The episode starts out like Koyaanisqatsi with a fast-mo montage of clouds moving across the sky, cars racing along the freeway, people rushing through a train station, people walking down the street.

Dr. Fellows is going to see Albert Brock in Meadowbrook Penitentiary.  En route, he gets a cell call from his son asking for a tele-transfer of his allowance, gets a pass printed out from a fax machine in his briefcase, punches in an electronic code to enter the prison, and enters another code to enter the the hallway, and enters another code to enter Brock’s cell.  So we kind of see where this is going.

Fellows comments on how quiet it is in the cell.  Brock demonstrates why it is quiet by biting a chunk out of the doctor’s phone.  And dropping his tape recorder in a glass of water; although, since it was set on Record, I don’t think it would have made much of a racket.  See, Brock is in jail  for murder . . . of machines.

He recounts the day he lost control. Awakened by a robot alarm clock, blasted by music in the shower, hit with cell calls before he reaches his desk, met with yards of paper spewing out of his cutting-edge dot-matrix continuous feed printer.  Back at home, the robot cook tells him to take dinner out of the oven, the robot maid tells his son to wipe his feet, and his wife won’t shut the hell up with her electronic interactive Spanish lessons.

The next day at work, he pours a pitcher of coffee into the videophone system.  Then he stomps on his cell phone.  And pours a chocolate milkshake into his fax machine.

The next day on the subway, he gleefully shorts out everyone’s devices with some kind of gizmo.

He complains of the tyranny of the majority:  “They figure that if a little music was charming and keeping in touch was good, that a lot of a good thing would be that much better!  But it’s not!”  Actually, I’m starting to like this guy.  Out with Barack, In with Brock!

After his adventure on the subway, he is arrested.  So he purchases an “equalizer machine” which looks a lot like a gun.  Fortunately, his rampage is limited to electronic devices spewing noise pollution.

Dr. Fellows returns to his office.  Besieged and assaulted (if those are not the same thing) by all sorts of noises that he had taken for granted before, he begins to sympathize with Brock.

There is a lot of truth and prescience in this episode.  That is good because the acting and script are pretty weak.  Although, there is none of Bradbury’s usual flower prose, much of the script is just set-up-and-spike exposition dumps from Brock to the doctor. Unfortunately, I think Bruce Weitz is a good actor who just made some bad choices in his performance.

Post-Post:

• Roger Tomkins directed 5 RBT episodes.  Nothing else before or since.  I continue to ask, where did they get these guys? And where did they go?

Ray actually participates in the beginning of this episode.  Looking around his writing room, which is destined to be on an episode of Hoarders, he pulls out a bound copy of the Johnson Smith catalog from his childhood.  Amazingly, unlike Ray, the company is still a going concern — in business, celebrating its 100th birthday this year.

The episode opens with a jaunty tune.  Young Tom is leafing through the catalog full of X-Ray specs, magic tricks, whoopee cushions and inexplicably is taken with the ad for growing giant mushrooms in your basement.  Unlike the x-ray specs, I can guarantee this ain’t gonna get you any closer to seeing your classmates’ underwear.

Maybe he is just a — ahem — budding horticulturist because in the next scene, he is enthusiastically mowing the lawn with an old push mower over grass that clearly does not need cutting.  He stops at his dad’s feet as dad holds up 2 tickets to the ball game.

Their neighbor, a plain middle-aged woman who Bradbury cruelly named Mrs. Goodbody is pumping clouds of DDT onto her plants.  Out of the blue, she starts complaining about invaders from outer space.  Tom’s attention is elsewhere as he sees the mailman coming to his house.  Sure enough, the mushrooms have landed.

The box promises “Giant Abyssinian/Amazon Mushrooms!”  There doesn’t seem to be such a thing as Abyssinian mushrooms, and if they were real, what exactly does a mushroom from Ethiopia have to do with the Amazon?  And if your life is so dull that mushrooms deserve an exclamation point, for the love of God, get the whoopee cushion next time.

