Twilight Zone – The Toys of Caliban (12/04/86)

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Problematic.

Like the Outer Limits episode Unnatural Selection, this episode uses a mentally-challenged kid as its catalyst.  That isn’t inherently bad, but man is it hard to do well.

Toby, a mentally challenged teenager, is looking at a book and becomes interested in a picture of a unicorn.  He says, “Brinnnnng.”  When his mother calls him and his father Ernie to dinner, it is fairly subtly revealed that a stuffed unicorn has magically appeared in his lap.  It’s a good thing he chose a mythological creature which could not materialize — three inches to the left, there was a picture of a gorilla.

His mother Mary asks if he is hungry and he shouts, “Doughnuts, momma, doughnuts!”  Ernie says no, he had doughnuts yesterday, like that’s a reason not to have a delicious doughnut today.  Even during dinner, Toby wants doughnuts.  Ernie finally gives in and pulls pictures of doughnuts out of a locked drawer.  Before he can give Toby the picture, he conjures up a chocolate doughnut.  Previously, like Amy Schumer, he always needed to see an pre-existing object in order to create.

That night Toby is in pain from OD’ing on doughnuts.  Mary says he only had two, but Ernie points out that with Toby’s improved powers, he could have eaten a dozen earlier.  They call an ambulance.  The hospital wants to keep him overnight in the children’s ward which has a TV and lots of comic books.  Ernie demands Toby must stay in a private room, so I hope he can wish up a good-ass insurance policy.

The next morning, Toby is better.  The family gets a visit from Mandy Kemp — she’s from the government and she’s here to help.  Actually, she is asking some valid questions about why Toby has never been to school.  All the adults are throwing around the R word — no, the original R word — so this is clearly an old episode.  You probably would have never heard the word retarded on the old TZ either.  Strange that there was a brief period when it became acceptable, although the taboos on each end were for different reasons.  But I digress.

Over Mandy’s objection, Ernie & Mary take Toby home.  Once again, TZ undermines itself with an entirely inappropriate score.  Toby has just thrown a tantrum and his parents blasted Mandy.  So naturally we get happy piano music which I swear I thought was leading into the Charlie Brown theme.  Sure, Toby is excited to see a floor-waxer, but the doctor and Mandy are concerned for his welfare, and his parents are desperate and angry as they defy they hospital.  Ernie grimly glares at Mandy as they enter the elevator.  This is no time for the Snoopy dance.

In his room that night, Toby closes his eyes and says, “Bring.”  A magazine Ernie was reading at the hospital appears.  Sadly, dad was not reading the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.  Mary goes in and sees Toby fondling a bloody human heart like one pictured in the science magazine.  She has a heart attack and collapses.  This a little muddled, at least to me.  My initial interpretation was that the heart he was holding came out of her chest. [1]  Other write-ups do not suggest this, and he is clearly playing with something before she collapses; so I guess I’m wrong, but I’m not sure my way is not better.

Some time later, Mandy comes to the house.  She insists that Toby must be moved to an institution.  Ernie decides to show her why Toby can’t go with her.  He makes a suit of armor appear and she is shocked.  But not as shocked as when Toby grabs a picture of his dead mother and wishes her rotting corpse back into the living room.  Mandy runs out and Ernie buries his wife in the back yard.

Just as Ernie finishes burying Mary, he hears sirens.  He fears they will take Toby and slice him up like a lab rat.  He goes inside and looks through his books as we hear more entirely inappropriate, sickeningly sweet music.  He apparently finds Great House Fires of North America and gives it to Toby.  Boom.

