Host Truman Bradley says he wants to tell us something interesting, which makes this a very special episode already.  “Ever since the beginning of mankind, murder has been a great problem of society — from the early days of the caveman and his club, to the era of the dueling sword . . .”  OK, he holds up a sword, but when he mentioned the caveman’s club, he appeared to hold up a gavel. Is this a commentary on the judicial system?

For one of the only times in the series, the college is named.  Maybe the Producer was bartering off a massive $250 circa 1950 student loan.  Barker College is a small medical school.  Dean Leonard Mills is working late in the lab, and waiting for his assistant Eve Patrick.  Someone walks in behind him and stabs him.  Before leaving, the person deliberately leaves several conspicuous fingerprints, and uses a glass without a coaster

The next day, Detective Davis grills Eve.  She says Mills had no enemies and was respected by the other professors despite the I Like Ike bumper sticker on his BMW Isetta ^[1].  He asks if they were having an affair.  She says there is no way she would have an affair with Mills because 1) she is engaged to Dr. Donald Stewart, and 2) Mills is bald.  Ouch!  Deputy Evans walks in with the results of the fingerprint analysis. The killer is Donald Stewart!

Davis questions Stewart.  He says those fingerprints could not have been faked because of the “sweat ducts and oily moisture.”  Stewart responds, “Undeniably!”  This is why you need a lawyer present.

Stewart says when Mills was killed, he was at home watching TV.  In this pre-VCR era, he tries to prove his innocence by describing the news show he was watching, “It concerns Dr. Black’s cardiac experiments on sperm whales.”  Davis says this is not a strong alibi because the same story was on all the newscasts — 7, 9 and 11.  The real mystery is WTF Dr. Black is doing to these whales that deserves that much air time.  And were they sperm whales before, or just after?

His further attempt at an alibi is foiled when “Lucy tries to get into Ricky’s act and hijinks ensue” is deemed to describe 400 episodes of I Love Lucy.

Stewart finally engages George Warren to be his attorney.  Warren says, “Don’t you understand Dr. Stewart you haven’t got a chance!  Those fingerprints are uncontestable!”  Warren then suggests Stewart confess to killing Mills just so they can plead down to 2nd degree murder.  OK, maybe sometimes you don’t want a lawyer present.  Luckily, Stewart’s fingerprints show up on some bottles after he was locked up.

Davis worries that the discovery of two people with the same fingerprints might throw the whole judicial system into chaos.  He worries that people might have been unfairly prosecuted on the basis of duplicate prints.  He orders Evans to get the prints of every man, woman and primate that had access to the lab.

Back in his cell, Stewart says he believes someone came up with a way to create duplicate fingerprints.  His attorney asks, “Who’d want to?”  Sigh.

Eve discovers that Dr. Mills had been working on a formula for synthetic skin.  The police go to see Stanley Barnes because he did not give his prints to the police.  Barnes has so much incriminating evidence in his apartment that even Marcia Clark ^[3] could convict him.  He confesses to trying to frame Stewart for Mills’ murder.  His portrayal is just bizarre, though.  The actor wildly overacts and seems coked up.  This guy makes Norman Bates look like he is in a Tarkovsky film.^[2]  Oh well, Stewart is freed and he and Eve vow to complete Dr. Mills’ work.

Another pedestrian outing.  It boggles my mind that this primitive series aired only 3 years before The Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond. Just think how great TV will be 3 years from now!  You know, if some assholes don’t burn down the studios.

I give it 1.5 fingertips.  Out of 5 or 10 — your choice.

Other Stuff:

• [1] The car reference is really just an excuse to show this verrückt Auto.
• [2] Sorry, I recently subscribed to the Criterion Channel.
• [2] Would also have accepted Yorgos Lanthimos, whose films, though deliberate, are at least watchable.
• [3] Would also have accepted Hamilton Burger.  Though decades earlier, he seems somehow less dated.
• June Lockhart (Eve) was the mom on Lost in Space.

Scientist Jeff Conover is placed in a vacuum chamber to simulate the conditions 10 miles above the earth, except he is more comfortable than a Delta passenger.  An experimental drug enables his cells to store oxygen, so he can survive without breathing, which would be good on some of those summer flights.