Tom plants his mushrooms and proudly shows them to his parents even though they are tiny and shriveled — fungal shrinkage.

The next day, Tom’s father Hugh is carpooling to work with their neighbor Roger.  After Hugh turns off a radio broadcast about a meteor shower, Rog says he feels like things are going to hell, he is having panic attacks, shivering at night.  He can feel the dust falling on him and the weather changing second by second.  “Something awful is is going to happen to all of us,” he warns.  Luckily this stretch of road is largely abutment-free.

When they get to work, Roger just walks off and does not return home.  That night, Tom brings up a tray of mushrooms which seems to unnerve his mother.  Hugh suspects something crazy might be happening when he sees that Roger’s son is also growing mushrooms.

Roger calls Hugh and tells him to warn the neighborhood not to accept any special delivery packages from New Orleans.  Hugh starts to worry about the world being taken over with out a shot being fired, because what fun would that be.

After eating the mushrooms on a sandwich, he gets seems to get with the program and can’t wait to feed mushrooms to his wife.

A nice little episode as long as you don’t burden it with expectations.  It really is Invasion of the Body Snatchers-lite.  But that’s OK.  For what it was attempting, I think they succeeded.

Post-Post:

• Yet another first time director.
• Abyssinia, Henry was the M*A*S*H episode where Henry Blake was killed.  Also, it always bugged me that there isn’t an asterisk after the H.  Don’t they represent the missing letters in the acronym?  Are they just there to separate the letters?
• There have always been Miss Goodbodys and Nurse Goodbodys in popular culture. Where are all the Mr. Goodbodys?  They must have fathers.  And why do they tend to gravitate to the medical or secretarial fields?  Has there ever been a Senator Goodbody?
• Charles Martin Smith directed the first episode of Buffy.  How could having that on your resume not launch a huge directing career?

One of Bradbury’s most famous stories.  Like A Sound of Thunder, it is not in the 100 story collection I have.  I’m starting to think I was had.

We open in the futuristic home of George and Lydia (as their children call them).  Lydia wants George to take a look at the nursery — the nursery of the future basically being a holodeck, although the 3rd dimension seems to come and go.

They enter the nursery and George is wowed by the images that occupy the entire wall of the titular veldt including zebras, wildebeests, giraffes and lions.  Lydia gets a bad vibe from the room, but can’t put her finger on it.

When an on-screen lion begins walking their way, Lydia pulls George out of the room and locks the door.  Which seems pretty paranoid until they hear growls and footsteps through the door.

George later tries to reprogram the nursery to a less threatening scene, but is unable to.  Lydia believes the children have locked the device on its Africa setting.

The kids come home; and apparently kids dress like Luke and Leia in the future as well as a long time ago.

Lydia accuses the kids of damaging the nursery and spending 40 hours a week in Africa, but they insist they don’t even get the Africa Channel. Looking in the nursery, sure enough, it is showing a peaceful lake, and appears to be the Golf Channel.

After consulting their child psych-iatrist pal, they shut down the nursery and all the other electronic helpers around the house.  The nursery screen is reduced to static. The kids accuse their parents of killing the animals.  Because do kids today even know what static is? Tint?  Horizontal?  Vertical?  I don’t mean TV settings, I just mean general vocabulary — they don’t seem too bright.

That night, George and Lydia hear their kids calling for help.  They rush into the nursery and are locked in.  A lion begins charging them.

Their shrink buddy comes to visit.  Seeing no one in the living room, he checks out the nursery.  The kids are having a tea party on the titular veldt as lions gaze on the portly psychiatrist.

Just as with A Sound of Thunder, the producers briefly removed their heads from their ass and came up with a good episode.  It was good to see Linda Kelsey for the first time in many years, and her husband and the psychiatrist did good jobs as well.

The kids are both just terrible performers.  The daughter has no other credits on IMDb.  The son seems to work about once a year;  this was his first role, so maybe he got better.

The animal scenes are clearly cut in or green-screened, but the effect is very well done and does not take you out of the episode.  Whaddaya think, RBT is going to Africa to film?  Well they did go to Europe and New Zealand for much less effect.