I like a simple, high-concept episode like this.  I really felt like Ernie and Mary loved their son, so it didn’t feel too exploitative.  The score, while dreadful, was only really offensive in a couple of scenes.  On the plus side, no narration from Charles Aidman.  That is strange, because this is the kind of episode his avuncular voice might have fit into.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] My interpretation comes from a problem I always had with shows like Bewitched.  Where does this newly materialized stuff come from?  Does it come from somewhere else?  How is the source chosen?  Is it a completely new object?  How was it designed?  What matter was used to create it?  Guess you’re not supposed to think about that.
  • Classic TZ Legacy:  It’s a Good Life.
  • Title Analysis:  Did they really need to compare a mentally-challenged kid to a monster?  They called Anthony Fremont in It’s a Good Life a monster too, but at least he was making reasoned choices.  You know, for a six year old.
  • And, BTW, Prospero was the magician; I don’t remember Caliban having super-powers, but it’s been a while since I skimmed the Cliffs Notes after a few beers the night before the test.

The Dilemma of the Dead Lady – Cornell Woolrich (1936)

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1.

Babe Sherman, “a good looking devil,” is packing his steamer trunk for a boat ride home from France.  He used his looks to fleece a woman out out her life savings earned at the largest jewelry store on Rue McClanahan de la Paix.  He also managed to pull a switcheroo with a string of pearls at her store, swapping out a $75,000 [1] string with a diamond clasp for a cheapo string.

He is hiding the pearls in a secret compart-ment in his shoe heel when there is a knock at his door.  A woman’s voice says, “Let me in, Bebe, [2] it’s me!”  He opens the door and she wonders why he’s dressed and packing a trunk.  He says he’s just going on a business trip, but she spots his ticket to the US.  The get into a tussle about the money he stole from her — one of them tussles that undoes the tiny screws on a shoe heel — and the pearls spill out.

Knowing he can’t let her leave, “he flung the long loop of pearls over her head from behind like a lasso.”  C’mon, how freakin’ long is this string of pearls?  Is it one o’ them 6 foot strings like flappers wore?  If so, how tall are his heels that he hid them in?  What are they, from the Tom Cruise collection?

So, he strangles her with the string of pearls.  It says they are on “a platinum wire” but that seems a little far-fetched.  Babe laments that she is “Dead.  Strangled by a thing of beauty, a thing meant to give pleasure” just like the woman in Florida who choked to death giving a blow job.  Ironically, a pearl necklace might have saved the Florida woman’s life.  But I digress.

2.

As always seems to happen, the porter knocks on his door while a dead woman is on the floor.  Christ, it’s like they have ESP.  Babe quickly realizes the only way out is to take the corpse with him in the steamer trunk.  He unpacks some of the hotel towels, robes and ashtrays, then “dragged her over, sat her up in the middle of it, folded her legs up against her out of the way, and pushed the two upright halves closed over her.”  He slaps a label on the trunk indicating it is to be delivered to his cabin, not put in the hold, and opens the door.

Babe and the porter take the trunk downstairs in an old cage elevator.  There seems to be a concern whether the elevator will take the weight.  So no one has ever ridden down from the 3rd floor with their luggage [3] before?

The elevator lands safely, and the porter takes the trunk to a taxi.  Babe wants the trunk stowed inside, but the driver wants it “tied on in back, on the top, or even at the side.”  How does that side storage work?  Finally a 2.5 X fare persuades the driver to put the trunk in the back seat.  At the train station, Babe tries to book a private compartment, but is forced to share one with a Yank.

3.

Babe insists the trunk be stowed in the hall outside his cabin, but the conductor says it is against the rules.  Babe flashes a few francs and persuades him.  Finally, after the train is in motion, he swings the trunk into it.  Babe discovers his compartment mate is a cop.

When they arrive at the ship, a familiar scene plays out.  The ship steward says the trunk is too large for a cabin and must be stowed in the hold.  The cop says, “Listen, I’m in there with him . . . put it where the guy wants it to go.”

4.

So the huge trunk goes into the cabin.  Babe figures he is going to have to resolve this situation in 2 days because the Frenchwoman is going to start stinking up the joint like a Frenchman.

His first move is to try to switch cabins.  That seems possible until the steward realizes who he is.  Suddenly nothing is available.  He suspects the cop got to the steward.

