Laredo (TV Series) A Double Shot of Nepenthe (1966) User Reviews

The Manchurian Ranger

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 12 December 2016]

Long before the Communists were turning Laurence Harvey into a controlled killing machine in The Manchurian Candidate Doctor Will Kulava slips Reese Bennett a Mickey Finn that turns him into a most agreeable and easily suggestible individual, a complete change from the irascible Neville Brand we all know.

This episode truly turns on Neville Brand and the reactions from all around him as he undergoes a complete personality change. It's all being done at the behest of outlaw Warren Kemerling who has hired Kulava so that Brand might kill Philip Carey whom Kemerling feels he has a score to settle with. In The Manchurian Candidate it was the Queen Of Hearts that did the trick for Laurence Harvey. For Brand it's a five dollar gold piece. His control mechanism keeps going off at the wrong time.

Fans of The Manchurian Candidate might want to check this Laredo story out.

"Laredo" meets "Bewitched". Disaster follows.

[grizzledgeezer · 1/10 · 12 November 2017]

Comic Westerns are difficult to sustain. (Only "Maverick" had any success with it -- and that was because most of the stories were more or less serious, with deft comic touches.) It appears that, by the beginning of the second season, "Lardeo"'s writers were running out of ideas, and borrowed one from "Bewitched" (which had already run it into the ground).

Many "Bewitched" episodes revolve around a magic spell or potion that never works the way it's supposed to, producing odd or embarrassing side effects. In "A Double Shot of Nepenthe" (look it up!), it's a drug with the amazing ability to almost instantly destroy someone's will, making them the unwilling (and seemingly unknowing) servant of whoever administered the drug.

The problem is that it's fundamentally unbelievable. The closest real drugs approach this are so-called "truth serums", which relax a person to the point they become susceptible to suggestion. When the drug wears off, so does the suggestibility. The same is true of post-hypnotic suggestions, which vanish after the person goes to sleep.

The results in this episode are likely to make the viewer squirm, especially at the beginning, when a man -- after a single injection -- is told to push his best friend off a cliff. And he does so. He is then shot to death, so there won't be any witnesses. One doesn't expect even a comic Western to be free of violence. But I doubt "Laredo" had many on-screen murders.

The best stories are built around plausible character interactions. This one is not.