Jeff is the crème dela crème of test pilots.  In fact, he is the whipped crème dela crème, as he has to ask  his wife’s permission that night to perform the experiment in an airplane the next day.  Lucky for the world of science, she says OK.

Jeff takes an airplane up to 50,000 feet and exits via the ejector seat.  I assume there was another guy in the plane, but that still seems like a strange way to disembark.  Unfortunately, the experiment is a failure as Jeff blacks out almost immediately and parachutes to the ground.  After the doctors leave, he confides to his wife that his whole life flashed before his eyes in the seconds before he lost consciousness.  He takes this to mean the human brain can outperform any machine created.

The next day, Jeff plays his boss a tape of him giving a lecture at 20X the normal speed.  He says that by using the experimental drug, people could understand that high pitched whine and retain it.  Why, this breakthrough could allow college students to becoming f***ing idiots in days rather than years!

In the next 2 weeks, he interviews people who have had similar rapid replays of their lives in dangerous situations.  Wait, didn’t the drug cause that?  While Henry Mason was caught in a cave-in, he recalled a dance he once took his wife to.  He estimates it took 3 – 4 seconds to relive the 4 hours they were at the dance, which is the opposite of how time passes for me at a party.

A little blind girl named Alice is able to give the day of week for any day in history.  Jeff quizzes her on 06/23/1412 and 07/04/2113.  He says she gives the correct answers, although, a fact-check shows that she actually got both answers wrong.  C’mon, no one could check an almanac?  Alice says she got this skill — the sociopathic ability to lie, I guess — after the skeet-surfing accident that blinded her last year.

He asks old Mr. Stevenson the square root of 317.  He says 17.0448.  Oh, so close!  It is 17.8044.  Maybe the elderly actor just screwed up.  Stevenson is played by Burt Mustin who somehow played 100 year old men for 25 years on TV.  He is best known as Gus the Fireman from Leave it to Beaver.  He sat in a chair outside the fire station every day despite having reached the retirement age for city workers 75 years earlier.  However, he totally boots the cube of 4,209 — he gives the answer as 1,309,516,011, the rube!  He is next given a list of phone numbers to sum in his head.  The producers wisely hide the numbers from us, but it is safe to say his answer was wrong.

Finally the scientists refine a serum that speeds up mice in a maze to 10X their normal speed.  Stop, I know where this is going!  Don’t give it to the janitor!  They have less success increasing a dog’s hyperactivity, but probably should not have started with a Jack Russell Terrier.  With time running out (in their research, not — God help me — the episode), they decide to test the serum on a human.

Of course, Jeff decides he will be the first test subject.  He orders his assistant to inject him with 5 cc’s of Solution 012.  They had previously identified the drug as Solution 31d, so I don’t know WTF he’s taking.  He is injected, and his senses are accelerated 100X.  He sees his lab assistants moving very slowly, although they are able to converse normally.  Soon he burns out while Good Will Hunting his way through complex math problems.

He has proven his point.  For this astounding breakthrough that will change humanity and send the stock value into the stratosphere, Jeff is given 2 weeks vacation.  Big Pharma, man!

I’m calling an audible; but one of those written-down audibles.  The boring review can wait, we’re skipping ahead to dessert.

I was going to finish up by including some corny 60 year old song with almost the same title as the episode, but it tricked me by being groovy as hell (except the Speedo guy).  Note the first girl crushed under the boulder, the naked lesbians making out under the umbrella,^[2] the brunette shaking her yayas ^[1] on the rock, the sea-weed boa that chick is sporting, and — holy cow! — the workout the redhead gives that motorcycle!  This might be the best thing I’ve seen since the lock-down.

[1]  After 30 seconds of research, it appears — against all odds — that yayas is not a synonym for breasts.  I shall be submitting an entry to the OED in the morning.  Or maybe the Urban OED.

[2] Your Rorschach may vary.

Anyhoo:

Welcome to CSI: Large Midwestern Town (SFT continues its trend of being set in generically described cities).  Vincent Price fires a bullet into a water tank that seems to have no water, then examines it under a microscope.  Dry — just as he suspected!  Also a perfect match to a bullet used in the crime he is investigating.  The ballistics and the blood sample should send this perp away for good, even without the confession the cops beat out of him.  The detective insists that the case was solved by “good old-fashioned police work, not hocus-pocus.”  Price tells him the day will come when every murder is solved in the crime lab.