The cop ups the game by purposely spilling liquid shoe polish on Babe’s white shirt.  He has no way to retrieve a shirt from the trunk and can’t go to the dining-car dressed like that since he isn’t from Florida.[4]

The rest is very episodic, much like Woolrich’s earlier story in this anthology Two Murders, One Crime.  Fortunately, he is great at this kind of story.  Both stories turn into a rambling comedic pas de deux between a cop an a killer.  Both would have made great episodes of AHP.  Chandler might be the great stylist in this collection, but for pure entertainment, Woolrich is my favorite.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] $1.3 million in today’s dollars.
  • [2] His name is Babe, but the woman calls him Bebe.  OK, that’s French for baby, but it’s a strange choice by the author since it just looks like a typo.
  • [3] I never really looked at that word before.  You lug it around; it is literally your luggage.  I wonder which word came first.
  • [4] I am stilled scarred by a 50 year old guy I saw at lunch today wearing a wife-beater.  It wasn’t a 4-star restaurant, but have a little class, dude.
  • First published in the July 1936 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.
  • Also that month: It got up to 114 degrees in Wisconsin.  Bloody global warming!

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Playground (06/04/85)

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We open in the titular playground which looks like it was shot in a sandstorm on Mars with a sepia filter during magic hour.  This dissolves to a strangely constructed shot of a kid in a cage, or in some sort of playground equipment.  There are sticks striking the bars and hands trying to grab him, but no other kids are actually shown.

Charles Underhill (William Shatner) is at home playing with his young son Steve when his wife interrupts them to tell Charles he doesn’t spend enough time with his young son Steve.  I don’t have any idea what this director was thinking, but he sure loves his earth-tones.  Charles goes into the dining room for breakfast.  The table is brown, the bureau is brown, the door is brown, we see through to the brown kitchen, there is brown paneling on the wall, and his tie and pants are brown.  The 54 year old Shatner’s toupee is a rich mahogany.  Even the toast is burnt.

Oops, not his wife, but his sister Carol.  She has a career and is getting married, so she won’t have time to take Steve places anymore.  She chides Charles for not even taking him to the local playground so he can meet some other kids.  She is worried he will never learn to fit in; a misfit who lives with his sister — just like Charles, or countless men on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

That night after work, Charles walks by the playground to see if it is safe for his son.  He sees a lot of kids having fun on swings, on a corkscrew slide, running around, riding a lazy susan, roller-skating, see-sawing.  Things gradually darken so the kids are getting hurt, some are crying, bullies begin hassling one boy.  Charles calls them out and they stream by him like a flock of assholes.

That night, at his sister’s insistence, he takes Steve to the park.  At night, I say.  To the park.  Who goes to the park at night?  A lot of kids apparently, as it as filled with kids when they get there.  When they arrive, the kids stop and stare at them.

One of the kids calls to him, “Come out and play, Charlie!”  He sees them as monsters as they approach him.  To be fair, this is one homely bunch of kids.  He panics and runs home like a little girl.  Well, not like the ones he is running from.

The next day on the train, he is gazing despondently out the window.  He has this exchange with his twitchy, gum-chewing co-worker:

Charles:  How do you raise a boy?

Twitchy:  I don’t know.  You find a cement mixer, you throw him in, you let it run for five minutes, you take him out.

What?  That’s not how you make anything.  That’s not even how you make cement.  And he didn’t say make, he said raise.  Bradbury was a great prose stylist, but some of his dialogue is just painful.

As Charles passes the playground that night. he sees Steve running around having fun with the other kids.  He chews Carol out for bringing him and picks him up in his arms.  Again a kid calls his name.  Charles recognizes it as Ralph who bullied him as a kid.

That night after PTSDing over his childhood, Charles goes back to the playground.  He sees 12 year old Ralph and runs home.

The next night — or maybe it’s the same night; who the hell knows?  This playground only seems to be open sunset to sunrise — when they get to the playground, all the kids stop and stare at them.  And I can’t stress enough how hideous these kids are.  If there were a juvie version of Escape From New York, this would be it.

