From Rod Serling’s Intro:  “I presume that most of you, in moments of weakness or spasms of compassion, have picked up a hitchhiker.”

Really?  Was it that common?  This episode was aired in 1971, a year after the Charles Manson trial.  Not that his shenanigans were related to hitchhiking, but I would think it might have put people off the idea of inviting strangers into their cars for a while.  Maybe it was Texas Chainsaw Massacre that 3 years later made hitchhiking less attractive.  It certainly did no favors for the perception of people in wheelchairs.

Pianist Eric Sutton comes into the police station to report his car stolen.  He was driving around 2 in the morning and picked up a female hitchhiker.  When he stopped at a store to by a newspaper, the woman stole his car.

Three days later, he is out driving again.  He goes for a stroll at the San Francisco Bay, and the same woman hits him in the head with a pistol and “cops the car” again.  The police show him a few mugshot books which are no help.  He insists the detective have the sketch artist create her likeness so she can be picked up.  The resulting sketch is of a hottie that the detective says should be hanging in the “Loover”.

The woman is out shopping and her chauffeur is getting a parking ticket.  Wait, what? The cop recognizes the woman from her Wanted (and I mean, wanted!) Poster and hauls her in.

Sutton is brought in to pick her out of a line-up.  Before they come out, the detective tells Sutton the woman’s name is Claire Foster and her husband is in construction.  She claims to have been with her husband on both nights, but he is in Venezuela where they apparently do not have phones.  Sutton does not nail her in the line-up, but seems interested in doing so later.

Turns out the only fingerprints in Sutton’s car are his own.  The detective tells Claire she might have a civil case against Sutton.  She wants to talk to him and somehow finds him in  a bar.  He says he has been dreaming of her for years.  Because a private detective was too expensive, he came up with the idea of filing a bogus police reports to get them to look for her for free.

She says she has been married “contentedly” for 3 years.  Her husband also has recurring dreams — in his case, it is of a man strangling him; a man with a long scar on the back of his hand.  There is a suspenseful moment when Sutton turns over his hand, but no scar is revealed.  He is not only a pianist but a player — he tells her she is afraid, but doesn’t know how to get out of her marriage.  They kiss in the bar.  He asks her to go on tour with him, she asks him to stay with her.

As they embrace, she deftly reaches behind him for a knife and slices a long scar on the back of his hand, paving the way for her husband’s dreams to come true.  She says she is sure things will work out for them now.

Damaging the hand of a pianist is a clumsy way for the script to close the circle.  Clearly, she intended no injury to him; just to give him the requisite scar.  However, a micron too deep, and he would be doomed to a one-song repertoire.  Surely a career less hand-centric could have been used.

It felt like the rest of the script could also have used one more pass, but it was a better than average segment, completing one of the better episodes.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.
• Title Analysis:  I can make no sense out of it.  But it’s still better than Edge of Tomorrow.
• Claire was played by Joanna Pettet, last seen in The House.  She was very stylish and hot in both, although her hair is just way too long — maybe that was a 70’s thing.
• Two notes on Richard O’Brien who played the detective:  I was disappointed because I was expecting the other Richard O’Brien who played Riff-Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Also, his voice sounds exactly like William Windom.

New schoolmarm Judith Timm has just arrived by wagon.  Things get off to an awkward start when she asks what happened to the previous schoolmarm and gets no answer. This on top of a terse “Don’t Come” letter received before her trip make it clear, that was not the Welcome Wagon she came in on.

When Judith mentions having 17 children in her school, a couple of ubiquitous bitties are adamant that there are only 16.  Judith says she remembers the sole titular brunette child because there are 16 blondes in the class.  This is later seen to be clearly untrue, but it seems too be more of a casting faux pas than a plot point.

That night, Judith goes back to the school to put in a little overtime — as government workers, even on the frontier, are wont to do.  From the looks of that chalk board, she could use a little more time in a classroom — and not at the head of it.  Note the math on the first two problems.

As she is working, she sees the dark boy boy peeking in the window.  She waves at him to come in, but he runs off. That night the bitties bring her tea and a cookie.  She tells them about the dark boy.

The next night, she is burning the midnight oil again — literally.  Oddly, the same math problems are still on the board behind her and have not been corrected.  Again, the dark boy peers in the widow.  This time, Judith confronts him outside.  She has found that his name is Joel and he has been in the 4th grade for two years.  She offers to teach him at night if he can’t come to class during the day, but he runs off again.

The bitties bring her tea and a cookie again, which seems pretty fishy, but ends up just being neighborly.

She believes Joel is the son of a local rancher.  Upon visiting him, she learns that his son Joel was killed in a fall from a ladder at the school 2 years earlier.  The father and others have seen ghost-Joel.  Like a Milford Man, he appears but never speaks.

