This is a two-part episode that truly needed the additional time. It is ultimately a social justice episode, but one that considers justice not merely from a societal level, but also a more personal one.
The premise is straightforward enough.
A man and a wife, chiseled through many years of hardscrabble life on the frontier, sit amid financial success, but without a personal relationship that the wife wants and the husband wouldn't understand. An argument results in the man storming out to get drunk at a bar or brothel leaving his wife home alone.
A band of Comanche renegades then descends upon the home and murders the wife and sets fire to the home, destroying it. The man is filled with grief and rage.
In steps an Irish-Cherokee Princeton educated lawyer, very skilled, and moving through town on his way to a new practice in San Francisco. The way the story plays out has many quality scenes that speak to the heart of true social justice, as well as to the manifest need to fairly measure men in the time they lived.
There are a lot of people wishing to tear down monuments throughout America who desperately need to see this two-part episode, especially the lawyer's (played by Paul Stevens) eloquent courtroom soliloquy, where he laid out the reality of forgiveness and understanding.
The episode needed the time to tell the story, one that saw many characters develop from one-sided to multi-faceted, from anger to understanding. In the ultimate example, one man went from blind murderous rage to genuine respect and friendship.
Few TV series ever had the chops to tell a story like this, and in our current era, the pervading sense of PC doctrine might tragically well prevent it. And this is why Gunsmoke remains, even after forty years since its enviable run ended, and nearly the entire cast has passed away, remains as vivid and poignant today as it was when it first aired.