FRIDAY HALL OF FAMER - MR. GARRITY OF THE ZONE

Our choice for this Friday Hall of Famer is fitting even though he only appeared once on our screens for the August TV Western showcase, even from Toobworld.  Everything else about him which I think qualifies him has to be considered theoretical.  But that's what the Friday Hall of Fame entries are for!

Let's meet our newest member.....

"Introducing Mr. Jared Garrity, a gentleman of commerce, who in the latter half of the nineteenth century plied his trade in the wild and woolly hinterlands of the American West. And Mr. Garrity, if one can believe him, is a "resurrecter of the dead" - which, on the face of it, certainly sounds like the bull is off the nickel. But to the scoffers amongst you, and you ladies and gentlemen from Missouri, don't laugh this one off entirely, at least until you've seen a sample of Mr. Garrity's wares, and an example of his services. The place is Happiness, Arizona, the time around 1890. And you and I have just entered a saloon where the bar whiskey is brewed, bottled and delivered from the Twilight Zone."  

From the IMDb:
Mr. Garrity comes into town offering to resurrect the dead and reunite the townsfolk with their departed loved ones out of the goodness of his heart. Do the town-folks want these miracles to occur?

In the early 1890s Mr. Garrity arrives in Happiness, Arizona apparently knowing a great deal about some of the people who live there. He knows that Jensen the bartender's brother died and that Gooberman the town drunk lost his wife. Garrity also reveals that he has a very peculiar gift - he can bring back the dead. When a dog is run down by a wagon in the street he resurrects it without any difficulty. When he offers to do the same for the town's loved ones, they realize they would rather he not bring back the dearly departed, something they are quite happy to pay him for. Garrity, a charlatan if ever there was one, is glad to accept their money - though he does seem to leave something behind.

"Exit Mr. Garrity, a would-be charlatan, a make-believe con man and a sad misjudger of his own talents. Respectfully submitted from an empty cemetery on a dark hillside that is one of the slopes leading to the Twilight Zone."

It's apparent that Mr. Garrity and his two accomplices (Ace and the dog) had pulled this supposed con game in the past in other towns of the old West, perhaps in such frontier towns of Toobworld like North Fork, New Mexico, ('The Rifleman'), Nichols, Arizona, ('Nichols'), and Mercy, Nevada, ('Doctor Who').  And as any experienced confidence man would do, Garrity got out of town as soon as he made his money.  So in such towns as those, he never knew that he really could resurrect the dead.  

A lot of the potential revenants in these towns are of course a matter of "wish-craft".  For instance, I'd like to think that if Garrity did arrive in Mercy, Nevada, after the Doctor helped resolve the conflict between two aliens from the planet Kahler, his powers were able to bring Isaac, the town's marshal, back to life.  Even though the Gunslinger (Kahler-Tek) was made the marshal of Mercy once the Doctor resigned and left, if Garrity brought Isaac back to life, then the Gunslinger would probably have stepped aside and let Isaac resume his duties until he died a natural death.  After that the Gunslinger would have resumed the charge given him by the Doctor.

Otherwise, Jared Garrity serves as the perfect splainin for all of those TV Western bad guys who seemed to keep showing up in various TV shows; sometimes even popping up over and over again in the same series!

But I'm not married to that idea and since the TV Universe is fluid as we've seen TV shows get overhauled with revisions, then I think either idea works.  And if all of those Milford characters were the same guy reanimated by Jared Garrity, then he might have followed Garrity around the West after the "con man" moved on from North Fork.  

One such example would be all of the bad guys played by John Milford in episodes of 'The Rifleman'.  In all, he appeared in eleven episodes of the series and pretty much he was gunned down by Lucas McCain in all of them.  And yet there he was again a short time later, to try again using a different name. 

(I wrote about Milford's gallery of rogues in the past, making the claim that the gaseous beings known as the Gelth - as seen in the 'Doctor Who' episode "The Unquiet Dead" - kept reanimating his corpse there in North Fork, each time taking on a new alias.

Eventually, I think Garrity did discover he had this power and so he changed his modus operandi.  He would set up shop in a town (especially Dodge City) and hire himself out to outlaws who knew they would be committing crimes in town.  So he offered them his services should their best-laid plans "gang aft agley".

Most of those characters played by Milford could be the same guy.  All of the bad guys played by Morgan Woodward, Jack Elam, and Lee Van Cleef in episodes of multiple TV Westerns could also be clients of Garrity.

(We've seen that six Milford characters showed up in seven episodes of 'Gunsmoke'; and 'The Virginian' had six of his characters.  However one was a Sheriff and the other was a deputy.  It's possible they have no relation to the corpse brought back to life by Garrity.)

I've written about this topic in the past, suggesting that Jared Garrity was eligible for membership in the TVXOHOF.  And now we're bringing it to fruition.

So if Jared Garrity could bring himself back from the dead, it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that at least two other characters could be Garrity leading a new life.  And that's all he needs to get his three TV show appearances under his belt.

O'Bservation: The day may come when I need a new Friday Hall of Famer for the TV Western showcase.  If I get stuck, I'll cobble together a "Game of the Name" theory that Garrity's accomplice Ace would be known by other names in other TV show episodes in which Robert Mitchum's baby brother John appeared.

But that's for another day.

For now, we tip our Stetson to perhaps the most famous Western character ever played by Mister John Dehner....

Welcome to the Hall, Jared Garrity!