User Reviews

I thoroughly enjoyed the episode, especially as it progressed and I started seeing hints of "Psycho," which was released the year before this episode - I mean, same house and everything. This episode dealt with some pretty modern subjects. Very cool!

SPOILER ALERT HERE

It's impossible to discuss this episode without a spoiler alert. It's about a sheriff who's been hijacking passing cowboys and working them as a road gang. But that's not his real problem: he picked up a drug habit in the War Against Treason while in the hospital (he was on the wrong side) and when he went West and became sheriff he kept the habit. And it got bigger. He has a man in town who's been supplying him with drugs...He decides to raise his prices. Doesn't go over well, as is usual when drug dealers raises prices. It gets him killed. But in precedent, Robert Fuller asks him about "narcotics". Uses that word. The Sheriff owns up.I won't give away the main plot. But I have to believe this was the very first time a drug dealer got called out as such on a cowboy show. Praise to the writers and directors involved. They were far, far ahead of their time.

While Slim Sherman and Jess Harper are working mending some ranch fences some shots are heard in the distance. When John Smith rides to investigate he finds a man dead outside a medicine show wagon and Smith is shot and seriously wounded. Robert Fuller picks up the trail of a man on a distinctive pinto pony. He trails him to the town of Rimrock where he finds him to be none other than Lyle Bettger the sheriff who runs the town with a tight and mean hand backed up by an equally vicious deputy Mort Mills.

We also hear about a mentally deranged brother that Bettger keeps locked away in a big dark house who escapes. Fuller has to break jail where Bettger and Mills have him locked up on a framed attempted murder charge.

Bettger made a specialty playing a lot of deranged individuals on the big and small screen and he's certainly in his element here. This Laramie story featues a rather modern topic, drug addiction. Bettger got addicted to painkillers during the Civil War in an army hospital and he gets a jones for a fix just about the same way addicts do today.

A fine Laramie episode about a topic not dealt with by family oriented westerns.