What happened next actually shocked me.  I expected a long-winded soliloquy from Bradbury on the innocence of children.  Actually, I got some interesting imagery and a body swap between Charles and Steve.  Charles, now in Steve’s body, is once again chased up the monkey bars and the kids are poking at him.

I was surprised again.  I expected Steve, now in Charles’s body, to rescue li’l Charles.  But no.  He mills around, does a little swinging on the swing set.  Makes his way toward the gate, and leaves.  What do you expect, he’s just a dopey little kid.

This was peak-Shatner, filmed between Star Trek III and IV.  Yeah, you get the breathy pauses and the permed brown toupee, but people forget how good an actor he was.  The image of him, with Steve’s katra in him is tough to shake.  The easiest thing would have been for Bradbury to have him go save Steve, they switch back, and have a good cry.  However, with the mind and soul of a six year old, the Charles-body doesn’t know what to do.  He stays away from the crowd.  Maybe he doesn’t fully understand what is happening.  He plays a little by himself, then gets bored and leaves.

Maybe a little too melodramatic, but one of RBT’s better episodes.  It certainly would have made a better debut than Marionettes, Inc.

Other Stuff:

 

Outer Limits – In Another Life (02/16/98)

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TV is never satisfied.  Ya got a dude, he has to have an evil twin.  Ya got twins, ya got to throw in an evil triplet.

We get a fabulous walk through the fabulous offices of Eigenphase Systems.  And I mean, they are really fabulous — modern, open, airy, well-lit, great views and a dude crying in his office.  Mason Stark is looking at a picture of his dead wife Kristin, and remembering how he was more useless than Thomas Wayne in an alley protecting her from a mugger.  It doesn’t help his mood that he has just been sacked for, as far as I can tell, wearing a sweater-vest to work.  A co-worker helpfully reminds him that his severance package includes psychiatric coverage.

About a dozen people are staring at him — stupid clean, open, airy, well-lit offices!  He slams the door and closes his vertical blinds.  He pulls a pistol out of his desk drawer and moves it toward his head.  Before he can do anything crazy, he is transported to an alternate reality where he ends up nekkid on the floor.  Thankfully, a couple of guards show up immediately with a gown and drag him away.  He is shown three cells which each contain a duplicate of him.

Mason is strapped to a chair.  Another duplicate wearing a necktie enters.  We’ll call him Mr. Stark.  See, maybe if Mason had worn a proper suit to work instead of a silly sleeveless sweater, he’d be Mr. Stark.  He begins interrogating Mason.  He asks about the time when he was 15 and his father beat him.  Mason just took it, but Mr. Stark says he kicked the old man’s ass.  Mr. Stark asks if Mason married Kristin.  He says he did, but describes how she was killed because he was too scared to try to save her.  Mr. Stark explains he invented a Quantum Mirror to bring Masons from other realities.

He plays a hologram of the first Mason he brought through.  He arrived nekkid with a huge wound on his forehead.  On the screen, he is called Mason #001.  For some reason, Mr. Stark took him home.  That night, he found #001 with a knife to his wife’s throat.  In a rage, he slit her throat and escaped.  Mr. Stark brought Mason here to stop #001 before he kills again.

Now that Mr. Stark has a relatively sane Mason, he can start returning some of the other Masons although he can only get store credit.  He fires up the Quantum Mirror, and brings in one of the Masons.  Pictures of thousands of other Masons flash by.  Mr. Stark explains that the QM is searching for the right reality to return him to.  What’s weird is that the QM finally stops on #001, and that Mason is transported back to his reality.  But wait, this can’t be right — homicidal-headwound Mason was #001!  And just search in order next time!  You went through 500 of these before finding the right one was #001, dumbass.

#001 commences killing Mason’s friends, or whatever you call people who gawk at you as you are weeping in despair and seconds from suicide.  Meanwhile, Mr. Stark tells Mason that in this reality 1) Kristin is alive, 2) she and Mr. Stark are not married, and 3) she got a D-cup boob job (although, frankly, I think the last one was just a ruse to reel him in).

