Aunt Ada is staying with Joanna and Craig.  She peers out the window as Joanna goes through the daily ritual of picking a green carnation and pinning it on Craig before he goes to work.

That afternoon, while transplanting some roses — he apparently has the standard college professor 2 minutes per week of office hours — he sees Ada suddenly disappear. He then sees her in the kitchen having tea with Joanna.

That night, Craig awakens and Joanna is not in bed.  He goes downstairs and finds Ada and Joanna having more tea.  He has some of the tea analyzed, and finds that it is seaweed.  But it is also known as “Witch’s Weed”.

Fortuitously, there is an expert in the occult on the staff, Dr. Porteus (Jonathan Harris). Just to drive home Craig’s frustration, it turns out he is a professor of “Logic and the Scientific Method.”  Porteus says the weed is used by old witches who have used up their present body to facilitate their transfer to a new young body with a big rack.  The weed must be administered in small amounts, say about a teacup-full, over three weeks.

Completely out of left field, Craig goes searching for Aunt Ada’s true whereabouts.  He discovers a grave with Ada’s name.  The cemetery caretaker is shocked that flowers have sprouted on the grave which had been barren previously.  This adds a completely superfluous level of nonsense to the segment.

He confronts Ada and she responds with a witch’s cackle as she splits into multiple bodies.  Suddenly Mr. Logic isn’t so sure of things, so he calls Porteus. Upstairs, Ada casts a spell giving Porteus a stroke.

Craig is sure Ada is going to transfer to his wife’s body 2 days later — even more frightening, his wife might end up with Aunt Ada’s body.  He substitute-teaches in a friend’s class, and drags Joanna along with him so he can keep an eye on her. Unfortunately, Ada casts a spell causing Joanna to sneak out of the class and return home during a brief 30 minutes when Craig has his back to the class.  Seriously, the Life Drawing class doesn’t see this much ass.

Craig is still droning on with his back to the class at ten minutes to midnight.  Now this is what I call night school.  I’m not sure I could have stayed awake through this lecture at high noon let alone almost midnight.  In fact, I’m getting drowsy watching it now.

He finally notices his wife is not in the classroom and is possibly facing death just as she is parking at the house.  Aunt Ada offers her yet another cup of tea.  Craig runs home through the rain.  When he confronts Ada, she spawns several other witch’s identical to her.  He takes Dr. Porteus’ advice and sets fire to his green carnation which is deadly to the witches.

But was he in time?  For the first time, Joanna forgets to pin a green carnation on his jacket as he goes off to work.  She even recoils as she sees the bush in the front yeard. This is a fine ending, but is is played so listlessly that it loses all impact.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Jeanette Nolan (The Hunt, Jess-Belle), Charles Seel (The Hunt, He’s Alive), Jonathan Harris (The Silence, Twenty-Two), Alma Platt (The Trade-Ins).
• Jeanette Nolan was last seen in The Housekeeper.
• In the opening, Rod Serling takes a shot at the Master of Suspense calling himself “the undernourished Alfred Hitchcock.”  Yeah, well he lived 30 years longer than you, wiseguy.
• The subject of the lecture is Aristotle’s Square of Opposition.
• Director William Hales was fired for running overtime due to some fancy camerawork.  For displaying such creativity, he never worked on Night Gallery again.
• Skipped Segment 1: With Apologies to Mr. Hyde — a short one-joke sketch with Adam West.
• Skipped Segment 2: The Flip Side of Satan — A tedious one-man show with Arte Johnson playing yet another TV / movie DJ that no one on earth would ever actually listen to.  Upside: he is killed.

We pan across harsh concrete architecture which suggests correctly that it is a future college campus. The few students present and the shadows forming little cages suggest a totalitarian future (or perhaps the totalitarian mind-think of current college faculty).

Inside, students assemble in a classroom made of Krameresque levels, humanity having evolved out of the need for chairs.  Vincent Price enters and reminds the students that this is the day of their final oral exams.

He begins randomly selecting students and quizzing them on propulsion and behavioral sciences — what freakin’ class is this?  In his questions, be pits white against black, hottie against nottie, Caucasian against Chinese.

It plays out almost completely in that one classroom, and there is a lot of talking.  Never the less, this is one of the best so far.  The story is compelling, and Vincent Price is excellent as the professor.

