I don’t want to bury the lede, so:  I’m surprised someone didn’t bury the leads.  These three lifeless nobodies are so dull that they bring down the episode.  It was never going to be MacBeth, but it was a perfectly adequate story with a twist at the end.  OK, maybe it was MacBeth. ^[1]  

How much time is left in this episode?

Actually, Arnold Burton is timing an egg above.  At the right precise second, he takes the egg from the water and places it in one of those egg cups that I’ve never seen anyone use and usually in movies looks too top-heavy to be practical.  Don’t be too impressed — Chester the butler was spotting him the whole time.

Clearly, Arnold is a kept man.  Despite having no job, he is dressed in a snappy suit and tie at the crack of eight for no other reason than to bring breakfast on a tray to his chronically sick wife Elizabeth who is ringing a bell from her bed.

A new nurse is starting today and Elizabeth expects she will just be some floozy.  Arnold reminds her that she actually did the hiring.  This woman is just nasty.  AHP stacked the deck by casting an actress that is 2 years older than her husband.  In Hollywood, that usually means you’re playing the mother.  They also gave her the high-forehead / tall-hair look that made Margaret Thatcher such a sexy mama in the 1980’s

Chester picks Miss Grecco up at the train station and brings her to the house.  Sadly, this role is also poorly cast.  I think she is supposed to be a beauty, but I’m just not seeing it.  Arnold nervously tries to make small talk.  While Miss Grecco rings his bell, Elizabeth rings her bell.  After being introduced to Elizabeth, Miss Grecco goes to freshen up.  This gives Elizabeth a chance to further berate Arnold for hiring a “chorus girl from the Folies Bergère.”

Six months later, Elizabeth is in her wheelchair, sitting outside with Arnold and Miss Grecco.  Arnold is reading a Shakespeare poem to her.  She calls it “romantic glop” and says he reads it badly.  He hands the book to Miss Grecco.  Funny how it falls open to The Rape of Lucrece. ^[3] She wisely chooses another piece and is much better at the reading.

Late that night, Arnold is in the kitchen having a warm milk and appreciating that Jack Paar isn’t still telling jokes about Nixon every night even though he lost the election months ago.  Miss Grecco enters and he gets her a milk.  After a very lame rebuff, they start kissing.  She makes it clear that if he expects these shenanigans to continue, she expects him to marry her.

The chemistry here is ELECTRIC, I tells ya!

He confesses he has no money of his own, and just hanging out with no duties, at the beck and call ^[2] of an unbalanced authoritarian invalid has prepared him for no job except Vice-President.

Hmmm, how could he be no longer married, yet become financially independent?  Hmmm, I wonder.  Check the name on the door, baby — AHP!  Similar to the plot in OSB’s Image of Death, Arnold and Miss Grecco come up with a plan to slowly poison Elizabeth’s food.  Wait, that’s exactly the murder plot in Image of Death!

They begin poisoning Elizabeth with very small doses, expecting it to take about 2 months.  The plan is foiled half way through when she fires Miss Grecco for having no first name.  Also Elizabeth catches Arnold and her smooching.  She proclaims that she will hire the next nurse, again overlooking the fact that she hired Miss Grecco.  

A few days later, she informs Arnold that she has hired a replacement, and that he will not like her.  He goes downstairs and meets the new nurse who is unattractive and old enough to be his mother (I probably need a comma in there somewhere).  There is some unnecessary misdirection here, but it is quickly revealed the new nurse really is his mother!  And, guess what, she is totally on-board with murdering Elizabeth!  But still won’t shut up about the piece of gum he stole when he was six.

First of all, major kudos for foreshadowing that Elizabeth had never met her mother-in-law.  It was just one line spoken several minutes ago.  How many series covered here would have sewn up that plot hole so nicely? 

However, the episode was a bit of a slog.  Who to blame?  Writer Henry Slesar was a machine, cranking out dozens of fine AHPs.  Director Arthur Hiller went on to make The In-Laws, so he gets a lifetime pass.  So I guess I have to fault the actors, especially Scott McKay as Arnold.

A rare miss this week for AHP.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  In which Shakespeare basically says a woman is nothing but a vagina.  With a quill like that, how did he get Anne Hathaway?
• [2]  What does that phrase even mean?  Can you just be at the beck of someone, but not at their call?
• [3]  It should go without saying, nothing funny about rape.  Just not what you expect from The Bard (I won’t even link the dreadful TZ episode of that name).
• Cheers for the civic-minded Lillian O’Malley (Arnold’s mother)!  She appeared as “Townswoman” four times in The Virginian, once in the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, eleven times in Laramie, twice on Frontier Circus ^[4], nine times on The Deputy, twice on The Tall Man, twice on Riverboat, once on Johnny Staccato, ten times on Cimarron City, five times on The Restless Gun, and twice on Trackdown.
• [4]  Frontier Circus sounds like the name a foreign market would give to F-Troop.
• I always feel like I’m on the right track when I agree with bare*bones e-zine.  Tip o’ the hat for suggesting Peacock also.