God help us, another segment described by Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-hours Tour as “considered by many the show’s finest hour.”  There’s the first clue — it is 30 minutes long, but feels like an hour.

Michael Dunn, the 20th century’s Peter Dinklage, returns to his master’s house on horseback and tells them that everyone they are looking for is busy or dead or both.  They suggest Dylan Evans, so the diminutive Dunn continues his ride.

Sadly, Evans is about to croak himself.  First he was sick with the plague, now he is sick with the famine.  The family has not eaten in a week.  Dunn tempts Evans’ wife with talk of lamb, eggs, onions, bacon, bread, cake, cheese . . . but there is no way Evan can make the trip.

The deal is that Evans is a sin-eater.  Upon the death of a villager, the corpse is surrounded by a smorgasbord.  By eating the food laid out near the corpse, the sin-eater absolves the deceased of his sins.  Sounds a little too convenient during a famine, like God telling Joseph Smith that multiple teen wives were the way to salvation.

Unfortunately, Dylan is too sick to make the journey, so his wife comes up with a plan. She will send their son Ian to be the sin-eater.  He is to send the mourners out of the room and stuff the food into his cloak, bringing it back home for their family.  He protests that he doesn’t know the routine, but his mother assure him it is just a lot of wailing and moaning.

So Ian and Dunn go back to the Craighill house.  Ian is spotted right away as a phony, just a boy, not a real sin-eater.  He salivates looking at the food laid out beside the body featuring colors unseen elsewhere in the segment.  He sends the others out and stuffs the food into his clothing.  He is doing the requisite wailing and moaning as he is so frustrated at not being able to eat this feast yet.  The mourners outside take this as a sign that the sin-eating has succeeded.

Despite having not eaten in a week and having a cloak full of food, he runs the 12 miles home without taking a bite.  His mother neatly puts the food in bowls, but will not let Ian eat.  She places the food around his now-dead father, and expects Ian to do some real sin-eating.  He is to be the sin-eater of the sin-eater.  At the thought of his exponential sin-eating, being damned forever, and being damned hungry at the moment, he begins wailing and thrashing about.

I really don’t understand the whole concept.  At one point, it is said that the food must be eaten off the body like Sushi Girl, but that never happens.

And unless I complete misread what was happening on the screen, Ian’s mother was sopping up the sweat on his chest with a piece of bread.

Frankly, a little disappointing.  After reading about how great this was supposed to be, and how controversial, I really expected some cannibalism.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Cyril Delevanti was in four episodes, but must have been small parts.  Alan Napier was in one episode, but is better known as Alfred in the 1960’s Batman.
• Michael Dunn was everywhere and always great — Star Trek, Wild Wild West,etc.  Richard Thomas does a little too much screaming for my taste here, but he carries it off believably.
• Unfortunately, someone had the bright idea of taking horror babe Barbara Steele and dressing her in a burka like Heather Graham in Outer Limits.
• Skipped Segment:  You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore.

Moira (Lois Nettleton) and Ianto (John Saxon) are spending the night in a manger just like Mary and Joseph.  Except there is no Baby Jesus and the man she’s f***ing is not her husband.  Almost identical scenario, really.  Well, they are making out in the hay surrounded by animals, anyway.

When Moira goes back into the house, her husband sickly Owen asks where she has been.  She blames the storm.  He sees that her hair has been tousled despite the fact she was not the one getting blown, so he asks to brush it for her.  Even that effort is too much for him.  After being with the studly Ianto, she is repulsed by her weak husband’s kiss.

Moira goes to see the local witchy woman.  For the price of two lambs, the old woman carves a likeness of Owen.  Although, I hope Moira negotiated that she could keep the lambs’ intestines to use with Ianto, eh what?

When she gets home, the doll moves its head when she is not looking.  When she sees the head has changed position, she panics and stuffs it in a sack which causes Owen to also be plunged into darkness.  When she takes it out of the bag, Owen regains his sight.

Not quite understanding the concept of cause and effect, she then throws the doll into a roaring fire and freaks out when Owen starts screaming in agony as if being burned alive.  Well, WTH did she expect?  She doesn’t remove the doll, but it leaps out of the fire on its own.

She grabs it and runs through the moors, then tosses it in the quarry.  She returns to the house and cautiously enters the bedroom.  All that is left is a charred, smoking pile of Owen.

The next morning, Ianto finds her passed out.  He is not happy that she murdered her husband.  He says he must go get the doll and completely destroy it.  Moira follows him and ends up falling into the quarry.

Owen, is lying in the bottom of the quarry and says, “I’ll never leave you — ever.”  This doesn’t make much sense as it was only the doll that was cast into the quarry; the smoking pile of Owen is still spread out on the bedroom floor of their house.

Plus, if the fall killed her, his threat is pointless.  If the fall did not kill her, she has more opportunities to cut this guy up into little pieces.  And what happened to Ianto?

Never-the-less, it is still a good atmospheric ride.

Miss Chicago, 1948

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Lois Nettleton was in The Midnight Sun looking both literally and figuratively very hot.
• Moira (per IMDb) is spelled Moragh in the closed captions. But Ianto, they get right?
• Skipped Segment: There Aren’t Any More MacBanes.