Of course there is a twist and the standard Serling hectoring about how awful humanity is; but really it is the story and the performances that make the episode — which is preferable to dumping all the weight on a twist ending.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.
• Strangely, this is the second segment in this episode which requires live actors to play corpses / frozen people.  It is similarly off-putting here (in a good way).
• Skipped Segment 1:  The Merciful is a twist on The Cask of the Amontillado.  For a change, it is one of the short sketches that actually works.  The title is a mystery as it would have made more sense to somehow reference the original story title.  Once you see the bricks being laid in the first shot, either it’s spoiled or it’s not, anyway.
• Skipped Segment 2:  Satisfaction Guaranteed also works better than most.  The payoff is a little strange, even pornographic if you’re of the mind.  But Victor Buono’s performance and a few cute 70’s babes save the day.  Due to a switcheroo by NBC, IMDb has this segment replaced with Witch’s Feast,
• Hulu sucks.

First off, out of the pilot + 8 episodes, this same house exterior is used in at least 3 episodes — not the same stock shot, but new filming at the same house.  Maybe four, but life is too short to go back and look for it. It’s too trivial a point to detract from the story; it’s just curious.  This time it is used as Soames Funeral Home.

A hearse pulls up in front of the funeral home and two men haul a casket inside.  E.G. Marshall (Creepshow) is doing an atrocious hand-job of playing the organ.  OK, it’s a TV episode, no one expects you to learn to play, but generally the notes change when the hands move.

He takes possession of a dead body from the county for $100.  The corpse is a pauper who will be put in the ground with a simple wooden marker.  No flowers, no mourners.  As the gravediggers lower the box into the hole, they comment how light it is. Hmmmmm, I wonder . . . .

On his way back to the funeral parlor, he is stopped by police to warn him of an escaped convict in the area.  Hmmmmm, I wonder . . . .

Sure enough, that night, a bleeding Desi Arnaz Jr. breaks into the funeral home (there must be synonym).  He has broken a window and climbed in despite hearing Marshall singing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, suggesting multiple people would be inside.

Arnaz peeks into the party room and sees that Marshall was singing to a corpse sitting straight up in a chair at the table.  Marshall is strangely accommodating, allowing Arnaz to lay on the couch and rest up.  Maybe he is confused and thinks he can get Arnaz to sing Babalu at the party.

Arnaz tells Marshall that he is facing jail for murder, and suddenly lapses into 1940’s film noir mode, “The only hand I ever got was the back of it, a kick in the pants, a taste of the sidewalk.”  Good stuff, but seems out of left field especially coming out of Arnaz’s baby face.  He finds it ironic that first warm, living person who cared in his life is in a funeral home.

Arnaz awakens to Marshall singing Jolly Good Fellow again.  He finds Marshall in the basement, in the middle of a party with his wife, mother, daughters, brother — all corpses propped up at the table, although looking very life-like.  He introduces the first corpse we saw as being his father.  This is the family he has constructed away from the competitive cruel world outside.

I think Arnaz can see the writing on the wall.  When the doorbell rings, he is ready to bail, even if it is police.  Marshall stops him on the stairs.  The police bust in when they hear gunshots.  They see blood on the floor, despite the fact Arnaz did not make it that far, and follow it to the basement — where Marshall has managed, within seconds, to drag the literal dead weight of Arnaz back to the celebration and prop him up in the role of his son.

The cops arrive at the party just in time to see Marshall join the guests by plopping down dead in his chair from a gunshot wound.  So Marshall did that dragging and propping up all after being shot?  Presumably Arnaz died of his previous wound, but the timing is pretty unlikely.  The policemen slowly back out of the room.

Arnaz is the weak point here, just not selling his character as a convicted murderer. That isn’t enough to ruin the episode, though.  Marshall’s performance, the scenes of the corpses sitting around the table, and the episode direction in general make this a good one.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy: None.
• I’m sure E.G. Marshall — from 12 Angry Men, The Caine Mutiny, The Defenders, and other classics — would have enjoyed having his legacy reduced to “the bug guy from Creepshow.”
• Desi Arnaz Sr. was a very smart guy by all accounts, but he and wife Lucille Ball didn’t have much imagination, naming their kids Desi and Lucie.
• The corpses sitting around the table are live actors — uncredited, so I wonder what they got paid.  Being so lifelike makes the scene even creepier. I’m not sure I noticed them barely moving, or was anticipating it because I had read that they were real people — either way, that just added to the creepiness.
• Hulu sucks

The real  George Maharis is driving through the city when he loses control of his hand.  He bursts through some construction barricades and nearly runs down a pedestrian.  So the hand also apparently controls the feet since he did not stop.  Also the arm, since the hand itself doesn’t really have much leverage to steer a car.

He goes to a surgeon and requests that the doctor amputate his hand.  The doctor sees nothing wrong with the hand. Thanks to several inter-cut shots, we see the hand contorting.  Also being bathed in a strange psychedelic pulsing light which you might think would catch the doctor’s eye.

Maharis grabs the doctor’s prescription pad and scribbles a Latin phrase that neither recognize.  And the handwriting is awful — maybe it has been the pads’ fault all these years.  He says the hand has attempted murder three times and he is afraid it will eventually be successful.  When the doctor refuses to cut off his hand, he grabs a heavy bust in the office and slams it down onto his hand.

