Killer baby!  Always a hit.  No way to screw this up, no sirree!

Pregnant Alice is rushed to the hospital.  In the ambulance, she is screaming, “It’s trying to kill me!”  She is clawing at her belly as if she expects the baby to burst out at any time.

When the new-born baby is brought to her in the hospital, she asks, “Is it alive?”  When told it is, she replies, “Oh, what a shame.”  Hmmmm, I don’t recognize the actress, why does the mother seem so familiar to me?

Husband David comes to see mother and child and everything seems normal.  Back at home, Alice is a wreck.  She says the baby screams and cries whenever David is not at home.

That night, Alice leaves the bedroom and sits on the stairs.  David follows her and she says the baby is trying to keep her awake to make her weak.  It listens to them them talking, waiting for David to leave so it can try to kill Alice.

One of many baby-eisenstein POV shots.

At work, David receives word Alice tried to smother the baby after it had cried for 3 hours.

She confesses to David she has no love for the baby.  We get a tracking shot and see shadows indicating the baby is on the move.  Alice thinks it is a prowler.  She goes to the baby’s room and is suspicious that he is perspiring.

David is going down stairs to the kitchen when he nearly trips on a teddy bear.  Alice believes the baby put it there to kill him.  David says babies don’t do that.  Alice says maybe he’s a genius.  At this point, it is impossible not to think of Stewie Griffen.  David storms out, the baby starts crying.

Alice tells the doctor she remembers her own birth.  She did not want to be born and resented her mother for birthing her out of that warm place and into the cold, bright world.  She believes her baby was also born with that self-awareness and is taking out his resentment on her.

In the most unlikely occurrence of the episode, the doctor makes a house-call.  He finds David in a heap at the bottom of the stairs where he has fallen and broken his neck.  At the top of the stairs is the toy bear that he almost tripped on earlier.

Seeing a movement upstairs, the doctor goes up looking for Alice.  She has been electrocuted in her bed.  It is not clear how the deed was done.  It involves a safety pin, an electrical cord and possibly the metal frame of the bed.

The doctor looks in the baby’s room and finds an empty cradle.  As he descends the stairs, he locks eyes with the baby and understands that Alice was right.  Knowing what must be done, he pulls out a scalpel and gives him a 4th trimester abortion.

I rate it 5 out of 9 months.

Post-Post Leftovers:

• The idea of the self-aware baby is great, and because the story was published in 1946, this must have been one of the first killer-babies.
• Wisely, the baby is never shown roaming the house or making the kills — I can’t imagine any way to do it.  It is all done though shadows, POV shots and a lot of gurgling.
• David is pretty forgiving and trusting, leaving his wife alone with their baby so soon after she had tried to smother him.
• Unfortunately, these European productions are killing me.

If you were thinking the only way this series could get worse was to set an episode in France —  sacré bleu!

We open with the standard shots of the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame Cathedral accompanied by the usual God-awful electronic score.  Normally, this would indicate stock footage and be a sure sign that the episode was not filmed in Paris.  Shockingly, the camera pans from the cathedral to one of the actors throwing rocks in the river.  Was this actually filmed in Paris?

Grandma calls her American grandson Dougie into the small hotel she runs so he can watch her plunge a Michael Myers sized kitchen knife into a turkey, which apparently he always takes great pleasure in.  As Grandma stitches up the bird, Dougie plays with with the guts she removed.  This strikes Grandma as charming rather than, say, a sign of tendencies toward serial killing.

A man, Mr. Koberman, rings the door of the hotel.  He is French, carrying a parasol and wearing a turtleneck, so Dougie wisely tells him they are full, beat it.  Grandma has a business to run, however, and invites the man in.  Dougie shows the man to his room.  When he opens the curtains, the man reels back from the sunlight.

That night at dinner, we meet the other tenants: Mr. Dumas, an artist, and the very hot and criminally underused Miss Treadwell, a student.  Dougie notices that Mr. Koberman hides his silverware and produces his own wooden utensils.  He says the sound of silverware clanking gives him lé willies.

So naturally Dougie tweaks him by doing a trick with his fork.  Somehow he plucks the tines, producing a sound that no real fork could ever make, not even a tuning fork.  In fact, it sounds suspiciously like the awful electronic score of the episode.  This drives Bokerman from the table.  I feel his pain.

That night, Miss Treadwell goes to the library, and Koberman goes out for the evening.  Dougie plays with his heat-sensing camera —  wait, what?  As Koberman returns to the hotel, Dougie notices a strange hot hourglass-shaped organ in his chest.  The next morning, Miss Treadwell does not come down to breakfast.  And they are having croissants!

Dougie checks out her room to see if she is OK.  Or naked.

No sign of her, so he goes to Bokerman’s room.  There he sees pictures of many girls, including Miss Treadwell.  There is also a picture of Bokerman at the construction of the Eiffel Tower.

