What the?  I have stumbled unwittingly into the second season.  For budgetary reasons, they switched to black & white.  Ya know, it’s easy to make funny jokes at this show’s expense even if there is no evidence of that here.  I bought a book about the series and now have more sympathy for what they were trying to do and the limitations they worked under.

“This is an electrocardiogram,” the narrator tells us while fortuitously showing a picture of an electrocardiogram.  Mechanic Warren Stark is working on a Volkswagen — no wait, he’s a doctor working on a big fat guy lying on his back.  Dr. Stark tells the the patient, Tom Horton, that his EKG looks fine, but that he might want to keep an eye on those brake pads.  And WTF decided the abbreviation for electrocardiogram should be EKG?

Dr. Stark warns Horton that his EKG might look fine, but that is while lying down in a comfortable office.  On his job as a cop, pounding a beat, it might be different.  Then his hatchet-faced wife chimes in, nagging him about retiring.  Although being at home with this shrew is not the Rx for a long life either — his or hers.

The next day there is a massive train derailment.  The District Attorney and head of the State Insurance Company visit Dr. Stark.  They tell Dr. Stark that the engineer was a patient of his.  The man died of a heart attack and caused the massive crash.  The autopsy showed the engineer had a bad heart, yet just a week before Dr. Stark and given him a clean bill of health.

Stark again uses the “in the office” excuse.  He says the engineer’s EKG looked fine in the office but could not possibly reproduce the stressful environment on a train.  After all, the strain of having a union job, a bottomless pension, generous healthcare, and the responsibility of guiding a beast which rides on unmovable steel rails to an inevitable destination simply cannot be duplicated in an office.

Stark gets a call from his wife.  Journalists are saying the train crash was his fault after finding no possible way to blame it on 10 year old Donald Trump.  They say “he passed the engineer without giving him a thorough examination.”  The two men tell Stark that a coroner’s jury will determine his guilt in the deaths of 24 passengers.  He could be charged with “malpractice, criminal negligence or even manslaughter.”  The jury finds him not guilty, but his reputation is shot.

That night, while he is checking the want-ads, his son asks for help with his homework about the weather.  Junior wants to know, “How do they make the forecasts so accurate,” so he is no brainiac either.  Dr. Stark describes how a system of high altitude weather balloons, telemetry, historical data, complex models, and high school graduate celebrities are able predict a blizzard everywhere Al Gore goes to lecture, and 20 out of the last 3 hurricanes.  That gives Dr. Stark an idea.

He wonders if such telemetry could be broadcast from the heart.  He works all night on his idea and presents it to Dr. Tubor ^[1] in the morning.  It would be a radio-EKG broadcasting the titular signals from the heart to a central database.  Stark says they would “have a continual picture of his heart action at all times.  When he’s playing or working or arguing with his wife.  EVERYTHING!”  I don’t know about his patients, but I can hear Mark Zuckerberg’s heart palpitating from here.

The two men work for days to create the transmitters that could broadcast heart data.  Tom Horton stops by for another exam.  They decide to use him as a guinea pig (no police pun intended).  They remotely chart Horton’s EKG for 3 hours without a blip.  Suddenly there is a spike that indicates he is running.  And frankly, the escape of the young thug is the most exciting 10 seconds I’ve ever seen on this series.  Sadly, it is too exciting for Horton and he has a heart attack.

The police are unable to find Horton.  Despite being the world’s oldest uniformed beat cop, they have assigned him a large area of dark alleys.  Stark has the brilliant idea of calling the FCC although I don’t know who he expected to answer after 5 pm.  They are able to find Horton by triangulating in on his signals.  They save Horton and Stark is a hero!

Holy smoke does black & white make a difference!  This was one of the most enjoyable episodes despite a lackluster story.  Not only does the B&W look great, it also provides a comfort level.  The color episodes seemed like they were grasping for something that they just couldn’t reach.  With B&W, you just accept certain limitations because it is unmistakably from another era.

I don’t think anyone in 1956 would have felt the same way.  I’m sure this was seen as a step back.  Another show that show have stayed in black & white:  the 1960’s Lost in Space.  The Netflix remake should have been filmed in black & black so it could not be seen at all.

Footnotes:

• [1] LOL.  Why would they give a character the hilarious name Dr. Tubor.  I think that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all day.  I know it’s the funniest thing you’ve seen.
• But it’s still better than Toomer.