Ellen Larabee, not only telling the future, but balancing a tray of cookies on her head at the same time. C’mon, Newland, just because Hitchcock never looked through the camera doesn’t mean you can get away with it.
Like thousands of other couples in New York City, Jim and Betty Hennessey are giving a cocktail party . . .
The guests are trying to get Ellen Larabee to make some of her famous predictions. Like the time she told Marie Cooper her house was going to burn down 3 days before it happened. Or how she predicted Betty and Jim would get married. Arthur is skeptical of her ability to foresee such catastrophes. After much prodding from her friends, she agrees to tell Arthur’s future.
Ellen goes into a trance and describes Arthur’s upcoming train trip. He is immediately skeptical as he has a reservation to take a plane that night. However, it is a Delta flight so this one could easily come true. She drops several other tidbits before she finally “sees” Arthur with a woman holding a knife. This kind of kills the party.
That night, Arthur comes back to the Hennessey’s apartment. He says Idlewild is fogged in and he is going to take a train. I guess he doesn’t want to wait for a flight the next morning, so he’s taking a 2 am train? Nice of him to drop by the Hennessey’s and tell them.
When Arthur gets to the train station, the cabbie tells him he dropped his keys, just as Ellen predicted. Then the conductor tries to give him room 102B just as Ellen predicted. He breaks the cycle by insisting on a different room. Minutes after settling in, the conductor says this room was actually booked and he will have to move to 102B. After some argument, he relinquishes the room to the woman who had booked it.
They meet up in the club car and both order a scotch (presumably Canadian Club) and club soda and a club sandwich. Several more of Ellen’s predictions come true. Arthur has a great opportunity when he realizes Ellen foresaw the inscription inside a ring the woman is wearing: To thee for whose love I rise and fall. [1] Man, if he had played his cards right, maybe he would not have been sleeping in 102B after all. But no, he blows it and lets her read it to him.
Arthur then panics and angrily demands to know if the woman knows him or Ellen. She — by the way, Ms. Big Shot psychic predicted every stitch and accessory this woman was wearing, but did not mention her name — insists that she does not. Arthur bolts out of the club car. Inexplicably, the woman runs after him; maybe he didn’t pay for the drinks. After a chase through several cars, she closes in on him. In a panic, he pulls the Emergency Stop cable.
He wakes up with his head bandaged and the woman holding a knife. Seems that by 
pulling the Emergency Stop, Arthur prevented the train from slamming into a stalled freighter. She says she is a nurse, but that doesn’t really explain the knife. She also asks how he knew to stop the train when it was clear that this sweaty maniac running through the halls really had no idea what he was doing.
Also, cool as it was to know the mystery lady would be wearing a fur collar and a snake ring, maybe Ellen could have also let someone know that a passenger train was going to slam into a freight train that night and possibly kill dozens.
There is not a lot of story here. The dominoes are set up one by one, then they are knocked down one by one (not even in one of those mass falls). The predictions weren’t particularly cryptic which might make you wonder how they could possibly occur. The final one with the knife is dismissed anticlimactically. Still, I appreciated the things that were well-done. So, another quality episode, but there is a certain sameness to all of them so far.
Other Stuff:
- [1] That’s pretty salacious when you think about it.
This might be the worst opening I’ve ever seen to a TV episode. It begins with 83 seconds of Sharon Bannister typing. That’s it. There is no suspense, we can’t read what she is typing, she isn’t topless. It is just typing for 83 seconds. [1]
She hustles Mrs. Trask out, and the cycle begins again. She hears noises, then gets a call from her ex-husband Larry. She hears the door and tells Larry, “They’re coming in.” She picks up a fireplace poker and advances toward the noises. Again, this is so flatly staged that it creates zero suspense or tension. Of course, it turns out to be Larry playing a trick on her. As he enters the room, she calls him a bastard. He replies, “You used to call me biscuit” which is just cringe-inducing. Yada yada, he kills her, which in a good episode would have been one of the yadas.
Well, Mrs. Trask’s loser son Joey has a crush on Sharon, there is a bit over some missing keys, Sharon is maybe not as dead as suspected, Joey gets a gun and Larry finds some hedge-clippers. This plays out nicely, but is just so deadly dull that it is hard to care. As if to really punish the audience, the return of Mrs. Trask is literally in slow motion.
He is taken to the morgue and we get a good look at that wound. There is no exit, so Dr. Ian Michaels reaches in and pulls out a metal projectile the size of his thumb if he had a larger weiner. A tentacle pops out of the hole and flails about before retreating back into Jacob’s noggin. Even more shocking, Jacob gets up and walks out of the morgue.
Meanwhile, Dr. Arthur Gress and his wife Regie are also in the desert. She calls up to him on a ridge to ask if he sees anything through the binoculars. He says, “No, I can’t see a thing, Regie. Better turn off that engine. As soon as it cools, I’ll tape up that radiator hose.” So he has brought his wife to collect samples in the 105+ degree desert, left the car running, knows there is a radiator problem, and risked stranding them in this furnace because the car overheated?