Mr. Stark believes #001 is “killing everyone close to me — my wife, my business partners.”  Mason corrects him that he is looking at this from his point of view, not #001’s.  He confesses that before he was beamed to this reality, he was going to kill himself, and also thought about massacring everyone in his office.  He even had a flash of other realities where that actually happened.  He thinks #001 is “just trying to put things back the way they are supposed to be.”

Wait, I thought the Mason with the head wound was #001.

They agree “that jerk Balmer” is most likely to be next.  Mr. Stark says there is a car waiting downstairs, hands Mason a key-card, and a gun, and tells him to go to Balmer’s office and kill him.   So Mr. Stark’s plan is to send a man — who looks just like him, uses his car, uses his key-card, leaves behind his identical DNA and fingerprints — to commit a murder?  How did this guy get to be successful CEO?  The callous murder, I understand; but the inattention to detail!

Mason goes to Eigenphase Financials, a division of Eigenphase Systems, a subsidiary of The Squim Group [1].  He finds #001 has killed a woman and has Balmer tied to a chair.  #001 says, “Come on Balmer, how do you like my version of a severance package?” and belts him.  Oooooh, sorry — the correct follow-up would have been to sever his pinky with a cigar-cutter.  See, sever?  Has this guy seen no 1980’s action movies?  #001 shoots Balmer and gets away because Mason hesitates to shoot him.

Mr. Stark sends Mason to a park where he sees his wife, dead in his reality, sitting on a bench.  #001 shows up and Mason punches him out, telling him “to leave Kristin alone!”  #001 says he is just there to spare Mason some embarrassment.  As they watch, a man joins Kristin on the bench.  They are clearly a couple, or else this guy is one smooth operator.

Mason and #001 talk it out.  #001 explains that Mr. Stark, despite his wealth — and they agree, his devilishly good looks — is not happy.  He was using the Quantum Mirror to find a happy version of himself.  He then planned to switch places with him.  He ended up grabbing #001 because he “looked happier than any other Mason he’d ever seen.”  #001 admits this was true “because I had just killed everyone I hated.”  Woohoo!

#001 blackmails Mason into helping him kill Mr. Stark.  They go back to Eigenphase, but Mr. Stark shoots #001 first.  Mr. Stark then forces Mason back into the Quantum Mirror.  There is a merry mix-up — #001 and Mr. Stark are beamed back to the wrong realities.  Mason stays behind in Mr. Stark’s reality where he approaches Kristin in the park, totally c*ckblocking the dude she was smooching earlier.  I’m sure they will be very happy . . . until DNA, eyewitnesses, fingerprints, phone records and security cameras link him to multiple homicides.  So, happy until then.

Another fine episode.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Where did I get that?  It feels like Arrested Development or the criminally underrated Better Off Ted, but is too obscure even for Google.  It was randomly weird enough for me to remember for several years.
  • All this Mason talk and I couldn’t work in the Illuminati anywhere?

The Hitchhiker – Secret Ingredient (05/05/87)

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Chris Taylor is the 1980s:  Yellow polo shirt that might as well have no buttons . . . collar turned up . . . worn under a suit jacket . . . padded shoulders . . . sleeves pushed up his arms.  I guess it is presentism to judge people in the past.  Hey, Shakespeare, what’s up with that air filter around your neck? [1]

Chris is pitching miracle supplement Fit Forever in what appears to be an infomercial, with the exaggerated speech and practiced awful jokes.  When the camera pulls back to reveal he is working this hard in a junky living room for a single uninterested housewife who is ironing, it is a pretty good gag and bodes well for the episode.

Maybe my optimism was premature.  This episode suffers the same lack of coherence as A Whole New You by the same writer.  He meets up with old girlfriend Cheryl in a restaurant.  He got her into the Fit Forever biz.  She has done so well, that she has been promoted, “I am no longer your distributor.  I’m your competitor.”  Wait, Chris doesn’t own the company, he seems to be selling door-to-door — how is that above a distributor?

