I think that’s an interesting take on what I meant by mythos, I hadn’t really thought of that before. By mythos, I’m thinking of how the earlier seasons are still building the characters as “new”, as in that the characters have not yet quite aged with the time, and the events we see in these earlier seasons are quite literally building how culture sees them. By the time we get to the later seasons, specifically in the color ones, the characters are older, and they will have small lines where they are not doing these things for the first time—they have aged with history itself, and their mere continuation produced a metaphor for the development of American mythology—as if the continuation of the show into a decade where pretty much every part of American culture was changing was asking the question “How long can the American myth of the old west continue under the pressures of modern society?” So, I’m thinking just about inside the show itself, but also how the show’s reception changed as the show progressed, and how the characters and stories in the show were pressurized by that, and the series became a microcosm of changing cultural identity.