I Call Him Wonder

Another great story by the grandmother of westerns - Kathleen Hite. From the moment we see Wonder you're hooked. This story was remade later on in the series. I think this is the better version.

Jud Sorrell is playing poker with three men in a saloon inside the town of Caldwell. After Jud wins the pot the other three men are not to happy. Before Jud can get out the doors the three men beat up on Jud and take their money back. Jud retreats out of town to sleep off the wounds.

While sleeping he is awaken by a small Indian boy that was attempting to steal food. The boys village had been burned and he was the last Indian left alive. The only word that the boy says is 'wondra' so Jud calls the boy Wonder.

They ride into Dodge and go to Delmonico's to get something to eat. The waiter in the place refuses to sell him anything with an Indian in tow but tells him to go to the back door. At the back door things do not go well and Jud sends the cook through the window. Matt has to arrest Jud for the attack and Wonder comes along.

Matt tries to get the boy some help from Indian scout at Fort Dodge but by the next morning the boy is back right next to the Marshal's office. When Jud is release there really is nothing to do except to let the boy tag along. They get a spot at the stable to sleep when the three men from the earlier poker game comes in for another visit. This time they want Jud dead. Wonder needs to make it to the Marshal's office but will he make it in time to avoid Jud's death.

This really is not a bad tale but is another episode featuring Indian hatred using a boy as the point of reference. It is a new twist to a repeating plot from season eight. The acting was actually well put together in this show with the actor playing Jud, Ron Hayes, as one the viewers can relate for his feeling toward the Indian boy. This is a show where the viewer has to watch to the end. We all have to know what happens to the lone Indian boy that no longer has a family.

This is one those episodes that I find particularly memorable for some reason. Jud Sorell is a cowboy that is more or less stuck with an Arapaho boy. The boy tries to steal food from Jud while Jud is camping. When Jud tries to return the boy to his family, he discovers their village has been burned and all of the people killed. Unlike many others in this story, Jud sees the boy's humanity instead of treating him as some kind of wild animal. Jud refuses to abandon the kid, and the boy latches on to Jud as a caretaker.

Along the way, Jud and his companion face all manner of discrimination because of the boy's ethnicity. Jud doesn't want the kid following him everywhere, but he cares too much to leave the child behind. This is the central plot of this episode.

One curiosity about this installment of the series is the absence of Quint Asper. Matt takes the little boy to Fort Dodge to meet with some Indian scouts in an attempt to discover more about the boy's background. Although Quint is half Comanche, and the boy is Arapaho, Quint's absence is a bit conspicuous.

The drama for the story comes from three major losers led by a guy named Docker. When Jud wins all their money in a poker game -- not once, but twice -- they can't accept the losses. My biggest issue with this episode is that Jud knows Docker and his idiot companions are sore losers, and he nevertheless engages them a second time. Maybe Jud was just acting out of desperation, but it was a pretty foolish move.

Ron Hayes carries this episode as Jud Sorell. The story is really all about him and the little boy, with the Gunsmoke regulars, including the Marshal, acting as side players. Look for a young, pre-Star Trek Leonard Nimoy as one of Docker's friends.

There is a very similar, very poor episode in Season 13 titled "Wonder" that uses similar characters played by different actors and *seems* to assume some knowledge of this earlier episode. In that episode Jud's last name is Pryor instead of Sorell, and Matt curiously does not seem to know the boy.

As memorable as this episode is, it falls short of greatness for me. This isn't a story about any Gunsmoke character. It could just as easily have been an episode of pretty much any other western.

Ron Hayes almost always plays a real hardass in westerns. Here, playing the central role from Kathleen Hite's script, he does a fine job as a loner with a heart, finally settling down to the fact that the little Arapaho boy he has saved has now saved his life too (with the help of Matt Dillon) after a few scraps with trouble loaded onto to them both by the prejudiced townspeople of Dodge and a band of three outlaws that includes Leonard Nimoy in a smallish role. This was a year before Nimoy got his break in the pilot for the classic "Star Trek" tv series as Mr Spock, but Hayes and his young adopted "son" are deservedly the stars here.

Jud Sorell is played by Ron Hayes, who is usually a villain. In this episode, he is a very nice guy who is robbed of his poker winnings by three nasty cowboys. Later on, an Indian child finds Sorell after his family and tribe have been massacred. Sorell lets the little boy tag along, and the boy won't leave.

As Sorell gets to Dodge City, he encounters hatred and racism because the little Indian boy is with him, and people imagine that Sorell is a "Squaw Man" and the boy is his own child. Considering that Marshall Dillon always had a positive relationship with the Indian tribes and that Quint Asper was Dillon's friend, I find it hard to believe that in a small town like Dodge there was always so much hatred against Indians.

You would think that Dillon's position and philosophy about the Indians would have some influence on Dodge, but apparently it never did, as there were numerous episodes about racism against Indians. by contrast, considering that Gunsmoke is set in the post-Civil-War era, there is only one episode that I can think of that dealt with racism against other minorities.

Bottom line is that Sorell has to deal with racism and the three cowboy thugs who beat him up at the beginning of the episode, and then come to Dodge and decide that they want to kill him too. Everything bad happens to Sorell and the Indian boy, and Marshall Dillon is not much help.

This episode is all about Ron Hayes, who always seemed like he should have had a more impressive acting career, but never did. Hayes does a great job as a nice guy, which is in great contrast to his previous roles. Edmundo Vargas plays the little Indian boy, and while he is a cute kid, he does not do much and says very little.

Killing them with kindness is the moral of this story. This story was remade a few years later as "Wonder" (season 13, episode 14) with Richard Mulligan in the role of Sorell.