Dougie connects a lot of dots and determines that Bokerman is a vampire.  He sneaks into his room, pulls out the turkey knife and plunges it into Bokerman.  He proudly brings the strange organ downstairs to show Grandma.

Strangely, Mr. Dumas and the police seem to have no particular concern that this boy has murdered a tenant at the hotel.  With a lack of skepticism worthy of the Obama press corp, they accept that this must have been a monster and deserving of his fate.  Seeing that he was stitched up just like the turkey, they cut him open and find the murder weapon — not the knife but Dougie’s silver coin collection.    Says one: “Seems like the boy made a good investment.”  Cue haughty French laugh.

I rate this a cinq.

Post-Post Leftovers:

• Sacré bleu is never actually used in French speaking countries.
• Dumas says the Eiffel Tower was built for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, but it was actually built for the 1889 World’s Fair.
• The director’s other credits are French productions, further suggesting this was filmed in France.  There’s got to be a story behind that.
• Dougie is one of the worst child actors in history.  He is at the level of Worf’s son on Star Trek TNG or . . . [I got nothing].  Appropriately, this is his only credit on IMDb.
• Féodor Atkine (Koberman) has had quite the career, however.  Mostly in France, but he was also in Woody Allen’s Love and Death, and in World War Z where he was oddly uncredited.
• Miss Treadwell is still in the biz, but is credited only sporadically on IMDb.

Well, the good news is that there are only 12 episodes in the season — an unusual mini-season for a 1980s series.  Did they foresee the fatigue that it would inflict upon future viewers?  More likely it was a result of the show’s weird provenance, changing networks, going almost 2 years between seasons 1 and 2.  There didn’t seem to be a lot of demand for this show, and maybe for good reason.

In another gauzy  episode scored with electronic tinklings, we meet Martin, a boy with an unnamed disease that renders him completely healthy as far as we can tell.  Sure, he sticks pretty close to that bedroom, but he’s moving around, leaning out the window, going downstairs to eat.  I’m not seeing a bedpan, an IV, wheelchair, casts or bruises.  If you’re going to get a disease, this is the one to get; just don’t expect many callers at your telethon.  His only friend is his dog, Dog.

There is some fun early in the episode as we get a Dog’s-eye POV of him running through the town collecting  artifacts to keep Martin in touch with the outside world.  Sadly, Martin has made a tag for Dog to take out into the world to recruit some friends.

Not so sadly, this tactic reels in 80s babe Helen Shaver, last seen in The Sandkings.  She sees that the dog belongs to her missing student, and marches straight into his bedroom.  This being pre-Letourneau, Martin’s mother leaves them alone.

Almost immediately, Martin crushes on Ms. Haight despite the horrible job the make-up, hair and costume people have done on her.  She brings flowers, reads to him, teaches him about Jules Verne, Jack London, Robin Hood, the Pyramids; frequently laying on his bed.  This inspires Martin to write his own book from which she reads aloud a passage he has written about her.  Awkward.

That night, Martin’s mother receives a call telling her that Ms Haight has been killed in a crash.  Martin watches the funeral procession from his window.  Dog, being the faithful psychic pal, knows what he must bring back to Martin to make him happy.

So we have a reverse Pet Semetary (which came out 5 years earlier) in which a pet resurrects a human.  And it works out just about as well, as we see the filthy Dog come into Martin’s room, and a gray decaying hand grips the door.  Sometimes, dead is better.

Once again, the ending is botched.  Leaving the episode open to interpretation and deliberately muddying the story are two different things.  Is this a happy ending or a horror ending?

Case for horror ending: The music and the wind suggest an evil presence returning to the house. Martin’s lamp goes out when Miss Haight enters his room.  She has been invisible up to this point — and I mean invisible, not simply out of the frame.  It could have been the POV in some shots, but when the front door slammed, where was she?  The only thing we finally see of her is a decaying hand on the bedroom door.

Case for happy ending: This has been a sugary sweet episode up until now with warm relationships between Martin, his mother, Miss Haight, and Dog.  Dog has always had a preternatural instinct to bring just the right thing back to his master.  Surely he wouldn’t bring evil, or fleas, into the house.  The gray hand does not seem to disturb Martin.  When his lamp goes out, it is replaced by a heavenly light.  He smiles as he is bathed in this light that washes out the screen.

The last line is said by Miss Haight and could be taken 2 ways, “Come to me.”  The words alone, coming from a corpse, are ominous.  However, they are said in a strange sing-song voice.  But even if said positively, this is a) a corpse beckoning a live child to join her, and 2) a 40-year old corpse beckoning a live child to join her.  No good can come from this.

I have to go with the horror ending, and the short story seems to suggest that.  But how did Dog go so wrong, and why is Martin so happy?

Would it have killed Bradbury to have the kid scream in terror?  Or maybe Martin could have embraced death if his disease had actually caused him to suffer.  It’s all just too nice; maybe that is the pitfall of a Canadian series.

