Chesterland

While I usually watched episode after episode of bodies dropping like lead weights in this show, this episode took a different turn and caught me by surprise. It kept me laughing pretty much throughout. Chester was tops in performance here.

I should add that Dennis Weaver was my neighbor in Ridgway, CO and I helped him choose a cantaloupe at the grocery one day. He didn't know me from Adam but was the sweetest guy. When I saw this Gunsmoke episode I almost cried. When his wife Gerry died I attended the estate sale and bought a few treasures for my home. I will always remember him with love.

Not a fan of Chester's bumbling courtship and antics in this episode

...what with Paramount having stretched Gunsmoke from a half-hour to a full-hour format starting for Season 7's eisodes airing in1961...writers has the luxury of doing a much fuller development of the principal characters...

...this 8th episode "Chesterland" being a case in point...Chester falls prey to an ambitious young woman, Daisy, who has stopped in Dodge City to do some prospecting for a suitsble husband...and, true to the basic background developed for Dennis Weaver's character, Chester Good...he portrays a kindly, rather naive, and thoroughly gullible fellow...

... this suited the producers and execs at Paramount Television just fine; but the upshot for Dennis Weaver was the real prospect of being permanently typecast as the likeable, yet dimwitted Chester...

...the upshot was that Weaver decided to leave "Gunsmoke" during its 8th season of dhows airing in '63...yet, the ultimate irony was that Weaver's most enduring success beyond Gunsmoke came in his signature series as Deputy Sam McCloud, assigned to a Manhattan precinct... a gig which ran for 8 seasons and earned Weavery two additional Emmy nominations...wel goollie!, , Chester...

A familiar theme of Gunsmoke was that Chester would wait at the Station Master's office every day for the mail to come in with the stagecoach. That would also give him the first crack at every woman that came into Dodge for the first time. Chester never tired of trying to impress a tourist, and he always failed.

This really should have been a thirty minute episode. For the first time ever, a girl likes Chester, and he proposes marriage. Daisy accepts, but she wants a home to live in. Daisy was played by Sondra Kerr, who later married Robert Blake. This was her only appearance on Gunsmoke.

Chester responds to Daisy's wish for a marital home by filing a claim on an old broken down shack in the middle of the dried-out prairie. This horrible one-room shack would have been a hard place to live in for one man. Not a place for any family. It is such a pathetic move that I have to wonder if Dennis Weaver felt degraded by having to play such a mentally defective character?

There is really nothing funny about this episode. It is very cruel in the way that ridicules and lampoons Chester's efforts to build a home. At one point Chester knocks down his own shack. Later he builds the frame but runs out of wood and money. Then he builds an underground dugout.

At that point his girlfriend Daisy comes out to check it out, and she is horrified. She tells Chester that he deceived her, and that she is shocked that he would expect her to live in an underground dirt shack. You really have to wonder if Chester could be that dumb?

So the next day Chester finds water where he had been digging his dugout. He builds a well and starts selling the water. Daisy is helping him now, and towards the end of the week, they have four big glass jugs full of money. Chester gives Daisy the money to take to the bank, and did Daisy go to the bank with moronic Chester's money? Did she wait for Chester so she could marry the stupid sap?? Did she just take the money and get on the first stage out of Dodge? Did she leave impotent Chester waiting at the well for Daisy?? This episode is very sad. I never liked the character of Chester too much, and yet even I felt he was done horribly wrong.