She says, “I found something inside me that really makes a difference.  I’m stronger now.”  Well, great, you go girl!  The problem is that she mocks him for never having used the product, “not one day in your life”.  This is exactly the opposite of where the scene should go.  Given what comes later, it should have been made clear that Cheryl had never used the product so that we clearly understood later where her new strength really came from.  To  muddy things even more, Chris says “I put you on Fit Forever.”  He clearly means that she used it, but her response is immediately about her financial success so it is not clear whether he put her on it as a user, or put her on it as a career.

The shot so nice they used it twice

When Cheryl goes to answer a phone, Chris takes a look through her sales receipts to poach some customers.  I still don’t understand where they are.  It is clearly a restaurant — there is a cash register, glasses hanging from a rack above, liquor bottles.  It is morning and they are standing behind the bar, so clearly they have some connection to it, but what?  She takes a call — does she work there part-time?  I thought she was doing so well financially.  Why is he there?  In my A Whole New You post, I questioned whether anyone on the set spoke English.  That episode was set in France; I don’t know what the excuse is here.

Chris goes to an old folks homes to talk to one of Cheryl’s leads, wisely making it his first stop because their clocks are ticking.  The old woman says she is no salesman, but Chris says they have a built-in market with the residents.  He says they will all want it for the secret ingredient that makes them feel young again.  All for the low, low price of $5,000 — hey this is starting to sound like Aqua Vita.  While the old woman is writing the check, he sees a beautiful young woman; at least relatively i an old folks home.

She looks even more relatively lovely when she leaves in her hideous orange Volkswagen Thing.  Again, I question the choices.  She is supposed to be an attractive, elegant woman.  Why do they have her driving this German POS (piece of Scheiss)?  He follows her home, as guys do.  When she carries a bundle of neatly-cut store bought wood into her house, he steals mail from her mailbox, as guys do.  He finds a letter addressed to:

Belinda Hascombe

1020 Faygate Lane

Washington

857112

My first though was, they don’t have cities in Washington?  Then I gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought, maybe it is Washington DC (and they forgot the DC, which I could totally believe from this bunch).  I figured the Zip Code would confirm that, but the Zip has a Twilight Zonish 6 digits.  Then I’m thinking, maybe this is supposed to be Canada — who knows what kind of crazy Zip Codes they use up there — but no, there is an American flag on the stamp.  And I wouldn’t say Faygate too quickly, either.  Just amazing.

He does not hesitate to walk right into her house, as guys do.  She is laying wood out by the hot tub, which he coincidentally hopes to do later himself — heyyoooo!  He tries to sell her Fit Forever and its titular special ingredient.  Belinda spots him as a Leo because he such a good salesman.  He tells her she is “an awesome chick” and would make a great Fit Forever distributor.  And believing in astrology, she’s used to peddling horseshit.  Fortuitously, she is having a party that night and can scam all her friends.  Chris opens his briefcase and his sales book is gone.

He panics and drives back to the Sunset Care Home.  He finds Cheryl there holding his book.  She has already copied it and makes a quip about his female distributors that I couldn’t understand even after multiple replays.  I’m sure it was great, though.

I’m not a fan of emojis, LOLs, etc but I did have to LOL at this.  When Chris pulls out of Sunset Care Home, we can see Belinda’s distinctive orange VW Thing ahead of him on the road — remember, Belinda is now back at her house.  They re-used the same piece of film (picture above).  I’m no director, but how long could it have taken to set up a second shot?  Or to edit around the car?  Or to use a more nondescript blue/brown/gray Oldsmobuick [2] that I would not have even noticed?  Or to not compound the problem by having 2 identifiable pedestrians prominently in the shots?  Or to use 2 cameras simultaneously shooting at different angles?  Or to not pan past the orange car, then swing back to actually catch it a second time for a few frames?

Back at casa de Belinda, she comes out of the house and gets into her car which — what the heck? — now has the convertible top down.  Ach du Lieber!  Chris pulls up as she is leaving.  She says she’ll be right back and is fine with the stranger waiting alone in her house with her bank statements, jewelry, and underwear.  I guess she never locks her house since he goes right back in.