Post-Post Leftovers:

• Although Pet Semetary was published 5 years before The Emissary aired, Bradbury’s original short story was published in 1947 — coincidentally, the year Stephen King was born.
• Dad gets one scene and is kind of a dick.  He has nothing to do with the story, why is he even there?  Oh, yeah: Men Bad.
• For some reason, it amuses me that one of the ChiPs guys was a producer on a few RBT episodes.  No, the other one.
• Why was the teacher named Miss Haight?  Surely not because it sounds like hate.  A Haight Ashbury reference?  Not sure it was anything significant in 1947.
• Nice economy of set dressing below, as the leaves start just at the property line.  Or did all the other homes have healthy boys whose fathers made them take care of their yards?  Maybe that explains this fishy symptomless disease.

Hypochondriac Eugene Levy is in the library looking at medical books.  Like his future son Jim in American Pie, he is obsessed with anatomy.  In Levy’s case , however, it is his own and it goes right down to the bone.  So it is a little like his son’s.

He goes to his doctor in a what seems to be a gratuitously bizarre scene.  There is no reason to think this is not a legitimate physician.  In fact, dramatically, he needs to be legit in order to put the next “doctor” into the proper relief.  The waiting room is populated by a man with a neck cast, 2 leg casts, and a halo brace; a punk with spiky hair, a kilt and a skull-print maternity blouse; and a guy in cable-knit sweater.  Although, to be fair, the last guy also seems to have some sort of facial issues; definitely hair issues.

The doctor tells Levy the other patients are nervous enough to be there without him staring at them.  Behind the doctor, Levy sees a window washer that seems to have some significance (but, alas, does not).   The doctor recites Levy’s previous baseless visits, berates his current complaints, lights up a cigarette, and says, “Are you still here?”  Levy tells the doctor that “his office doesn’t even look like a doctor’s office.”  The surly doctor responds, “What do you want?  Pictures of germs on the walls?”  The whole scene reminds me of the “inexplicable malevolence” Jerry Seinfeld talks about in one of the commentaries on the Seinfeld DVDs.

Levy finds a new “Bone Specialist” in the Yellow Pages; how quaint.  In a phone booth; how quaint.  Munigant’s office is also bizarre, more of a museum of bones.  Munigant’s immediate diagnosis is that Levy’s bones do not fit his skin.  Seems reasonable to Levy.  After a scan by a device the Bone Specialist invented, he gives Levy a full size x-ray to take home and study.

In the morning, Levy gets on a scale which helpfully states his weight aloud as, “169 pounds.  You have lost 16 pounds.”  Actually it is 17 lost since the 186 weigh-in at the doctor’s office.  OK, different scales, but why not just make the math work?

Worried that his bones are showing, he goes into a bar and asks a fat guy how to gain weight.  The fat guy makes a little speech that is pretty good, and too profound to sully by relating here.  If you see me in a bar don’t ask me how to lose hair; I will not be as accommodating.

Levy invites  Munigant to make a house-call as his bones are hurting more than ever, he is losing weight, and his wife is unhappy.  He puts Levy in a recliner, has him open his mouth as big as possible, leans in, and simply says, “out.”  Levy awakens and is in agony as somehow his bones begin to disappear from his body.  Or were they already gone when he woke up?

The kicker is fairly botched as Levy’s wife enters and sees him in a heap on the floor, having been completely deboned.  His head seems to have yards of extra skin creating folds around his face.  Sadly, there was no effort to make this monstrosity look like Levy.  It would have been so much more effective — and could have been played for either comedy or horror — just to leave the glasses on, or at least have his famously bushy eyebrows still be prominent.

Munigant is then seen admiring his newly acquired fully intact skeleton as his next patient arrives.  Like many of Bradbury’s works, the science & mechanics of this miracle are less important that the story.

I warmed up to this episode a little more as I was reviewing it.  For one thing, it is hard to take your eyes off Eugene Levy.  He is pretty subdued here, but imminently watchable.  Ultimately, though, it reminded me of how I feel about Night Gallery — with a little more effort, it could have have been a lot better.

I give it 150 out of 206 bones.

Post-Post Leftovers:

• Eugene Levy has been in 8 American Pie movies.  C’mon, even Chevy Chase said “no” once in a while.
• The first, slightly less crazy doctor was also a doctor in Thinner.  A mob doctor, see?
• The second, slightly more crazy doctor claimed to have the skulls of Caesar and Cleopatra.  The actress playing Levy’s wife was in a movie of G.B. Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra.  The actor playing Munigant played Julius Caesar Rat in Faerie Tale Theater.  I know, chills.
• Whenever I hear an unusual name, I immediately suspect an anagram — Ethan Rom = Other Man, Alucard = Dracula, Spiro Agnew = Grow a Penis, etc.  But for Munigant, I got nothing.  Very curious where that name came from.