The Loner “The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove” (November 20, 1965)
Rod Serling’s last hurrah may have been this episode of his short-lived existential western, the story of a freed slave (Brock Peters) who returns from service in the Union army to find that his father has just been tortured and lynched.  As in The Twilight Zone, the allegorical elements are pointed – the dead man is hanged because he was “uppity,” a term with modern resonance, and the lynch mob wears the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan – but not overdone.  Serling’s dialogue, by this point, tended toward the purple, but here the severity of the subject matter spurs him to a spare eloquence: “Something hanging from a tree, that could be just a plain old carcass.  But if a son come to cut it down, it’s a human being.”  Peters’ outsized intensity is tailor-made for the climax, in which Lemuel and a few courageous others stand against those who would leave the dead man’s body on profane display.  But the best scene is probably the first one between Lemuel and the show’s eponymous hero, Colton (Lloyd Bridges), a simple, moving sketch of the beginning of a friendship, in which Colton sees that the other man’s boots are worn through and offers him his own.