On a very foggy night, we see a horse-drawn wagon go to the medical college with a delivery, where they take it in the rear.

Inside, Dr. Fletcher is teaching a surgical class using a cadaver.   He spots his student Mr. Tuttle getting a little pale looking at the cadaver.  Fletcher points out that the cadaver has been cut open and sewn back together many times here to save lives.  This additional information does nothing to settle Tuttle, who faints.  This reaction to routine surgical procedures is where urologists come from.

He gets a message that there is a new delivery in the titular rear.  He can tell that the body has been dead three weeks and not passed through a mortician’s hands.  He tells the men to go back and bury it where they found it.  The next corpse is much fresher — just a couple of hours dead.  He is not so uppity about the provenance on this piece of meat, so he gives them $50.

At his fiance Barbara’s house, her father questions where Fletcher is getting his cadavers.  Fletcher responds with a Clintonian dodge that he needs these bodies to teach young surgeons who will save many lives in their career.  He draws a pretty fine line between the grave-robbers and actually robbing the graves himself.  Besides, he claims, the bodies are always bums.  Fletcher says he puts them to work and give them a purpose.  They are a net benefit to society for the first time in their . . . er, life.

Going into the college the next day, he is accosted by an old woman who says he has her husband Charlie in there.  His day gets no  better when he sees the headmaster Dr. Shockman.  He asks for some assurance that Fletcher is not using grave-robbers.

Fletcher dodges the question, saying that he doesn’t ask questions.  The old lady talked to Shockman also, and the headmaster says the police will be called if Charlie’s body is found in the college.

Fletcher places a special order for a dead female from his procurers to be sure Shockman can find no male cadavers on the premises.  It is too cold to dig,so his thugs kill a woman to fill the order.  Hmmmm, special order, short notice, must be female, cold weather . . . $100 for this one; which Fletch forks over.

He lectures the class that the questioning of where the cadavers come from is misplaced.  No individual life is of consequence if it contributes to the saving of many lives.

He changes his tune; more of a scream than a tune, really, as he uncloaks today’s specimen and it is his fiance.

A nice piece, well cast and directed.  I just felt like there was something missing to link his fiance to the grave-robbers.  Maybe if she had just mentioned talking a walk in a dangerous part of town when Fletcher was visiting.  As it is, we are left to wonder, did these thugs just break into her house and snatch her?  And why her specifically?

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Marjorie Bennett (3), Peter Brocco (2,) Ian Wolfe (1), Walter Burke (1).

Carol Lynley and Donna Douglas are browsing in an antique shoppe. Donna sees a statue that is the spitting image of Carol’s husband Bill Bixby.  She calls Carol over and she also sees the resemblance.  The audience, not so much.  I honestly see no resemblance whatsoever between the statue and Bill Bixby.

But, for a cool 75 bucks, she has it delivered, placing it the backyard.  Bixby is less than impressed.  She tells him that she bought it because it looks like him.  Bixby, who complains about the cost on his junior law partner salary says “overruled.”

The Buddy Druid

That night, he has a nightmare about the statue coming into their bedroom. The next morning, he notices foot-steps of dead grass leading from the statue to the house.  That day, he goes to the shoppe to ask about the statue.  I was pretty pleased with myself noting that both Bixby and the owner were saying Drood instead of Druid.  Then Bixby realized what the old man was saying and corrected him.  Kudos for suckering me in, anyway.

On the other hand, there is some really botched composition in that scene where Bixby’s face is directly behind a vertical pole on a quilt rack.  Was no one looking through the camera?

Yeah, real dead ringer.

Turns out the owner, after 10 years, just happened to find a picture of the statue with historical information on the back.  At home, Bixby reads to his wife that the statue is of a “defrocked Abbot of Penicude Cathedral, Father Balamaster, referred to as Bruce the Black.”  This delights Carol as Bruce is Bixby’s name in the episode.^[1] She buys into Donna’s theory that this is Bruce’s great-great-great grandfather.

Bixby continues, “He practiced sorcery, and the religious ceremonies of his particular order were purely satanic.  And the worshipers followed their leader’s habit of debauchery and rapine as well as sacrifices both animal and human.”

And now the bloodline has really devolved . . . to a lawyer — the horror!

While barbecuing the next day, Bixby sees see statue appear closer to him after he looks away for a second, like the topiary in The Shining (or not, I read it eons ago). After burning himself on the grill, the statue is back in its place.  Bixby talks to it, telling it that he is not intimidated by it.

He is caught talking to the statue by Donna.  The grill flares up, bathing them in magic-hour light.  Bixby is possessed by Bruce the Black, grabs Donna and gives her a hard long kiss.  She actually seems OK with it, hoping he tries it again some time.

He continues being a little crazy when he sees an image of Bruce the Black in the fire, and tries to barbecue the neighbor’s cat.  When the maid catches him and he calls her an “old bag”, the party is pretty much over.

