This extremely interesting episode of the "Cheyenne" must have surely raised eyebrows when it was first aired. The villains catch our protagonist, Cheyenne Bodie, herding twenty horses across their rangeland and warn him that he must turn around and ride off their property. Naturally, our strapping big hero has other ideas until a ruthless cattle king (Storm (Barton MacLane, a veteran Warner Brothers heavy from their 1930s gangster movies)orders his top hand gunslinger to lasso Cheyenne and pull him off his horse. Of course, Cheyenne is taken by surprise, loses his twenty head of horses, and winds up bruised and battered. He rides slumped over in the saddle onto a small rancher John Dembro's property (Regis Toomey) and the rancher's young wife Sheila (Beverly Michaels)and daughter Johnny (Anne Whitfield) nurse big Clint Walker back to health. Dembro offers Cheyenne a job as a ranch hand which our hero readily accepts. Frustrated wife Sheila and the budding 17 year old daughter take one look at Cheyenne's massively muscled chest with a field of dark black hair and swoon. The daughter starts dressing up and behaving like a woman, while the somewhat older wife confesses to Cheyenne that her marriage to an older man isn't what she expected. Meanwhile, the evil range boss offers to buy out the small rancher, but he refuses when Cheyenne challenges the villain's top hand over a matter of money owed him for the loss of his horses. Initially, "The Storm Rider" looks like a familiar rendition of "Shane" with the smaller ranchers trying to survive a hostile takeover from a big rancher. The writers (R. Wright Campbell and "Dirty Harry" scribe Dean Rieser)switch horses in the middle of the stream and focus on the unhappy Sheila whose obvious glimpse of Cheyenne's chest hair stimulates her libido. When Cheyenne guns down the nasty top hand gunman in town in a duel, he awakens the slumbering hope and courage in the small ranchers that if they band together they can repulse the power of the fiendish range boss. In the meantime, Cheyenne spurns Sheila's advances and she grows shrewdish and takes her rage out on her husband who has drunken too much liquor following Cheyenne's shoot-out with Storm's top hand. Now, the small ranchers agree to band together. At this point, the show centers on Sheila's jealousy. She drives her unconscious husband back to their ranch and puts the horse and carriage in the stable. Dembro is so drunk that he cannot unhitch the horse. Sheila becomes irrational and sets fire to the stable with a lantern and her husband dies in the ensuing blaze, but the murder haunts Sheila. Eventually, the authorities are able to lay the blame for Dembro's death on his insane wife. Beverly Michaels is thoroughly convincing as the delusional frontier wife trying to make the best of a terrible situation. The scene where she knowingly leaves Dembro in the barn to burn to death is a plot element lifted from two previous Warner Brothers movies: "Bordertown" (1935) with Bette Davis and "They Drive By Night" (1940) where jealous wives murder their husbands. Again, for a television show aired in 1956, "The Storm Riders" boasts more obviously adult oriented sexual intonations than you'd expect from this landmark ABC-TV series aired in 1956.

Clara Phillips (Diane Hyland) persaudes our heroes to take her to the Devil's Hole so that she can tell her husband whose hiding out there that he has been cleared of all criminal wrongdoing. Heyes and Curry reunite with some of their old companions, among them Big Jim Santana (Fernando Lamas) who runs the gang now and has a great idea for one last robbery. When Clara reaches the Devil's Hole, she shoots on sight one of Big Jim's men Hamilton (spaghetti western actor Brett Halsey of "Roy Colt & Winchester Jack") and accuses him of corrupting her 17-year old daughter. Big Jim is considerably upset by Clara's wounding Hamilton and demands the truth from both parties. Learning the truth turns out to be a difficult as neither person wants to come clean. When Big Jim isn't trying to get to the truth (he would never hire somebody for his big raid if he didn't thoroughly trust them)he grilles Heyes about the notion of going straight. Big Jim spent seven years in prison and doesn't plan to go back. Now, he has been collecting a gang to attack a major money sorting place in Denver, the biggest job that he has ever staged. The search for the truth and the turnaround that Big Jim experiences makes this one of the best "Alias Smith and Jones" episodes. The Clara Phillips character is unusually headstrong.

You'd think that our heroes would stop boarding trains and stagecoaches because of the odds that they could be identified and arrested. In this episode, our heroes wind up aboard a train armed to the teeth with guards working for the Bannerman Detective Agency and lead by Harry Brisco (J.D. Cannon of "McCloud"). They masquerade as a couple of Bannerman detectives and find themselves thwarting a railroad heist by the Devil's Hole Gang, lead by stuntman Hal Needham. Not only do our heroes discourage the gang from attacking the train, but also they expose the twosome on board the train who are going to rob it from within. An awful lot of bullets are fired in this episode and our couple of bad guys bite the dust. At the end, our heroes convince Harry Brisco that the descriptions of Heyes and Curry are inaccurate and they embellish those features with scars. Pete Duel and Ben Murphy are at their charismatic best. William Windom guest stars as a corrupt Bannerman agent. The detectives come extremely well-armed on their train with a Gatling gun.

A conniving bank employee is caught swindling the bank and kills his boss, blows the safe to get the money inside, then blames the robbery on Heyes and Curry. Banker August Binford (John McGiver) quotes the wanted poster descriptions of our heroes in this elaborate frame up and even clobbers himself on the head with a crow-bar to complete the picture. Heyes and Curry set out to clear their names and pull another sting, this time involving a fake diamond mine. With some help for an old pal (Sam Jaffe) they masquerade as diamond miners who want a safe-deposit box at the bank. The shifty banker refuses to sell them one until he knows what they are going to stash in it. They show him the diamonds and his eyes light up. This is another episode where yet another actor (Mike Road)incarnates Sheriff Lom Trevors. The sting itself is no great shakes, but the success that our heroes have in convincing the villain to turn himself in is truly extraordinary. Talk about good citizenship! At the outset of the show, Binford brandishes a gun to kill his boss, but we never see him fire the fatal shot. Ostensibly, our heroes manage to clear their names and at the same time persuade a felon to give himself up based on his own struggle with his conscience.

In what passes for a lightweight version of the John Wayne classic "Stagecoach" (1939) and the Tyrone Power epic "Rawhide" (1951), Heyes and Curry find themselves taking a ride on a stagecoach with a variety of characters, some friendly and others less friendly. Ultimately, our heroes wind up prisoners of the man (Keenan Wynn)who runs the stagecoach relay station after a gang of outlaws beseige the place. Although nobody dies in this episode, the characters in "Stagecoach Seven" shoot off more rounds of ammunition that you'll find any virtually any "Alias Smith & Jones" episode. Steven Inhat plays an unfriendly passenger who learns how deadly fast with a gun Kid Curry is, while Sam Peckinpah favorite heavy L.Q. Jones leads the gang trying to take Heyes and Curry prisoner. Earlier, the gang held up the stage and robbed the passengers of their valuables. The chief bad man thought that he recognized Heyes and Curry, but he was only sure after they let the stagecoach go. The characters in the stagecoach change under the tense conditions that they endure during the barrage of gunshots that riddle the station with bullet holes. Predictably, our heroes win over the hearts of their captors. Look for a young Randolph Mantooth in a minor role as well as Geoffrey Lewis as an outlaw called 'Patch.' Again, for a family friendly oater, this episode features more gunfire than most "AS&J's" shows. Like other episodes, "Stagecoach Seven" shows how single-minded our heroes are in pursuing the straight and narrow and they are rewarded for their efforts here again.