Twilight Zone – The Wall (02/25/89)

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An agrarian society on the other side of a mysterious portal which is being secretly researched by the military.  Night Visions knew what to do with that premise — an awesome episode entitled A View Through the Window.  Twilight Zone once again drops the ball to create a feel-good episode.  They don’t even get the title right.  The Wall?  How about The Gate, The Portal, The Doorway, The Window, Das Fenster?  It’s not about a freakin’ wall!

Major Alex McAndrews is escorted to an underground facility.  We know it is Top Secret because it uses facial recognition technology.  It is either very good or very bad because it allows John Beck without a moustache, and I have never seen him without a moustache.  Some people, you just expect to have hair on their upper lip, like John Beck, Tom Selleck, Joy Behar.

He meets with General Slater.  Not to get all Cinema Sins, but does it makes sense that he is wearing a 1st Cavalry Division patch?  I mean, I know they don’t still fight on horses, but how did their mission evolve into manning underground bunkers?  But it’s still a cool patch, so I’m deducting one sin.  Gnib.

Slater says two months ago, this facility was a particle physics lab, nothing unusual.  During a wormhole experiment, there was an explosion and they discovered this phenomenon.  They put on some welding goggles and Slater opens the vault door.  The awe-stricken McAndrews gasps. “My God!”, even though all he can really see is a bright light.  Slater says they brought in top scientists from all over the place — Cornell, NASA, JPL — but they are baffled by the quantum fluctuations, the gravitational anomalies, and talking to girls.

This gateway is being held open by equipment that somehow survived a blast that punched a hole into another dimension, but they don’t really know how it works.  Or how to turn it back on if someone spills coffee on it.  The military wants McAndrews to go through the gate and report on what is on the other side.  He is a former test-pilot, so they naturally figure he is the best guy to explore a subterranean hole in the ground.

He is not the first person to go through.  Slater shows him pictures of the people that have been sent through the gate and have not returned — a Mexican ( Emilio Perez), a Woman (Evelyn Marx), and an African-American (Henry Kincaid).  Draw your own conclusion there, I’m not touching it.  McAndrews has recently been given a desk job and his wife left him, so he volunteers to go in.

He is outfitted in a spacesuit and climbs through the gate.  He loses contact with the general within seconds and collapses.  He awakens in a wooded earth-like area, and finds one of his predecessor’s gloves.  He soon meets Captain Kincaid and a woman who appears to be Amish.  They take him into a farming community.  McAndrews asks, “What is this place?”  Kincaid answers, “Call it Heaven!” but I notice he’s stepping pretty gingerly through that cow pasture.

They meet with the other officers.  Lt. Perez is a navigational expert.  Again, the military decided this was the expertise needed by a guy going into a hole in the ground.  It worked out, though.  By studying the stars, he has determined that they are not on Earth or anywhere near it.

McAndrews figures out that Kincaid lied about them not being able to go back.  Kincaid admits it, saying that if they went back, the military would flood in and destroy this paradise.  I don’t disagree, but what the hell would they want there?  McAndrews, however, feels duty-bound to report his findings as ordered.  No wonder his wife left him.

McAndrews finds the gate and returns to the underground facility.  He reports that the other side is an agrarian society whose threat to national security is “nil”.  Of course, the military dweebs immediately begin planning an invasion.  McAndrews drops his major insignia on the floor (but only one, I notice) and walks back to the gate.

He destroys the equipment keeping the wormhole open, then jumps through.  I know he doesn’t want the military to follow, but this is all wrong.  First, how did he get back after first destroying the machine?  Second, this just sets up yet another TZ happy ending.  It would have made more sense dramatically for him to sacrifice himself to save the other society.  As is, we get a brief epilog to show that he made it back to this simple idyllic community for a happy life of polio, cholera, syphilis, and shitting in the woods.

Even though they Disneyed the ending, it was still a good episode.

Tales from the Crypt – The Assassin (12/07/94)

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After a first viewing, this seemed pretty good, but not quite great.  Watching it again, I am baffled by my reservation.  It is simply one of the best episodes of the series.  Before I watched the episode, my expectations were high:

IMDb description:  A happy housewife is pitted against three CIA agents, who have come to kill her husband, a supposed rogue agent.

