Strange Town

I enjoyed this yarn. Lucas escapes the cardboard North Fork for a vastly better open air town setting. The direction by cult figure Joseph H Lewis is, as usual, above average. Take, for example, his excellent opening frame of the heavy's hand shackled to the barbed wire. The cast is fine, with Peter Whitney in his third Rifleman, spoiled only by his over-the-top ethnic costume. As ever, Claude Akins makes a superb villain with a touch of vulnerability.

We know Lucas will pull through but don't know who will actually gun down the heavy. There's a surprise there.

Micah is carrying an outlaw, Bletch Droshek, in for trial. While stopped on the trail, Bletch jumps Micah and starts beating him up. After a few punches Micah goes down and the outlaw rides off. A badly injured Micah is able to make it to Lucas's farm and deputizes Lucas so that he can ride to a neighboring town to find the outlaw.

When Lucas makes it to the town the entire town seems to be hiding information from Lucas. When he finds the Marshal of the town things only get worse. The town does not give up its own.

Claude Akins and Peter Whitney do a great job of playing Russian immigrants that settled in the New Mexico mountains making for a nice change of characters for the series. The episode held tight to the regular 'Rifleman' plot so there are really no surprises in the show. This is just a usual good episode that has all the good qualities that make the series entertaining.

...Although it was hard to suspend disbelief for William Schallert playing such a tough bad guy.

I always think of him as the teacher on Dobie Gillis and as Patty Duke's father on her show lol.

Not to mention his role in the comical Star Trek "Trouble with Tribbles" episode.