This one takes palace in Arizona and uses the old western plot of a posse where the hero suspects, (correctly), that some members of the posse don't want to take the fugitives alive for reasons of their own. I've always thought that modern westerns should be successful on TV because they can use all the plots available to a western but also to a modern series.
Tod agrees to go on the posse because his employer has been killed in a robbery. Also along are James Brown, in his fifth appearance, each time as a lawman, playing the local sheriff; Med Flory as his disgruntled deputy, Steve Cochran as a friend of the victim and the "best tracker in the territory", an Indian who probably deserves that title more, Kathleen Crowley as the victim's much younger wife and John Anderson as a retired military officer with a heart condition who wants to prove he's still got it. Each has his own, selfish motives for what they do and Tod, at the end of it, winds up vowing that their selfishness and violence won't turn him into one of them.
Unlike other reviewers I didn't see any politics in this, just a conflict between good and evil within the human spirit. Here's what Tod says at the end: "Can people only make themselves important at the expense of others? These killings were they sacrifices to a private reason to a hidden God? Do people really think that if they go through life without hurting other people nobody will know they've been alive?"
George Maharis is still being listed in the credits but it's hard to tell what role he would have played here. I'm going to take a wild guess and suggest it might be the woman Tod talks to at the beginning who questions why he feels he has to go on this posse. Buz was always questioning why they would get involved in other people's problems. He always had a sixth sense about where the trouble might come from. Maybe they took his lines and gave it to a new character, a piano playing girlfriend of Tod's.
Tod agrees to go on the posse because his employer has been killed in a robbery. Also along are James Brown, in his fifth appearance, each time as a lawman, playing the local sheriff; Med Flory as his disgruntled deputy, Steve Cochran as a friend of the victim and the "best tracker in the territory", an Indian who probably deserves that title more, Kathleen Crowley as the victim's much younger wife and John Anderson as a retired military officer with a heart condition who wants to prove he's still got it. Each has his own, selfish motives for what they do and Tod, at the end of it, winds up vowing that their selfishness and violence won't turn him into one of them.
Unlike other reviewers I didn't see any politics in this, just a conflict between good and evil within the human spirit. Here's what Tod says at the end: "Can people only make themselves important at the expense of others? These killings were they sacrifices to a private reason to a hidden God? Do people really think that if they go through life without hurting other people nobody will know they've been alive?"
George Maharis is still being listed in the credits but it's hard to tell what role he would have played here. I'm going to take a wild guess and suggest it might be the woman Tod talks to at the beginning who questions why he feels he has to go on this posse. Buz was always questioning why they would get involved in other people's problems. He always had a sixth sense about where the trouble might come from. Maybe they took his lines and gave it to a new character, a piano playing girlfriend of Tod's.