"Dust" is the twelfth episode of the second season of The Twilight Zone, and was first broadcast in January of 1961. It starred John Alonzo as soon-to-be-executed criminal Luis Gallegos, John Larch as the Sheriff holding him in custody, Thomas Gomez as unscrupulous peddler Sykes, and Vladimir Sokoloff as Luis' father. John Alonzo had only a short career as an actor, but later became famous as the cinematographer on such films as Chinatown and Scarface.
In an impoverished southwestern town in the Old West, Luis Gallegos is in jail, waiting for his execution. While drunk, he ran over a young girl with a wagon. Peddler Sykes, who sold the rope for his hanging, stops by to taunt him in his jail cell, until the Sheriff, who is ambivalent about the entire affair, drives him off. Gallegos' father pleads with the parents of the dead girl to spare his son's life, but gets no response. Taking advantage of his desperation, Sykes offers him some "magic dust" that will change the townspeople's hate to love. Can even fraudulent magic save a condemned man and change people's minds?
This episode had a lot going for it, and the concepts and personalities could have been carried well beyond 22 minutes. Along with the concepts of mercy and forgiveness, there is a subtext of social justice: the vengefullness that the townspeople feel towards Gallegos is hinted at being because of his ethnicity. The life of this town, and the motivations of the characters, is something that could have been stretched out to the length of a feature movie.
I also find it interesting that we have seen some of the aspects of this episode before: a western town with a peddler in "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" and a western town with an execution in "The Execution". But while both of those episodes were cheesy and mined the mythology of westerns in an obvious way, this episode takes a very different tack. This is one of the more realistic Twilight Zone epsidoes I have seen, and just the sight of Sykes' stubble is enough to set a gritty mood. The variety of ways The Twilight Zone can take a theme is always interesting, and it seems that as the series established its popularity, it was able to subvert expectations more and more.