"The Avenger" (Bonanza) 1960

I will be blunt: the reason this is my favorite Bonanza episode is because of the guest star.  Vic Morrow is a dear favorite of mine, and I absolutely love getting to watch him play a good guy in a western.  He was in quite a few classic western shows, but almost always playing the heavy, sometimes playing very sinister and nasty baddies indeed -- and I enjoy those in a certain way, but not in the way I enjoy seeing him play a good guy.

I remember watching this episode for the first time in my teens, watching it with my whole family as part of our weekly Friday Night Movie Night family time.  I went in knowing he was the guest star and being pretty sure he was going to be the bad guy because that was how it had gone with all the eps of other westerns I'd seen him in.  You can imagine my delight when he proved to play not a bad guy, but not even an antagonist!  He plays a hero!  Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!

A stranger (Vic Morrow) rides into a town that positively drips ominous foreboding.  No people on the streets.  A saloon filled with toughs who are raucously celebrating the completion of a gallows in the middle of town.  Bad stuff is about to happen here.  Bad stuff has already happened here.

And then we discover that the two men in jail who are going to be hanged that night... are Ben and Adam Cartwright (Lorne Greene and Pernell Roberts).  Those yahoos in the saloon are eager to dance and spit all over their graves.  The stranger finds this disturbing, but he's a quiet guy not looking for trouble.  At least, not looking for this particular trouble.

Actually, he's looking for a group of men who lynched his father and killed a lot of other innocent townspeople a few years ago in Lassiter, Kansas.  Because he never shares his name in this episode, folks take to calling him Lassiter after the town he keeps talking about.  

Thanks to his family history, Lassiter is very sensitive to wrongful hangings, even when they're carried out by the law and not by a lynch mob.  He becomes convinced that Ben and Adam are innocent.  Their conviction hinged on the testimony of one scared hired man and one angry young woman -- and the hired man has been murdered, while the young woman is seeking to punish the Cartwrights for her father's death whether they were actually guilty of killing him or not.

Vic Morrow plays Lassiter with exquisite gravitas.  He's calm, steady, soft-spoken, and unflinching in his quest to find his father's killers and bring them to justice.  He doesn't waste a single movement; every flicker of his eyelids, every sideways glance, every raised eyebrow speaks as much as his dialog ever does.  This is a man who will not fail, and the audience knows it.  The people of this town know it.  Even Hoss and Little Joe Cartwright (Dan Blocker and Michael Landon) realize it, and agree to let Lassiter try to save their father and brother first before they start throwing lead at everyone in sight.

Obviously, Ben and Adam don't hang.  Obviously, the guy trying to get them hung is one of the men Lassiter is trying to find.  Obviously, Lassiter's calm logic and insistence on seeing truth and justice served are what save the Cartwrights.  There aren't any huge surprises here... unless you are used to seeing Vic Morrow play baddies in westerns, and discover to your great joy that he is playing a very good guy indeed here.

Honestly, "The Avenger" doesn't really feel like a typical Bonanza episode... because it wasn't.  It was supposed to serve as a pilot for a spin-off series starring Vic Morrow.  Another pilot of sorts was filmed as an episode of the lesser-known show Outlaws, with Morrow playing the same character and tracking down another of his father's murderers.  But the network never picked the show up.  

Part of me is sad about that, because Lassiter is really cool, and I would love to have a whole western show starring Vic Morrow to watch over and over and over.  But part of me is okay with it, because if Vic had made a success in that show, he might have been under contract when they started casting the series Combat! (1962-67) and unable to be in that.  And that would have been horrible, because that is my favorite TV show of all time, and his character, Sergeant Saunders, is my favorite fictional character ever.  So, I just keep enjoying this episode every now and then and don't mourn too much over the series never happening.

You can watch this episode basically anywhere because it's in the public domain.  It's easy to find on streaming platforms, YouTube, DVD, etc.

This has been my contribution to the 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted this weekend by A Shroud of Thoughts.

A Little Kitchen Project

I made a coffee bar in my kitchen!  When my mom started living with us part-time last fall, I bought a Keurig because that makes it really easy for her to get her first cup of coffee even if she wakes up long before me.  But the Keurig and its coffee pod storage took up a lot of space on my counter -- space I couldn't use for anything else anymore.  Not only that, but reaching coffee mugs in the cabinets was tricky for my mom, since she has Parkinson's and that affects her balance and movements.

So, I decided to make a coffee bar to make coffee and mugs more accessible for my mom, and also for any guests.  Now that she lives here part of the time, we get a lot more guests because her friends from near and far like to come out and spend some time with her.  I figure it's nice to not make guests wonder how your coffee maker works, where you keep your coffee grounds, if you have creamer, and so on.  Everyone can figure out a Keurig pretty quickly, especially an ultra-simple one like mine.

Long, long ago, when our first baby was less than a year old, we bought a huge old dry sink at the Salvation Army.  It was a perfect changing table for many years.  Once my kids outgrew diapers, it became a combination extra kitchen storage space below, and a catch-all for my stuff above.  In the past few years, it's transformed into a sort of strategic planning zone where I could keep my bullet journal, stickers, letters that need to be answered, and random things I needed to deal with in the immediate future.

In other words, it had become a giant mess:

I knew it could be ideal as a coffee bar.  It's a little lower than my counters, so my mom can easily reach everything there.  It's not huge, so she should be able to stand in one place and access everything.  It was originally a dry sink, so it's easy to clean and not a stranger to moisture.  All I had to do was clean it all off, rehome everything that I had been storing on top of it, and pick up a few small accessories!

Yeah, it took me about two weeks to do all that.  But, it's finished at last!

I already had the cute sign that says "Coffee and friends make the perfect blend."  I picked up a rubber mat to go under my Keurig and make cleaning up spills easier.  I bought a mug tree online.  I picked up a couple of new mugs at the thrift store so that Mom and guests could have some drinkware choices.  And I used a gift card that I won in a giveaway to buy a cute little mug-shaped basket to hold flavored coffee creamers.  So, now I have a coffee bar!  

I also ordered a mini table-top trash can, but that has been delayed in shipping, so I'll have to change this up a bit once that arrives.  Still, I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I hope it makes mornings easier for my mom when she's staying here and more fun for our future guests.