Anthony James and Victor French are back as a couple of alcoholic lowlifes that pass for comic characters in the last years of Gunsmoke. The pretty Lane Bradbury is back as their sister. James and French have a plan to turn in their uncle for an old $50 reward so they can use the money to open a sleazy bar where they sell bootleg liquour.
Victor French later went on to work on Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven with his best friend Michael Landon. I never liked his acting on Gunsmoke, because it seemed like he was always either a drunken thug, a drunken henchman, a drunken farmer, or some other lowlife character who did very little except act like a nasty drunk. I never got it, and never liked it.
Anthony James was a lifetime thug and henchman. He spent his career as a lackey and got beaten up in a few Clint Eastwood movies. His acting skills were nothing special. He did get to be the main villain once that I know of, in a Hunter TV episode.
So you get a comedy about alcoholics taking advantage of a mentally defective deputy. I saw this as a kid, and I never thought it was funny, just sad and boring.
Matt Dillon is busy not working on the show in this episode, as he is out of town. Towards the last years of Gunsmoke, the writers decided that spoofing the Old West for comedy was a great idea. Bonanza had been doing comedy Western episodes (usually with Hoss as the lead) for years. Now Gunsmoke was doing it with dimwitted Festus as the lead. These episodes all harken back to Barney Fife and the Andy Griffith Show.
Unfortunately, since Festus had started out as a hardcore cowboy, and a tough deputy, every time the writers used Festus as the village idiot, it just degraded his original character.