That night, he has another nightmare where Bruce the Black suggests that he kill Carol so he can have Donna.  That’s just crazy — that bed will hold three.  He manages to resist.  He goes downstairs and gets a crowbar to destroy the statue.  On the first swing, there is a flash of light and Bixby has become the statue and Bruce the Black is lying on the ground, restored to life.  The new statue still looks nothing like Bixby.

There is an unnecessary scene at the end that just raises more questions, but it is another chance to see Donna Douglas, so no harm.

Wow, two good segments and no filler sketch segment — highly unusual for Night Gallery.  This outting was also unique in that, even though it was not one of the comedy segments, it did have several clever situations and witty lines.  Unlike most of the comedy segments.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Bixby also played Bruce on The Incredible Hulk — or should have.  For some reason, his character was renamed David Banner for that series.
• Is your name not Bruce?
• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Donna Douglas was in the classic Eye of the Beholder.  Ned Glass and Bill Bixby were also in one episode each.
• A Beverly Hillbillies twin spin episode with Jed Clampett in the first segment, and now Ellie May Clampett (or Ellie may not (hooo-aaah!!  misspent youth reading Mad Magazine finally pays off!).
• That last scene does kind of bug me.  Donna takes the statue back to the store to see if the owner wishes to buy it.  Where is Carol?  Is she dead?  What is that mischievous smile Donna gives?  Was this some sort of plot by her?

Gunslinger Sam Dichter comes a-riding into town.  He stops for a moment to check out a man who has been hanged from a tree that overhangs the road.  He could have stolen the corpse’s spurs, or maybe his fine pin-striped gray coat, but he already has one like it.  The exact same ensemble — awkward!

He hitches his horse outside the local saloon, enters and orders a whisky.  I’ve always wondered about that.  When cowboys came in off the dusty trail, is whiskey really the first thing they order?  Seems like just water would be a good start, then maybe some lemonade.  Which is why I would have been beaten to a pulp in 19th century saloons . . . a fabulous citrussy pulp.

He sarcastically asks the bartender if the place is always this busy.  Seeing as there is only one table, and it is filled with four guys playing cards, this is really an overflow SRO crowd for this establishment.

He walks to the table and is quite happy with himself that the men recognize him as Dichter, a gunslinger with “lightning draw and deadly devilish aim.”  Maybe he recognized the card players also — there was Jed Clampett, Jock Ewing, former Tarzan Lex Barker, and Danny Noonan’s father.

When the clock strikes 9 pm, Tarzan reluctantly stands up from the table.  Dichter recognizes him as a fellow gunslinger.  He walks out of the saloon and seconds later a gunshot is heard.  The men at the table say they know what happened — Tarzan got his head blown off just as Dichter had heard that he died years earlier.

He sits down to play the dead man’s hand.  Soon he recognizes Mr. Noonan as another gunslinger he saw killed at high noon in Monterey.  Dichter decides these strange events are the result of “fever crawling into my mind”.  Because drinking straight whisky after a long ride could have nothing to do with it.  I begged him, have the lemonade.

Just as Dichter and Mr. Noonan are about to draw on each other, the clock chimes at 10 pm.  Noonan knows the bell tolls for he, so he is next to walk out of the saloon.  A few seconds later there is the sound of another gunshot.

Very soon, the clock chimes at 11 pm.  I can see why people come to this joint — time really flies here.  This time it is Jock the bank-robber’s time to step outside.  He tells Dichter where he is going and how is is going to die.  Another gunshot.

Jed tells Dichter that he wasn’t a criminal, but a doctor.  He patched up the bad guys so they could go on stealing and killing.  I’m sure it would horrify most actors now, but he makes a pretty good case for the death penalty, and against leftie criminal-lovers.

The clock strikes midnight — which I really expected Serling to save for Dichter — and it is Jed’s turn to walk out the door.  Years ago, in despair over the lives he had enabled to be taken, he killed himself.  Exit exit.  Bang bang.

Dichter — no steam engine scientist — still hasn’t quite cracked the code.  He demands the bartender tell him what this place is.  The bartender tells him it is a waiting room where people await their ordained fate — Hell.

The clock strikes 1 AM and it is last call for Dichter.  He exits and is back where the segment started.  This time, he when he stops at the hanging man, he reaches up and takes the sack off the dead head and sees his own face.

Terrified, he runs to the saloon where the quartet are playing cards again and the bartender already has a whiskey waiting for him.  The last minute of the episode has no dialogue.  In slow motion, the clock chimes 9 pm again, Mr. Noonan knows it is his time, and they all stare at the clock (whose second hand is the only thing not in slow motion).  Very effective.

Nothing startlingly original here, basically one set (although they did spring for a horse), yet it is one of my favorites so far.  I’m always a sucker for a Hell / Purgatory story. And the veteran cast was perfectly . . . er, cast.  Most of the heavy lifting, though, is done by Steve Forrest as Dichter.  His cockiness, lack of understanding and fear are well-conveyed.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Albert Salmi was in three episodes, Steve Forrest and Buddy Ebsen in one each.
• Buddy Ebsen is playing Doc Soames.  It was also a Doc Soames that patched Nick Andros up in The Stand.
• This was Lex Barker’s last IMDb credit.