Oh, he isn’t alone.  Belinda’s friend Elizabeth is there — her punky, slutty, gothy friend Elizabeth.  Maybe I’m just looking for trouble now, but that is some lame-ass character-naming there.  At least Esther Nairn was played for a joke.  She downs a glass of Fit Forever.  Despite Chris touting the secret ingredient, she says “something is missing” and pours the rest down the drain.

He asks her how many friends are coming to the party.  She says 10 or eleven.  I’ll be charitable and assume she isn’t including herself and Belinda in that count — that would get them the requisite 13 for a coven.  But why would she have even suggested 10, which would only get them to 12 women?  Surely the writer knew a coven needs 13 witches.  Right?  Right?  She says she just hopes there is enough of him to go around which is a pretty good line.  He asks her sign and she says, “Over 1 Billion Served.” What, did some else write the 2nd half of this episode?  Like a writer?

That night at the party, the music is playing, wine is flowing, and Chris is the only man there.  He sees Elizabeth slip into the hot tub naked and joins her.  She grabs a can of Fit Forever and dumps in into the bubbling water.  Belinda and her guests — including Cheryl — now all dressed in white, circle the hot tub.  They chant, “We banish you.”

Belinda says, “Better luck next lifetime” and Cheryl clubs him in the head.  This sequence is pointlessly repeated — literally the same footage — two more times.  The screen goes red and returns to show Chris floating lifelessly in the water surrounded by the witches.

The titular Hitchhiker seems a little more interactive this episode.  A Fit Forever can rolls down the road and he stops it with his foot.  Now just WTF did that can come from?  He closes, “Chris promised a secret ingredient.  He gave up everything to deliver the goods.”  And tosses the can away.  They should call this The Litterer.

I have to constantly compare this to A Whole New You because they are from the same writer and have some of the same problems.  This episode, however, is far superior.  It does not star Elliott Gould, which is a good start to any production.  Dean Paul Martin does a great job as the unctuous salesman.  He is even able to sell some gags appropriated from Steve Martin.  I totally bought it as awkward humor from his character rather than laziness from the writer — and that is almost never successfully done on-screen.  Candy Clark as Cheryl elevates the episode with her 1980s perkiness.

Most of the problems above are just sloppiness [3], not show killers.  They just compounded the problem that this is a pretty straightforward story:

  • Chris was not a great guy, but did he deserve to be killed?
  • Was he just a random dude that they needed for a sacrifice?  I would guess not since Cheryl set him up to meet Belinda at the old folks home.
  • Why didn’t the old woman buy the $5,000 of product from Cheryl?  They seemed very friendly.
  • Was she in on the set-up?  If so, then why didn’t they show her wearing the ankh symbol that the other women wore?
  • What did Elizabeth mean when she said something was missing from the drink?  It feels like that was meant to be significant.
  • Why did Elizabeth pour the Fit Forever into the hot tub?  Actually, bathing in one of these miracle cures rather than drinking it seems seems like a concept that could have set up a much better episode.
  • And what is this freakin’ special ingredient that is so special that they mention it repeatedly and named the episode after it?  Nothing is done with it.  Nothing.  It does not even rise to the level of a McGuffin.  It is a goose-egg.  It is an egg McGuffin.
  • Maybe if the coven had started selling New & Improved Fit Forever with a special ingredient, they would have had something.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert for the 1973 Soylent Green.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I originally made a note about George Washington’s wig, but turns out it wasn’t a wig.  What a yankee doodle dandy.
  • [2] A shout-out to Fletch which co-starred Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (Belinda).
  • [3] The sloppiness is surprising since the director went on to great shows like Fargo and Breaking Bad.
  • The episode did not air as scheduled due to Dean Paul Martin’s recent death in a jet crash.  An HBO spokesman said “on review, some of the lines were in poor taste” so it was replaced by The Legendary Billy B.  You know, the episode about the dead 1960s rock star . . . which Martin was in the 1960s.  It’s not logic, it’s HBO.