Best episode of the series. That is just based on the presence of Thora Birch, so your mileage may vary. Really, she could have just walked around the titular maze for 22 minutes and I would have been happy; so the bar is pretty low on this one.
The lovely Thora is jogging around the track at school when Wes merges into her lane. There is some cute dialogue involving him asking her out. She declines so Gail, her only friend at school, tells her she needs to get out and make friends. Although it is a scientific fact [1] that smoking hot girls are the loneliest, she needs to make an effort.
Professor Amanda Plummer walks by the table for one of the worst character introductions I’ve ever seen.
Professor: “Hello Gail”.
Gail: “Hello Professor”.
That’s it — even in a 22-minute episode, there must be more than that. Making it worse, 
there are a couple of performance queues that just go nowhere. Amanda approaches the table awkwardly, almost like she is going to ask Gail on a date. Gail’s response is a little giddy as if she is enamored with the professor. Further complicating the scene is the mere presence of Amanda Plummer. She is a great character actress, but you know she’s going to end up nuts.
Gail advises Thora to start being more sociable or she will end up old, miserable and alone. When she heads back to the dorm to schedule some sleepovers and pillow fights — in my mind, anyway — she sees Wes. Not quite ready to practice what Gail preaches, Thora ducks into the campus hedge-maze. Wait, what? Is this a metaphor for negotiating the complex college years? The labyrinthine legal ordeal awaiting a college guy who looks at her the wrong way? Forming mature relationships? No, I think it’s just a hedge-maze, and it works.
Thora walks through the maze. The path is snowy even though there is no snow on the hedges. She loses her way in the maze and walks for a while, getting a little concerned. And maybe rightfully so. Some of the shots show chain-link fences in the hedges — they really didn’t want anyone taking a short-cut out. Finally, she sees an EXIT sign. She pulls out the world’s worst Kindle — some giant heavy thing about 2 inches thick and begins reading as she walks.
She is so entranced by her reading that she doesn’t realize that she is completely alone. She passed no one on the campus, and the dining hall is empty. She goes back outside and sees absolutely no one. She searches the campus, but can find no one. Then she hears music coming from a classroom. She rushes there expecting to find some football players in Music Appreciation 101. She does find the aforementioned nutty professor still alive and a few dead students propped up in their seats. To the surprise of no one, she is insane.
Thora runs out, and even her run, unlike some people’s, is cute. She goes back to the dining hall for some reason. Searching the kitchen, she finds the cook dead with his head in the oven. She grabs a big-ass knife and heads out to keep looking. She sees a menu dated March 2, 2003 — two years in the future.
She heads to the library to look for people. She hears a phone ring. She answers and a voice says, “What are you going to do with the knife?” Turns out it is Wes. He shows her newspapers describing how an asteroid is going to destroy the earth. Headlines say an effort to destroy the asteroid have failed. And that the “UN Convenes Special Session”, most likely to apologize to the asteroid for being in its way.
Everyone has gone to the mountains, or underground or killed themselves. Wes didn’t want to die that way. There were so many books he wanted to read, so he came to the library. Thora realizes that the maze somehow transported her, so she starts back there. Crazy Amanda Plummer shows up out of nowhere like Karl in Die Hard and stabs Wes. In another non-written scene, basically Thora just shows her the newspaper. Plummer hands over the knife and walks out. That’s it.
Thora tries to drag Wes back to the maze, but he dies. Which is actually a good thing, or else there would have been two Wes’s in our timeline. As the sirens blast and the sky turns red, Thora manages to get back through the maze and back to her own timeline. That night at 2 am, she goes to Wes’s room. The final shot shows them walking across the campus at 2 am — there is no one else out, but they are not alone.
Having learned the importance of friends, Thora and Wes will live happily ever after . . . for two years until that asteroid kills them and everyone else on earth.
As I said, this episode started with a huge credit. It still managed to build on that, though. The last person on earth scenario is certainly not original, but it is always fun. Thora was perfect, and Wes was OK. The only weakness was the writing and casting of the Professor — not a deal-breaker, just kind of jarring.
Post-Post:
- [1] By “fact” I mean “bullshit”.
- As Thora wandered around the deserted campus, it reminded me how scenes of some tyrannical or dystopian future frequently seem to be shot at colleges . . . Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, a couple of Night Gallerys, etc.
- And how can dystopian not be in spell-check? Did we learn nothing from The Hunger Games?
- Thora Birch was last seen in The Choice.
- Amanda Plummer was in the awful Lover Come Hack to Me and excellent Stitch in Time.
I got a great laugh from your review (thanks for that laugh), especially when you wrote:
“She pulls out the world’s worst Kindle — some giant heavy thing about 2 inches thick and begins reading as she walks.” It’s called a “book.” People used to read them back in the twentieth century, and into the first decade of the 21st century.
