The best episode of the entire series combines the greatest story-line and the most melodramatic...
The good involves Bruce Boxleitner's character, after having to leave the gorgeous tomboy Elyssa Davalos, and joins up with a band of charming outlaw scoundrels led by Richard Basehart, including Animal House bad boy Tim Matheson as a slick-talking fast-gun (he might as well be Otter Stratten) and Mexican Pepe Callahan (The Long Goodbye)...
Scenes with.this band of outlaws are topnotch, involving terrific writing, which leads to a fantastic twist involving the story boomeranging right back to the town he just left and a gold mine heist that could kill either group of friends, the crooked and the honest...
On the bad side is star James Arness, hating the white man more than ever (he must have suffered guilt for starring in a white man's series Gunsmoke for 20 years)...
He's trying to fix a political pickle involving the most melodramatic character, an Indian overplayed by famous overactor. Ricardo Montalban, who speaks in corny and cliche Indian-speak in symbolic animal platitudes... just horrible, and sadly takes up most of the time... and Arness simply goes too far with the pro-Indian stance... it simply becomes corny...
Meanwhile the c-story is pretty good, involving the pretty older sister falling for a Mormon and, about to become his third wife, it takes until the next episode where another great twist comes to play...
Sadly, on that following episode, soap opera elements intrude upon a great series that, as mentioned already, pretty much peaked here, in this episode, the best of the lot.
The good involves Bruce Boxleitner's character, after having to leave the gorgeous tomboy Elyssa Davalos, and joins up with a band of charming outlaw scoundrels led by Richard Basehart, including Animal House bad boy Tim Matheson as a slick-talking fast-gun (he might as well be Otter Stratten) and Mexican Pepe Callahan (The Long Goodbye)...
Scenes with.this band of outlaws are topnotch, involving terrific writing, which leads to a fantastic twist involving the story boomeranging right back to the town he just left and a gold mine heist that could kill either group of friends, the crooked and the honest...
On the bad side is star James Arness, hating the white man more than ever (he must have suffered guilt for starring in a white man's series Gunsmoke for 20 years)...
He's trying to fix a political pickle involving the most melodramatic character, an Indian overplayed by famous overactor. Ricardo Montalban, who speaks in corny and cliche Indian-speak in symbolic animal platitudes... just horrible, and sadly takes up most of the time... and Arness simply goes too far with the pro-Indian stance... it simply becomes corny...
Meanwhile the c-story is pretty good, involving the pretty older sister falling for a Mormon and, about to become his third wife, it takes until the next episode where another great twist comes to play...
Sadly, on that following episode, soap opera elements intrude upon a great series that, as mentioned already, pretty much peaked here, in this episode, the best of the lot.