Wow, Die Hard in the home!  Great premise.  Maybe not technically “from the Crypt”, but enough over the top gore could have qualified it.  I envisioned a Home Alone series of Rube Goldberg devices, brutal accidental kills, and domestic mayhem by a kill-at-home mom like Ma Peltzer in Gremlins.

Shelley Hack

Briefly a beautiful Charlie’s Angel, sexy in classic Charlie Perfume ads, and stunning in countless other productions with the word Charlie [1] in them.  I have remembered her for 25 years as an evil submarine commander in the pilot of SeaQuest DSV.  The show quickly became unwatchable for many reasons; killing her off in the pilot was one of them.  She was also in The King of Comedy where she was beautiful and classy, although that might have been because every other character was repulsive. [3]  So I was prepared to love this.

Jonathan Banks

Mike Ehrmantraut has become such an iconic grizzled character on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul that it’s hard to believe he was ever young (or, at 46 here, younger).  I looked forward to seeing him in something from 25 years ago.

William Sadler

Always solid.  He has been in a ton of great movies and TV shows — a fine Outer Limits, Shawshank Redemption, etc.  He was no Hans Gruber, but was a memorable villain as what’s-his-name in the underrated Die Hard 2.  He was even in the very first TFTC episode, The Man Who Was Death; and he was the actor who was Death in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Corey Feldman

Er, maybe not so much now, but this was 25 years ago.  I was expecting the Stand by Me era, but this was 8 years later.

Chelsea Field

I think I confused her with someone else, so this one’s on me.

Janet McKay is the ideal, adoring 1950s housewife.  Even better, this is 1994.    She cooks a nice breakfast for her husband and gets him off; to work, I mean.  She returns home from the grocery store wearing an adorable little dress and finds a less adorable woman in her kitchen.  She says she is a CIA agent and tells Janet her husband was a contract killer.  Qu’est-ce que c’est.

After Agent Simone knocks Shelley out, they are joined by clean-up crew Todd (the formerly adorable Corey Feldman) and William (the futurely adorable Jonathan Banks).  They tell Shelley her husband was a notorious hitman and that they are here to kill him so he doesn’t embarrass the president (back when that was possible). [4]

When they give his name and show her a picture, though, Shelley assures them they have the wrong man.  Simone roughly shakes her in a nice POV shot and shouts, “He’s changed his appearance you stupid cow!  He’s changed his face, he’s changed his hair!  He’s a Hollywood actor! a new man!”  Unfortunately, the hitman went for the Hollywood trifecta [5] and also got his teeth fixed so was tracked through his dental records.

Todd takes Shelley downstairs to kill her.  After a seduction scene with equal amounts of creepiness and humor (your wokeness may vary), Todd ends up dead thanks to Shelley’s quick thinking and a treadmill.  That exercise equipment is dangerous, I tells ya.

When Todd doesn’t return, Simone goes to the basement stairs.  It is a little muddled what happens next.  Shelley has Todd’s gun, and the ladies fire at each other.  They both miss because one of them breaks a heel.  It is poorly edited, but I believe Simone was wearing the grey this evening; plus, she tumbles down the stairs.  However, Shelley falls also, but maybe she was dodging a bullet.  After a brief, leggy tussle, Simone grabs Todd’s gun which Shelley had dropped 1) into an open can of paint, 2) in this otherwise immaculate basement, and 3) which had been left open just long enough to congeal just enough to prop up the gun.  When Shelley runs away, Simone fires with the paint can still on the muzzle.  The director cuts away quickly, but we are led to believe she was killed in an explosive backfire; deadly, albeit in lovely Sherwin-Williams Rhapsody Lilac.

Shelley runs upstairs and dispatches William quickly and viciously.  Just when you think she is safe, Simone reappears less dead and less lilacky than I expected.

The twist that follows is Ludacris, and maybe that’s what bothered me on the first viewing.  However, in the TFTC style (the ideal, not what it sometimes lapses into), it makes complete sense.  The still goofier, winking epilog even comes across as reasonable and charming (thanks to Ms. Hack).

