Top Gunsmoke Television Episodes: The Harris List: 2001 Addendum

It's been a year since I logged into your terrific site and you did me the
honor of posting my list of "best" and "worst" episodes. ... so I hope you won't mind my writing you long after the fact. I have one addition each to the "best" and
"worst" list. Each of the episodes aired in October 1970 or shortly
thereafter. I hope you will enjoy it.

ONE OF THE BEST:
"The Gun." This is a vivid look at the means and perils of acquiring
celebrity; it certainly is a sobering one. Kevin Coughlin (see also "Hard
Labor" in 1975) plays a teenager who idolizes a famous gunfighter and,
perchance, meets him face to face. But the gunfighter has gone completely
paranoid, and with reason; everyone wants to knock him off for the glory of
it. Not daring to show his face anywhere in town and desperately needing
some getaway money, he learns Coughlin works at the Dodge City bank and
forces him to help rob it. Coughlin dives for cover once inside the bank,
finds a revolver in a drawer and, after the gunfighter fires wildly twice,
comes up shooting. End of notorious gunman. Coughlin, welcome to Hell.
St. Louis reporter L.Q. Jones, at his slimiest, comes to trumpet this new
hero of the yellow press, even though his actions were, truth to tell,
somewhat cowardly. It's not long before Jones has bullied Coughlin into a
showdown with still another champion. Matt arrives on the scene in time to
beat the second gunfighter, who had no malice and was looking just to
enhance his own reputation. Matt then does a very politically incorrect
thing and smashes Jones' jaw with one punch. He then turns to the crowd and
tells them "You got what you came to see." They disperse. Coughlin is left
to contemplate how many more men he will have to kill before being killed
himself. And he played a key part in it by fantasizing over these legends
in the first place.

And, in contrast:
"The Scavengers." I tremendously admire Yaphet Kotto and think he has only
done two bad performances in his whole film career. "Midnight Run," where
he played an inept FBI agent, is one. This is the other one and it's even
worse. It may have been intentional; though Gunsmoke occasionally showed
some dubious moral premises, this one takes the cake and Kotto may have just
took the money and sleepwalked. You be the judge. Kotto, a poor and black
dirt farmer with a young daughter and another baby on the way, happens upon
the site of a massacre by renegade Indians -- and begins to pick small
valuables off the bodies of the dead. When he hears other Indians coming,
he stabs himself with an arrow (in a scene which defies credibility) and
plays dead while the Indians -- who had no part in the massacre -- plunder
on their own. Kotto is feted, dined and given gifts for his "survival,"
while a group of bounty hunters (led by Slim Pickens in his usual
no-holds-barred performance) gloats over capturing the Indians and, due to
Kotto's testimony, getting them sentenced to hang. Now how many felonies
does Kotto commit before he gets religion and stands off the bounty hunters
in an effort to save the tribesmen? This episode would make anyone's bottom
ten (maybe bottom five) if not for a brilliant performance by Cicely Tyson
as Kotto's wife, who while giving birth tips Doc Adams off to the fact that
innocent men will be executed. Her angry speech to her husband, emphasizing
that "niggers" will be thought of just as badly as Indians due to incidents
just like this, is the one bright spot in this sorry mess.