Lancer

- Season 1

(1968)

Faced with continual raids by the Pardee gang, California rancher Murdoch Lancer seeks the help of his estranged sons: dapper Bostonian Scott Lancer and border-town gunslinger Johnny Madrid.

The Lancers help a 10-year-old orphan who wants to meet his outlaw father.

Used to blowing in the wind, Johnny rebels against his new circumscribed lifestyle.

Scott is caught up in a family war when a young pregnant woman shoots her abusive husband and escapes in Scott's buckboard, sending the husband's family after both of them in revenge.

Trouble brews when a washed-up marshal - to whom Murdoch once promised a share in the Lancer ranch - shows up with a group of deputies and a prisoner who claims to know Johnny.

After meeting a young woman, Scott is waylaid by two unscrupulous bounty hunters who claim he is the girl's outlaw brother whom they have been pursuing. The local sheriff gives Johnny two days to find the girl and prove Scott innocent, but the bounty hunters have no intention of waiting that long.

Murdoch meets an old flame, now widowed, and brings her to the ranch, where they rekindle their romance. But this is all threatened when her son comes to the ranch with another prisoner after their escape from an Army barracks, in which a guard was killed.

The Lancers take in supposedly injured stranger Jelly Hoskins, unaware that he is hiding money pilfered from bank robbers so that he can care for eight orphan boys.

When Charlie Poe and his wife are forced off their land by land grabbers claiming an old Spanish grant, Johnny, Scott, and Charlie decide to break jail and stop the train carrying the papers the land grabbers hope to use to make their claim official. But Charlie enlists an old friend who may plan to take more than just the papers.

A pretty young woman and her grandfather try to con the Lancers out of $500 to pay a gambling debt.

Johnny gets more than he bargained for when he goes after a horse trader who cheated him and ends up taking care of the trader's feisty 10-year-old niece.

Three men come to Morro Coyo to kill Scott, who they are convinced is responsible for the deaths of a group of fellow inmates during an escape from a Confederate prison during the Civil War.

Scott and his friend Josh, a Lancer ranch hand, try to rescue Josh's fiancée, who was kidnapped by outlaws during the wedding ceremony.

A man with a vicious dog and a grudge against Jelly terrorizes Murdoch, Teresa and Jelly at Lancer while Scott and Johnny are away on a cattle drive.

Scott is duped by the attractive daughter of an Irish con artist whose family is robbing and intimidating the community.

When Murdoch goes to the town of Mesa Roja to bury the hatchet with an old enemy, he is shot in the back and then disappears.

Trying to avoid violence, Johnny ends up on the wrong side of a range war against Murdoch and the other ranchers of the valley.

The Lancers' plan to build a jail in Spanish Wells unintentionally sets an old handyman against his former protégé, a saloon owner who is the puppet of the leader of a gang of toughs.

Teresa's mother - a ne'er-do-well who ran off when Teresa was born - returns to demand custody of her daughter.

A grifter comes to town to cheat the locals in a phony land deal, straining the friendship between Murdoch and a neighbor who once saved Murdoch's life.

Murdoch sends Scott and Johnny to rescue an old friend's daughter, who is about to marry a charming, manipulative and abusive man.

After a family of highway robbers shoots Scott and kidnaps Teresa, she begins to sympathize with one of her captors.

When Sheriff Val Crawford is injured, newcomer to Green River, Clay Crisswell takes over temporarily. His civilized ways and the ability to subdue the rougher element of Green River without a gun make him popular with the businessmen, but things may not be what they seem.

After being stranded in the desert, Scott is found and taken in to an abandoned mine by an inquisitive young boy. But the boy's family includes an outlaw uncle who plans to kill Scott and pass the body off as his own.

A schoolteacher encounters hostility and harassment when he arrives to start a school in a ranching community that has had no teacher before. When the teacher disappears after being taken out of town by night riders, his wife decides to continue in his place, and Johnny assists her despite continued resistance from children's parents.

Murdoch leaves on a stage for Yuma in hope of disproving assumptions that he's getting too old to take care of himself. But on the way, he and the stage driver are held up and left for dead. They walk to the town of Blessing, which they find is run by a crooked town boss who has the stage robbers in his employ.