Bass Reeves is a historical person, the first black US marshall west of the Mississippi, with a record of 3000 arrests.
This chapter is dedicated to its director, Charles Beeson, who died in April 2021. Beeson also had directed chapters of NBC television's Timeless (2016), which also featured U.S. Marshall Bass Reeves (The Murder of Jesse James (2017)). While he did not direct that particular chapter, both shows feature three protagonists - two male and one female - out of their element adjusting to and aiding Marshall Reeves in Old West justice.
Some have postulated that the real Bass Reeves was an inspiration for The Lone Ranger, the fictional (white) hero who was first created in the 1930s for a long-running radio serial and who continued via popular TV shows, movies, and comic books. This notion was largely promulgated by a single historian, Art T. Burton; in his Reeves biography "Black Gun, Silver Star," Burton wrote, "Bass Reeves is the closest real person to resemble the Lone Ranger" and listed a number of similarities between the real-life Reeves and the Lone Ranger character. However, many other historians have since argued that the similarities between them are too generalized and circumstantial to authoritatively state that the Lone Ranger was definitively based on Reeves. For example, a 2019 Texas Monthly article by Sean O'Neal says that Burton's argument rested on only a few broad similarities that also applied to many other Western figures, but "it remains pure speculation; there's never been any conclusive evidence linking the two." O'Neal also argued that the insistence on a possibly spurious folk linkage between Reeves and the Lone Ranger also condescends to Reeves by "eclipsing" Reeves's real-life accomplishments "by the tall tales of an imaginary white man."
The director, Charles Beeson, directed several of the more popular Supernatural episodes, including The French Mistake (2011) and Changing Channels (2009).