I wrote and produced this episode up in Vancouver for Fox. I was on set with the director for every shot, nagging him constantly until he was ready to deck me (as was Thora). The director was a really nice guy, though he was personally ticked at me because I kept pushing him to get more emotion out of the actors (the biggest weakness of this episode). Years earlier the director (Tobe Hooper) had shot the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, and I expected that he would get the requisite level of fear from the cast, but I wasn’t happy with how things were going in that respect for this episode, and remained unsatisfied through the shoot.
Regarding the maze itself… I picked this location earlier in the season before I even had an idea how I would use it. Vancouver is a boring city to shoot (not the beauty of the natural surroundings, but the city itself) with its omnipresent green glass high rises and the city’s lack of a long rich history, which limits interesting locations for shooting.
At the beginning of the season (prior to the beginning of actual shooting), I had a scout give me a list of every conceivable interesting location in the city. The hedge maze was one of them. I made a note to write a script that would include this hedge maze, and it resulted in this episode, which was fittingly if obviously titled, “The Maze.”
Check out another Night Visions episode available for free on YouTube called “Now He’s Coming Up the Stairs…” It was originally supposed to star Bill Paxton, but ended up with Luke Perry instead at the Fox network’s insistence, which pissed me off royally. But to give proper kudos to Luke, he ended up doing a very good job with the role, and was a dedicated pro who even got a standing ovation from the crew after a scene in which he ate a meal covered with truly disgusting bugs (grubs, roaches) as part of a hallucination being experienced by his mentally-shaky character. We had a handful of “fake bugs” prepared for him to actually eat but he refused to use the fakes. The thousands of disgusting bugs in that scene were all real, not digital.
Wow, it’s scary when a creator leaves a comment. Thanks for the background and behind the scenes info. I really did enjoy this episode; I hope that came through. In fact, I thought this was a great series. I would love to see a crisp digital release some day. And not just the Thora Birch episode.
Also, thanks for your work on A View Through the Window. That episode has stuck in my mind for decades as a really special piece of TV history.
“A View Through the Window” was based on a short story by Bob Leman which I had read about 20 years earlier. I contacted Bob and got the TV rights to the story, after which I re-wrote it (with Bob’s happy encouragement) into the teleplay “A View Through the Window.” I hope Bob liked it. Some things did have to change, based on the needs of a thirty minute TV format.
Bill Pullman was cast as the lead, which pleased the network as Bill had some genre cred and fame due to his role in the movie “Independence Day” which was released about 5 years prior to our shoot.
There was one problem however. Bill was insisting on directing the episode, and he didn’t have TV directing experience. We agreed to his terms, but assigned one of our regular directors (a talented French Canadian director who had directed the pilot of Night Visions) to join him in the prep and shoot of the episode.
Bill Pullman came to us from the movie world, and as such, he expected that he, as director, would have greater control over the script and the editing than he was given. Television, quite unlike movies, is mostly controlled by the writer-producers and not the director. This led to some friction, as I wouldn’t agree to Bill’s script changes. I remember sitting in my office with him for about 5 hours listening to his script ideas, and disagreeing on just about every one of them, which greatly frustrated him. I believed that the script changes he wanted, while making his character look stronger (more courageous and less flawed), would ultimately hurt the story and weaken its emotional resonance. It was simply a matter of “creative differences” and whereas the director would win this battle in a movie, the writer-producer has much greater power in TV.
Bill ( working with Yves) did a nice job directing and acting in one of our more difficult scripts to shoot (difficult from a technical point of view due to the nature of the dual locations and the way they both had to be shot to marry them with post production effects.)
There is one big flaw in “A View Through the Window, and unfortunately it’s right at the end, which is the GREATEST moment in Bob Leman’s story, a very chilling moment with horrifying implications. It’s a shame but we really mangled that last moment in our TV version. Up until the last 30 seconds of the piece, I feel that we did a great job translating the essence of Bob Leman’s original short story, and in some ways elevated it, making it more emotionally intriguing that the short story. The episode was a super intriguing scientific mystery with a smart but emotionally traumatized sleuth who ultimately makes the error of losing his objectivity and seeing what he wants to see – a way to escape from his depression, loneliness, and guilt. A great episode! Well, great until the last 20 seconds…
That ending was the last thing that we shot, and unfortunately, the shoot was running very late and there wasn’t enough time to shoot the end the way it was written. So some of the pieces for the end didn’t get shot, and I ended up having to try to piece something together in the editing booth that made sense. Unfortunately, there were just too many missing pieces that were never shot, in that we simply ran out of time before we could finish shooting the necessary pieces to make for an effectively chilling ending. Painfully, this resulted in a “patch-job” for an ending, and as a result, the audience was left more confused than horrified by what should have been the final eye-widening chills of those last 20 seconds.
Oh well, we tried. Sorry about that, Bob! We almost pulled it off! Too bad we screwed up the very end.
By the way, if you’ll send me an email address, I’ll attach a behind-the-scenes shot of your girlfriend Thora in “The Maze.”