Adam is having flashbacks of a surviving a horrific car crash.  Suddenly, he sits upright in a hospital bed.  He pulls out his tubes and walks into the hallway.  The hellish lighting and rippling walls suggest he is still dreaming although the absence of topless nurses with white stilettos suggests otherwise.

He walks into a hallway where the floor is rather wetter than one would like to encounter in a hospital.  Then it gives way completely and he sinks as if in quicksand.  Suddenly the scene shifts to an operating room where two doctors are trying to revive him from a coma.  He is showing spikes in brain activity, like you might see from a dude in quicksand or a topless hospital, but is otherwise unresponsive.

But enough science fiction.  Let’s get to the melodrama.  Dr. Carter tells Dr. Neal Eberhardt that this research is going nowhere and he is going to take a teaching gig.  Turns out that Eberhardt’s benefactor at the hospital, Marty Kilgore, confesses that he suggested that that move to Carter, but is recruiting a new assistant for Eberhardt.  Coincidentally after their racquetball game, Everhardt sees his old girlfriend Janice in the park and hires her as his new assistant.  Say, that guy Kilgore really is a benefactor.

They waste no time and are in another patient’s room with her parents.  Eberhardt says, “We want to hook your daughter up.”  The girl’s mother is aghast and reminds him the girl is in a coma.   No, he says they want to hook Lisa up to his invention, the Neural Inter-Cortex Stimulation Array (NISA) to try to rewire the brain damage caused by an aneurysm.  He is honest in saying that there will probably be no improvement.  Kilgore jumps in and assures them her parents that the research will help others.

Eberhardt tells them when he was 8, his mother was in a coma like this.  Medical science gave up on her, but Eberhardt read her the funny papers, “strips like Dagwood and Blondie”.  When she had no reaction, he knew she could hear him.  It was then that he decided to devote his life to the advancement of coma treatment rather than, sadly, the advancement of cartooning.

Lisa’s parents are convinced.  Eberhardt and Janice hook her up to the NISA.  Then they hook Adam up again, and their brainwaves synch up.  They meet each other on this other plane.  He is out of the quicksand, but is still covered by it.  Soon, however, they discover a nice house and have a picnic.  They seem to be having such fun in there, that Eberhardt drugs himself into a coma and tries to join them.  He does go briefly to the titular Other Side, where he sees them smooching.  He is yanked back to This Side when Janice returns to the lab to ruin his fun.  No wonder he dumped her.

Kilgore angily demands that Eberhardt not use himself as a subject again, but easily rounds up more brain-dead saps from ____________________ campaign headquarters. ^[1]  Eberhardt’s plan is to channel other comatose patients to the Other Side.  The first result is horrific as another dude enters the Other Place with Adam and Lisa . . . well, horrific for Adam; the last thing the only guy on earth wants is another guy. ^[2]  The new guy is in a wheelchair, but finds here he can walk again.  Then another guy named Roger shows up.  WTF?

Eberhardt decides that since the people still have functioning brains and personalities, it might be possible for him to go the Other Place and bring them back.  Janice dopes him up and he is transported to the Other Place.  He tests his theory by dragging Roger through the portal.  Sure enough Roger wakes up.  Then has a heart attack and croaks.

Things go bad for Eberhardt.  Kilgore fires him, Janice breaks up with him, and he forgets to cancel his free XM Radio before the trial period ends.  When he gets in his car, I was sure he was going to be in a wreck and end up in the Other Place anyway (which would have been cheesy).  But no, he snuck back into the lab and doped himself up again.

The ending is not totally unexpected, but is a little unexpected.  Maybe just the right amount of unexpected.  Sick as I am of the happy endings on The Twilight Zone, a little sunshine here was welcome.  Part of the credit must go to Ralph Macchio as Neal Eberhardt.  Hey Hollywood, pull your head out of your ass for a change and give this guy more work!

A fine episode.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Fill in as desired. Really, any answer will be correct.
• Especially AOC.
• [2] Your mileage may vary.
• Around the 37:30 mark, Eberhardt wears a jacket that is way too big for him.  This seems to happen a lot in this series.