She goes to chew out the bitties for not warning her that the schoolhouse was haunted.  They expect her to run off like the previous teacher, but she wants to see Joel again first.  Also his father, as she pays him a visit that ends with a kiss.

She goes back to the schoolhouse that night where the same problems are still on the board like they’re waiting for Will Hunting to come by and correct them.  Joel appears again, this time coming inside the classroom.  While Judith reads Joel a story, his father peeks in the window at them.  When he enters, Joel stares him down.

brown chicken, brown cow

Judith and Joel’s father walk hand-in-hand back to his place, Joel following a few steps behind.  When they get to the house, Joel’s father gives the whippoorwill whistle that they used as a signal.  He and Judith hear the whistle returned, but Joel is back in his grave having united these 2 lonely people.

Well done, just not really what I was looking for.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Directed by John Astin who was in A Hundred Yards Over the Rim.
• Producer Jack Laird once again put one of his kids in the show.

This is Serling’s contribution to this fairly ignominious episode.  We start off in a nice western frontier town where Forrest Tucker is beating a drum to draw customers to his wagon.  And by customers, I mean rubes.

He is hawking an elixir, “a strengthening cordial that reinvigorates the stomach, stimulates the liver, regulates the kidneys and restores health and vitality.”  It cures cholera, yellow fever, acne, chills and dizziness of all kind.  Although I think a cure for anthrax or syphilis might have gone over better with this crowd.  Being a humanitarian, he is willing to let this miracle tonic go for only $1 per bottle.

One of the suckers comes to Stringfellow’s wagon and asks him to look at his daughter.  He finds her in an uncovered wagon.  She says there is a pain in her abdomen and it is growing.  Rather than thinking she is knocked up, Stringfellow unsurprisingly prescribes his Rejuvenator and predicts she will be up and around in a week.  He pockets a buck for the tonic and a small honorarium.

As he walks away pocketing the 2 bucks, he is approached by a Dr. Snyder who calls him out on his flim-flammery.  Snyder makes a much more medically sound diagnosis of the girl

When the rube’s daughter continues to “die an inch at a time,” he confronts Stringfellow. Stringy prescribes another bottle of the Rejuvenator.  Another honorarium probably wouldn’t hurt either.  He changes tacks and says that he is actually selling faith, and that “if that child crosses into the shadows, I will bring her back to life.”

Sadly, the girl does cross into the shadows (i.e.croak).

When Stringfellow goes outside, across the dusty road he sees the dead girl rocking in a chair.  He asks her if it is a haunt or a resurrection.  She stands and the camera cuts to Stringfellow and then back to the empty chair.  The girl has disappeared, but the chair is still rocking.  This makes no sense as even if she is still there, but invisible — she had stood up, so the chair should not be rocking.

Then he croaks.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Murray Hamilton was Mr. Death in One for the Angels.  But he is more better known as the mayor in Jaws, and most better known for his cool anchor jacket in that movie.
• Skipped Segment:  Hell’s Bells.  Neither good enough nor bad enough to merit comment.  It does, however, star the always-entertaining John Astin.  He is playing a hippie kind of like Bob Hope would play in sketches long after the hippie era ended cuz a 106 year old dude saying “groovy” spellz komedy.

I wouldn’t normally write about one of the short Night Gallery sketches, but this one fails so completely on every level that it can’t go without recognition.

1. The Title — There is no blood bank in the story.  Then I thought that maybe the titular blood bank was a metaphor for the girl.  Like when Jack Torrance referred to Wendy as “the old sperm bank”  in The Shining (although he could have been referring to his own impotence).
2. The Description — From the DVD menu:  A vampire attempts to open an account at a blood bank but only plans on making withdrawals.  OK, so the title did refer to a literal blood bank.  Well, where the hell is it?  There is no account being opened — the entire sketch takes place in a girl’s bedroom.
3. The Dialogue — As the vampire is about to bite the girl, she says, “I gave at the office” and he withdraws dejectedly.  OK, I get that this references an old joke about dodging people seeking contributions, but does she work at a blood bank?  Is that the office?  I am very confused.
4. The Cast — The girl is played by the producer’s daughter in her only IMDb credit.  On the other hand, admittedly, Victor Buono is great as the vampire.
5. The Effort — Zero on the above points.  The segment only runs 1:36 and 14 seconds of that is spent on the oil slick at the beginning.

So was the wrong segment put on the DVD?  Was it just severely edited for time?  Rod Serling did no intro for this segment — were they just embarrassed to show it to him?  I am at a loss.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.
• Odd Couple Legacy:  Victor Buono was highlarious playing an exorcist.