One of the more dramatic and suspenseful entries in the ANDY GRIFFITH canon. Andy receives a letter from an ex-convict named Luke Comstock whom he sent to jail eleven years earlier for a service station robbery. (Andy shot him in the leg during the holdup, which caused him to go lame.) In the letter Comstock says that he wants to see Andy again in order to "set things straight between us." The phrase is just ambiguous enough to send Barney into a panic, and he organizes a "posse" (consisting of Otis and Gomer) to protect Andy. Comstock's arrival in Mayberry sets the stage for the suspenseful part of the episode, as we wait along with Andy to see what will happen; Earle Hagen's musical score is put to extremely good use during these scenes, which have a palpably foreboding atmosphere. This episode has a hint of film noir as well as a touch of the Shakespearean, with the light/dark, tragi-comic intercutting between Andy's anxious vigil at home and the humorous shenanigans of Barney's "posse." A high point of the episode is the fleeting, intense conversation between Andy and Opie in which the son asks the father whether he is scared. Only an ill-advised piece of comic business towards the end of the episode (Barney and his posse getting hopelessly tangled up in a rope) and an apparent minor continuity error in the script make me fall short of giving this one ten stars.
Review of High Noon in Mayberry