Of course, Shelley Hack was great.  I never understood why she wasn’t a bigger star.  The others were also very good in their roles.  That includes, to my surprise, Corey Feldman.  I’m convinced he could still come back big given the chance.  Unfortunately, William Sadler appeared only in the Cryptkeeper segment.

So I guess it took a second viewing to get into the spirit of the episode.  Final rating: Excellent.  Maybe I should Give Ray Bradbury Theater another chance.

Footnotes:

  • [1] Charlie?  Why does a perfume have a man’s name? [2]  OK, could be short for Charlene, but how many sexy Charlene’s have you ever known?  Plus, in 1973, the Viet Nam War was still fresh in everyone’s mind — why name your product after the enemy.  Just lucky it wasn’t released after VJ Day, I guess.
  • [2] I see on Wiki that it was named after the founder of Revlon.  What kind of controlling, egomaniacal dude names a woman’s product after himself?  What a douche — oh, sorry Dr. Masengill.
  • [3] I forgot the nice woman Rupert dragged to Jerry’s house.
  • [4] The president when this episode aired was Bill Clinton, so this comment is really a perennial.
  • [5] Boob jobs lead to a Superfecta for women.  Could be even more, but who wants to deal with the bleach?

Outer Limits – The Human Operators (03/12/99)

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Well this is just great!  I don’t say that in sarcastic exasperation, as might be expected.  This was a legitimately great episode.

Man — no names in this one — is kept as a prisoner on a ship which travels endlessly through the universe.  Like his father before him, he is the sole passenger and is kept alive only to perform repairs on the ship.

This is another Outer Limits episode like Trial by Fire or Quality of Mercy.  It is so good I am uncomfortable mocking it.  The story is great, the script is great, the performances are great, it looks great.  It probably even smells good.

Just watch the damn thing.

Science Fiction Theatre – The Other Side of the Moon (01/28/56)

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Truman Bradley:  Heat, cold, sound.  These are only a very few of the problems that will confront modern man as he ventures into space.

Great news Truman, there is no sound in space!  Again I have to wonder, how did anyone on the production not know this?  To their credit, however, they did not once call the titular other side of the moon “the dark side.”

Professor Lawrence Kerston has invented a new kind of camera.  Unfortunately, he is disturbed by the pictures he has taken, and not just the ones at the playground.  He has not left the lab for 2 days, so his wife has come to nag him in the way that women inexplicably think will make a man more likely to go home to them.  Lawrence says he can’t leave because he has called Dr. Schneider, and he’s coming in.

Katherine says, “Not at 3 am he isn’t!”  Perfectly on cue, Schneider walks into the lab.  The tall bald man is wearing an insanely well-tailored suit, a tie, and has the chipper, self-confident attitude of a casually-dressed man at an earlier hour with a full head of hair.  Katherine apologizes for her husband calling him in at that hour.  He says, “A man with 4 grandchildren is used to getting up at the oddest hours.”  Katherine replies, “Well there are no grandchildren in sight, believe me!”  That’s a nice emasculating zinger, but really makes no sense because 1) Schneider is not either of their fathers, and 2) why would his grandchildren be in the lab?

Lawrence shows Schneider the new camera he invented, and the disturbing picture he took with it.  He has a photo of the moon surrounded by a mysterious corona invisible to telescopes.  A spectrographic analysis identified the corona as being radioactive dust with a wedge of lime.  Lawrence concludes, “Something is going on on the other side of the moon — the invisible side.”

They take Lawrence’s photo to the Dean.  He is skeptical of the new camera and photos “that might throw the world into panic.”  The Dean suggests a six month research project before the news of the radioactive cloud is released.  Lawrence decides this is too important, and sells his findings to a magazine; then the danger is broadcast on the radio.  He is fired faster than a professor refusing to call a student zher.

He lounges around home for a few days, still wearing a tie everyday.  Katherine says maybe the Dean is right.  “Maybe a 38 year old Associate Professor shouldn’t act as if he knows more than everyone else.”  That’s the students’ jobs.