That show of commitment seems to change the doctor’s mind and he goes through with the amputation.  Actually, we are supposed to believe that the damage done to the hand made amputation “mandatory”, but in the operating room, it seems pink and rosy and functional and unbruised.

He tells the story of almost running over the pedestrian again to a psychiatrist, complete with the same footage being replayed.

Also how, while making a phone call, he involuntarily called a strange number and identified himself as Borgus Weems, a name he had never heard before.  Actually, I don’t think anyone has ever heard that name before.  So in addition to the foot and the shoulder, the hand also controls the mouth.  When the man he called tracks him down, the hand tries to stab him with a letter opener.

Then he recounts how the murder tried to kill his fiancee.  So in addition to the hand, the shoulder, the foot and the mouth, it also controls his legs which carried him to her apartment. He pulls the gun on her, and struggles to lower it.  He manages to drop the gun and at that moment decides that the hand has got to go.

The surgeon decides to bring in another consultant, this one a detective.  He recalls that a man named Borgus Weems previously rented Maharis’s apartment.  He also dabbled in the black arts, naturally.  Turns out someone had lopped off Weem’s hand at the wrist. His sister, now Maharis’s squeeze, and the other men he tried to kill were both complicit in his maiming and murder.

The doctor sees Maharis getting agitated so he writes him a prescription.  Now the doctor’s hand is possessed and he writes that same Latin phrase again.  Luckily the detective not only speaks Latin, but recognizes it as a quote from Virgil, “Arise my avenger, out of my bones.”  The doctor stares in disbelief at his hand.

No, this isn’t the wind. The Detective’s hair was like this in every shot.   Make-up!!!

An OK story — far from original, but I never deduct points for that — but it is weakened by its goofy structure.  At times I had to orient myself between past and present based on whether Maharis had one or two hands.

Post-Post:

• Borgus: The concept that a global human consciousness will form, manifested as the nexus of all written knowledge on Earth and the inter-connectivity of that information through computer networks — Urban Dictionary.
• Parson Weems fabricated the anecdote about George Washington’s honesty vis-à-vis the cherry tree.  Oh, the irony.
• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Patricia Donahue and William Mims were in one episode each.
• Two lame short segments not deserving a post (even by me!) starred Leslie Nielsen, Joseph Campanella, and Sue “Lolita” Lyons.
• Hulu sucks.

Starting Season 2 on Hulu because I’m not sure the box is worth $23 at Amazon.  Outside of the Pilot, NG has had zero rewatch potential.

This whole episode is a cornucopia of 60’s and 70’s stars.  In this segment,  we get Michael Constantine (Room 222), Bernie Kopell (Get Smart, Love Boat) and Clint Howard (geez, everything from Gentle Ben — Christ, a show about a kid who has a full grown BEAR for a pet! —  to Arrested Development, with one iconic episode of Start Trek in between).

10-year old Clint is at a TV studio with his grandfather.  They have given him a spot doing commentary, apparently having the same criteria for maturity as MSNBC.

He begins talking about some books he’s read and a telescope he hopes to get, driving the station manager crazy at the banality.  Then he gets very serious and describes a missing girl being found, and an earthquake occurring the next day.

Despite Clint’s track record of having been 100% right on previous predictions, the station manager is outraged and threatens to fire everyone and burn the tape.

Of course, Clint is 100% correct, so we flash forward 18 months (during which young Clint has not grown an inch).  Finally, after a year of public predictions being 100% correct, a doctor is sent to study Clint.  The government also sends a man to monitor every show.

While getting made up for the day’s show, Clint gets very anxious and wants to go home.  He is cajoled into staying,and makes a prediction of an event the next day which will turn earth into a paradise with everyone loving each other.  Of course, he is lying.

The next morning, Clint admits the sun is going supernova and will incinerate the earth.  Unfortunately, the episode takes a couple of minutes making this revelation when the audience gets the gist in a few seconds.  Also, the cast seem to be bathed in a amber light, but the event doesn’t happen until tomorrow, so why the special lighting?  Clint even points to the sun and says tomorrow it won’t be like that, indicating that today, the sun is normal.  Maybe it was just magic hour.

Other than botching the twist, everything was pretty great, especially Clint Howard.  I give it a 6.5 on the Richter Scale.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Michael Constantine was in another heliocentric episode, I am the Night – Color Me Black.
• Nice opening shots in what I assume was an actual production studio at NBC.  It’s like old-time NASA with the bulky equipment.
• John Badham went on to direct Blue Thunder, WarGames and Saturday Night Fever.
• Hulu sucks.