DOUBLE VISION: DEHNER'S PAST

Normally I would save this for the August showcase for TV Westerns, but as we're nearing Halloween.....

'THE TWILIGHT ZONE'

"MR. GARRITY AND THE GRAVES"

Back in the 1880s, Jared Garrity was a con man traveling through the American Southwest with a unique scheme: he claimed he could resurrect the dead.  In Happiness, Arizona, Garrity went up to Boot Hill and performed the spells necessary to bring Life back to the Dead... Out of the goodness of his heart. 

The residents of Happiness, however, weren't too keen on the idea.  And they were more than eager to pay hundreds of dollars to Garrity so that he would keep them quiescent up on Boot Hill. 

The Dead had other ideas though.....

Garrity thought his powers were a scheme, but he really did have the talent to resurrect the dead. 

I believe eventually Garrity discovered his powers and turned it to his advantage - by hiring himself out to bring notorious outlaws back to life after they were gunned down by officers of frontier justice. 

In this way, Jared Garrity is deemed eligible for the TV Crossover Hall Of Fame - think of all the gunfighters and assorted other "bad hombres" played by the same character actors in all those TV Westerns of Yesteryear, like Morgan Woodward, Jack Elam, John Milford....  

Thanks to Garrity's powers, they came back to life, assumed new identities, and moved on to other frontier towns to cause trouble. (Although Milford's character seemed fixated on North Fork, New Mexico, where he took on eleven different aliases... and was gunned down as most of them.)

The time eventually came when Garrity felt the clasp of mortality on his own shoulder and figured he had nothing left to lose but to use his own powers on himself. 

This gave him a form of immortality. 

It's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that Jared Garrity, under other names, appeared on our TV screens over the decades in several different series. I'll have to do more research on that. But here's one possibility I think fits:

'THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW'

"AUNT BEE'S MEDICINE MAN"

From the Mayberry Wiki:

Colonel Harvey, a traveling medicine man, sells Bee two bottles of his Indian elixir. Bee becomes tipsy on the brew and Colonel Harvey lands in jail.

From the IMDb:

Andy must protect Aunt Bee from a charming, traveling, dishonest huckster whose 170-proof "tonic" provides temporary relief from [her] mid-life crisis.

By the 1960s, the bureaucracy of the world was making it harder for a man like Garrity /Harvey to hide in plain sight - boxed in by social security numbers, for example. 

The actor who played Mr. Garrity, John Dehner, is gone now. But the character could still be alive in Toobworld, keeping himself alive through his powers. 

But if so, how come his path hasn't crossed with any one of hundreds of TV characters over the last quarter century?

Simple go-to answer:  Jared Garrity met The Doctor, who took him to a world where he could live undisturbed as an immortal. 

Either that... or another kind of immortal mistook Garrity as the same kind of immortal and sliced off his head. 

"What are you doing with that sword?"

As often quoted in another Dehner series....

Que sera , sera.