Lawrence goes to pack up his things at work.  He decides to takes a few last pictures of the moon since “atmospheric conditions are ideal.”  Although the atmospheric condition of actually being the daytime seems like an impediment to a non-pro photographer like me.  These new photos are even more convincing and disturbing than the first set.  Even Schneider agrees that streaks in the pictures are “man-made” objects.  I think he just means it was fabricated, rather than occurring naturally.  “Man-made” includes aliens; just not alien women. [1]

They call Washington and are summoned to a meeting with General Evans.  The Joint Chiefs decide we must go to the moon to see who and what is up there.  Seemingly overnight, a rocket is launched to the moon.  In minutes, it arrives and the ship is sending back pictures.  The scientists are amazed at the clarity of the pictures being transmitted.  As they approach the far side of the moon, one says, “We’re half way there.”  Hunh?  Does he think the moon is 250,000 miles around?  The ship is unmanned; there is no need for it to return.  No idea.

The rocket detects intense radiation on the far side of the moon; until it is destroyed by the radiation.  That’s why we can’t have radioactive things.  They do get enough telemetry to see that there are mountains of toxic nuclear waste on the moon.  The last photos from the rocket show a fleet of ships leaving.

Schneider believes the aliens will not attempt to communicate with us puny earthlings because “they must be highly civilized to do what they do.”  Yeah, like your civilized neighbor who lets his dog shit in your yard.  These aliens can go anywhere in the universe, but they choose to drop their deadly radioactive waste on the moon of the only inhabited planet within a thousand light years.

On the SFT curve, not a bad episode.

Other Stuff:

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Schartz-Metterklume Method (06/12/60)

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Elderly Hermione Gingold gets off the train when she hears a local man yelling at his horse and whipping him.  I don’t know if she was considered a babe in her day, but her picture at IMDb makes me start to understand how they allowed Bette Davis [1] in front of a camera.  Ben Huggins is calling the horse an idiot and really is being brutal when Gingold demands that he stop.  When he refuses, she offers to buy the horse.

He asks an outrageous price of 10 pounds because back then horses were valued based on the # of pounds of glue they could be converted into.  Over the decades, the Glue-Book Value became known as the Blue Book Value due to 1934 translation error in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.  Hermione writes up a bill of sale with the stipulation that the man continues to use the horse in his work, but to “keep him well-fed and not over-loaded.”  The man is immediately more caring and leads the horse to a trough while he goes into the pub for a pint because you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

Hermione notices the train pulling out of the station just as Mrs. Wellington pulls up.  She believes Hermione is their new governess, Miss Hope.  She says the old governess didn’t work out and that they wanted someone “more up-to-date.”  Although how that desire led Mrs. Wellington to hiring the ancient Hermione/Hope rather than a bonny young lass is a mystery, not least of all to Mr. Wellington.

On the way, Mrs. Wellington describes how she would like the children handled.  She expects the speaking of French, teaching of history, and lots of outdoor fleeing playtime.

Viewers smarter than Ben Huggins’ horse will notice there is a disconnect between the two women, but it is not clear exactly why.  Is Hermione just a stunningly impudent servant, or is there something more?  Watching at 2 am, I didn’t figure it out, but this created a great opportunity.  Once I knew the secret, rewatching this episode was even more entertaining.  So many of Hermione snarky comments and gestures are perfectly played once you understand the dynamic.

There is no point in tediously recapping every point . . . you know, like usual.  It is just a thoroughly entertaining episode cleverly executed.  I will just note of couple of interesting casting choices.

Patricia Hitchcock makes her final AHP appearance.  After a brief departure in The Cuckoo Clock, she returns to her customary role as the AHP maid, schoolmarm, spinster, or office nottie — in this case, a maid.  Three months later, she would play a secretary in Psycho whose plain looks are used for a laugh . . . by her father.  But really, sitting next to Janet Leigh, who wouldn’t look homely?

They also cast the Bates House from Psycho as the Wellington House.

Two of the children went on to work with the creepiest figures in science-fiction history — Veronica Cartwright with the titular Alien from Alien, and her sister Angela Cartwright with Dr. Smith in Lost in Space.

Other:

  • Special kudos on the final scene.  The outdoor setting and use of deep focus visually set this location apart from the Wellington House.  It is almost other-worldly.
  • [1] Ms. Davis’s URL is an impressive 0000012 at IMDb.
  • For more information about the episode check out bare*bones e-zine.