Well they roped me from the first second.  There is a jaunty little piano tune in the background and a young woman begins a voice-over.  It is so refreshing and unlike the usual Outer Limits opening that I fear the episode will not back it up.

Mona tells us she has lived in the Clarkson Arms all her life.  She admits it has seen better days, but thinks it still has charm.  Her husband Ned is pumped because he was offered his dream job managing Crazy Moe’s Electronics Superstore.  Mona refuses to move out of the Clarkson Arms, though, so he folds like Crazy Eddie’s.

Mona goes to the condo board meeting to discuss who has been buying up units as residents have been abandoning the old building.  The remaining owners are violently opposed to selling out cheap.  The cutting-off of heads is mentioned.  Uh, here’s a less radical solution:  just don’t sell.

Mona now has a cause — you know, other than crushing her husband’s dreams —  to get excited about.  She thinks maybe the mysterious buyers will not want the building if it is full of Radon, so she buys a Radon-Detection Kit.  Although, maybe she should have just bought some Radon.  While she is testing the basement, she catches her married (not to each other) neighbors Shirley and Dom banging ^[1] on top of the washer.  Mona backs her wheelchair into the shadows and is electrocuted.  Yeah, so I didn’t mention she was in a wheelchair.  You think that defines her?  What’s wrong with you?  Anyway, she falls out of the chair, but on the way down hears the naughty thoughts of her fornicating ^[2] neighbors.

She wriggles on her stomach all the way to their 3rd floor unit.  I guess she took the stairs, because how would she reach the elevator button?  Ned picks her up and carries her inside.  At the next owner’s meeting, she is able to hear everyone’s thoughts and discovers they are a bunch of neurotic, unfaithful, insecure, hateful dolts.  Concerned that their unhappiness might cause them to sell out and move out, Mona tries to help with the problems only she knows about.

Everything is easier with cash, so she asks to get in on Dom’s poker game.  The other players are resistant, but she demonstrates her knowledge of poker by reciting the winning hands in order and, after all, brought her own chair.  Heyooooo!

With her new psychic ability, she cleans the men out, but the game also exhausts the viewer.  Her reading of minds is demonstrated on-screen by filming the actors with a fish-eye lens, overlighting them, and having them speak maniacally directly to the camera.  It became tedious at the owner’s meeting, but unbearable at the poker game.  The device might have worked if used judiciously, but in some scenes the grotesque over-emoting occupies over half of the screen time.

Mona tries to set everyone’s lives on the right track.  This leads to a scene of escalating mayhem which shows signs of greatness on a Night at the Opera stateroom level.  Unfortunately, it is undermined by these repulsive characters.  Toward the end, their grotesque inner-selves are indistinguishable from their live personalities.  I just didn’t care what happened to these clowns.

That is not the end though.  There is an utterly unnecessary twist which makes no sense.

Jane Adams was perfectly cast and gives a great performance as Mona.  Every other character is so relentlessly over-the-top that they are repulsive.  The lone exception is her husband.  He is relatively normal, but I have no idea what his character is.  He appears to be unemployed, yet sits around all day in a suit.  He wants a job managing a store, but seems to be a real estate mogul.  He seems to love Mona, but has a long-existing plot to kill her.

It really is too bad the episode went off the rails.  It was fun, well-scored, and artfully directed.  It was just a chore being around these people.

Footnotes:

• [1] Really, they named him Dom Pardo?
• [2] I used the nice word there in honor of Outer Limits’ restraint.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard an F-bomb used in this series.  They do, however, show occasional nudity so I’m happy with the trade-off.