Overall, one of the best RBT’s so far.  In fact, with the exception of The Haunting of the New, RBT has been on a mini-roll recently.  Next week is the last episode of the season. Hopefully the producers don’t forget everything they learned during the summer vacation.

Post-Post:

• Five of the the monitors in their living room appear to be showing other episodes of Ray Bradbury Theater — so maybe this is an allegory for Hell.  I can make out Punishment Without Crime, The Coffin, Gotcha and The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.
• Actually, I am heartened that I can’t place all of them — most of the episodes do not deserve any space in my brain.
• Wow — there actually is a Golf Channel.  It is owned by NBC so they have experience with bad lies.  Heyyyyooooo!
• Sometimes the nursery is clearly just a 2-D television.  Other times, like below, it achieves holodeck status.

Young Willie is chased down the street by some older boys.  Turns out it was a race, but they are mad when Willie beats them, just like he always beats them, just like he gets all A’s in school.

He walks away from the bully when he sees a little girl walking home from school.  The actor playing Willie was 13, and this girl looks pretty 10-ish, so it seems a little creepy. But the creepiness ain’t even started yet.

When they arrive at the girl’s house, he sees her mother and their eyes are locked on each other in breathless recognition.  Willie sees her as the grown up little girl Charlotte he loved 25 years ago, and she recognizes him as the same boy she loved back then. So clearly she is a lot sharper than Lorraine McFly.

Cut to Willie writing a letter to his adopted parents.  He periodically tracks down parents who have lost a child and allows himself to be informally adopted as a replacement.

It is time for him to move on to another family because Willie never gets any older.  After 2-3 years, people start noticing he never ages, and he must disappear before the government kidnaps him and dissects him to make super-soldiers in a richly funded program run by some senator’s brother-in-law.  That last part is not in the episode, just speculation on my part.

When Willie first realized that he was not aging, he ran away from the orphanage where he was picked on as a runt.  He ran away to the circus to be a freak as “The World’s Oldest Kid.”  But it doesn’t really work out as he just looks like a normal kid.  The rubes would have to wait around for 3 years to really get the effect, which makes me wonder how the Hunger Artist got away with his shtick.

He recalls meeting an old woman in the park who lost her young son 30 years ago, and her husband just recently.  He stays with the old woman for 2 years until she croaks.

As he is leaving town, he has one last confrontation with a bully, but he seems to have grown a little — he is able to throw a baseball faster to the bully’s surprise, and to more adeptly handle a bare-handed catch.  This scene makes no sense as he is still not aging, yet he seemed stronger.  Hearing the train whistle in the distance, Willie heads out leaving the bully even more baffled than me.

He passes by Charlotte’s house and she is outside trimming the hedges.  Again, their eyes meet in recognition.  We hear her thoughts, “I was in love with you.”

We hear his thoughts, “Was?”

“Willie,” the 40 year old woman says.

“Charlotte,” the 12 year old boy says.

We immediately cut to a whistling train barreling down the track.  Bradbury seemed like too much of a good egg to have the train go into a tunnel.  Can’t say it was just a simpler time because Hitchcock used that same gag 30 years earlier.

Willie has found another obituary and heads to the house to use his old “I think I’m lost” spiel to insinuate himself into their home.  He has been a kid for 40 years now and thinks to himself that this is his “job” as he heads up the new family’s steps with his suitcase in his hand like Willie Loman.

This is a good episode after one iffy and one god-awful episode.  Maybe it helps that they are back in the USA and are using directors that actually have other credits.  Josh Saviano (The Wonder Years) doesn’t have as much of the trademark Bradbury flowery writing to sell, but he has been one of the better actors in pulling it off.

Post-Post:

• This is the 3rd highest rated episode on IMDb’s always-suspect user rating list.
• Saviano has done virtually nothing in the last 20 years.  I hope he’s enjoying his Wonder Years loot.  Or doing something productive that wouldn’t show up on IMDb.
• Wearing the same hat for 40 years might not have helped him keep a low profile,