail cell, Paladin breaks the lock, and gets his head smashed with the back of an angry guard's rifle. Pretty neat trick to break into jail, in order to avoid hanging.

John Larch plays a prison minister who is used to getting pushed around by the warden (Paul Birch). When the guards are about to break the cell open so they can hang Carter, Larch snaps and fights them all to break the metal saw, and keep Carter from hanging.

It was good drama, some action, and Carter gets exonerated at the end. Paladin shows Larch that he is sincere by giving Larch most of his $5000.00 payment, so that Larch can open a library at the prison. A positive story all around.

Paladin is hired by a tyrannical father (Armstrong) to save his innocent son (Marlowe) from hanging at the state prison. But Warden Bullock (Birch) is bent on the execution since it was his son who was murdered.

The premise poses all sorts of dramatic possibilities, but the opportunities are mostly squandered by clumsy direction (the escape from the gallows), an overly pat ending, and cheaper sets than usual. What appears a gutsy screenplay challenging TV conventions of the time (an unjust execution, a chicken-hearted chaplain), unfortunately loses its nerve in several highly contrived scenes. Too bad that the good dramatic set-ups weren't handled more imaginatively. Then a really memorable entry would have resulted instead of this missed opportunity.