This is Peter Harris, originator of the "Harris List" which you cited in the Gunsmoke Home Page. I still have the same Edress (hharrisfam@aol.com); this Microsoft Outlook page came up when I had the opportunity to write you again. It's been a year since I logged into your terrific site and you did me the honor of posting my list of "best" and "worst" episodes. Sometimes it's hard to access the site (for reasons unknown), so I hope you won't mind my writing you long after the fact. I have one addition each to the "best" and "worst" list. Each of the episodes aired in October 1970 or shortly thereafter. I hope you will enjoy it. ONE OF THE BEST: "The Gun." This is a vivid look at the means and perils of acquiring celebrity; it certainly is a sobering one. Kevin Coughlin (see also "Hard Labor" in 1975) plays a teenager who idolizes a famous gunfighter and, perchance, meets him face to face. But the gunfighter has gone completely paranoid, and with reason; everyone wants to knock him off for the glory of it. Not daring to show his face anywhere in town and desperately needing some getaway money, he learns Coughlin works at the Dodge City bank and forces him to help rob it. Coughlin dives for cover once inside the bank, finds a revolver in a drawer and, after the gunfighter fires wildly twice, comes up shooting. End of notorious gunman. Coughlin, welcome to Hell. St. Louis reporter L.Q. Jones, at his slimiest, comes to trumpet this new hero of the yellow press, even though his actions were, truth to tell, somewhat cowardly. It's not long before Jones has bullied Coughlin into a showdown with still another champion. Matt arrives on the scene in time to beat the second gunfighter, who had no malice and was looking just to enhance his own reputation. Matt then does a very politically incorrect thing and smashes Jones' jaw with one punch. He then turns to the crowd and tells them "You got what you came to see." They disperse. Coughlin is left to contemplate how many more men he will have to kill before being killed himself. And he played a key part in it by fantasizing over these legends in the first place. And, in contrast: "The Scavengers." I tremendously admire Yaphet Kotto and think he has only done two bad performances in his whole film career. "Midnight Run," where he played an inept FBI agent, is one. This is the other one and it's even worse. It may have been intentional; though Gunsmoke occasionally showed some dubious moral premises, this one takes the cake and Kotto may have just took the money and sleepwalked. You be the judge. Kotto, a poor and black dirt farmer with a young daughter and another baby on the way, happens upon the site of a massacre by renegade Indians -- and begins to pick small valuables off the bodies of the dead. When he hears other Indians coming, he stabs himself with an arrow (in a scene which defies credibility) and plays dead while the Indians -- who had no part in the massacre -- plunder on their own. Kotto is feted, dined and given gifts for his "survival," while a group of bounty hunters (led by Slim Pickens in his usual no-holds-barred performance) gloats over capturing the Indians and, due to Kotto's testimony, getting them sentenced to hang. Now how many felonies does Kotto commit before he gets religion and stands off the bounty hunters in an effort to save the tribesmen? This episode would make anyone's bottom ten (maybe bottom five) if not for a brilliant performance by Cicely Tyson as Kotto's wife, who while giving birth tips Doc Adams off to the fact that innocent men will be executed. Her angry speech to her husband, emphasizing that "niggers" will be thought of just as badly as Indians due to incidents just like this, is the one bright spot in this sorry mess.