Price’s former fiancee Ada drops by the lab and grinds the episode to a halt.  Price opens the door and she just stands there a few frames too long, then she slowly enters and begins speaking very slowly.  She says, “I want you to save my husband Robert March from being killed.”  Price knows her husband as the inventor of the March Motion Picture Projector.  Ada says his new invention, the April Motion Picture Projector, is the most important thing he’s ever done, as it really brings out the flesh-tones on those Bettie Page slides.  Unfortunately, someone is trying to kill him for it.

She wants Price to use his CSI skillz to make her husband’s lab safe — bullet proof glass, cameras — that sort of thing.  Price does a little research and finds that March believes in ghosts, seances, and the supernatural.  The newspaper archivist tells Price, that March “was married to a beautiful woman much younger than himself.  She is supposed to have jilted her poor fiancee to marry the rich Dr. March.”  Oh, I get it — well-played, SFT!

Price meets Ada at March’s lab that night to measure for Kevlar curtains.  I guess this makeover is meant to be a surprise because Ada waited until she saw March’s car leave.  When they enter the lab, however, they see March has been shot in the back.

The detectives are called and Price brings all his CSI training to bear on this mystery.  He determines from the powder-burns on March’s back that he was shot in the back from the back.  He also deduces that March knew the killer because “he had to come in through that door.”  The door behind March?  Check your math on that one.

The cops gave Ada a sedative because she had become hysterical, although for Ada, that might just mean she blinked and cleared her throat.  When she is back to her usual effervescent self, she tells the police the only person who might have known about the invention was March’s assistant, John Clifton.  Luckily, after being thrown under the bus by Ada, Clifton has a pretty good alibi — he’s dead (although not killed by a bus).

Blah blah.  That’s enough of that.  Go watch The Vast of Night on Amazon Prime.

We start, as always on SFT, in a generically named institution — tonight, The Office of Scientific Security.  Jim Spencer is investigating the disappearance of three leading food scientists, all of them patients of the same doctor.  He is curious why these scientists chose to visit that doctor when there were other doctors closer to their homes with smaller index fingers. 

He finds it especially strange because all 3 scientists are over 70.  Wait, why are these geezers even still working?  And they are the leading scientists?  Where are the new food scientists of tomorrow coming from?  And accordion players?  He has heard that another patient, Dr. Kenneth White, has closed his bank account, sold his wife and car, and paid his bills.  

Spencer goes undercover to the doctor for a physical.  In the waiting room, he observes on the doctor’s diploma that he graduated in 1907. He exclaims to the nurse,  “That would make him at least 70!”  Well, yeah, if he graduated from medical school at age 21 it would.  Maybe there was less to learn then.  They were only up to COVID-3.

Spencer recruits the nurse as part of his investigation.  He tells her to take time off to care for a “sick relative” so he can send Nurse Kinder as a spy to take her place.  Kinder can find no connection to the missing scientists, but does discover a secret lab in the office.  Dr. Dove interrupts them, and Kinder introduces Spencer as her fiancee.  Dove lets it slip that his dog is 33 years old.  

This is apparently good enough to get a warrant because they wiretap Dr. Dove’s office.  Sadly, that does not work, so they have Nurse Kinder do some surveillance.  She sees a man named Gorman leave the lab.   He is rolling down his sleeve like he just had an injection, or forgot his handkerchief.  They get his fingerprints and learn that he died 18 years ago, which is shocking because he looks like he died only 10 years ago.

They learn that his fingerprints belonged to a forger who died in prison, and that Dove was the prison doctor.  By wiretapping Dove’s lab, they learn that Gorman is providing forged passports in exchange for injections of a youth serum which, frankly, doesn’t seem to be doing him much good.  

Sweet Jesus, this thing is only half way through!  Dull story short, Dr. Dove has discovered a serum which will add 50 years to the average human life.  But the real stunner is that  SFT actually came up with an interesting twist.  If life expectancy increased that dramatically, then the population would quickly increase, leading to mass starvation as the lines at Cracker Barrel grow to a mile long. 

Ergo, Dr. Dove is keeping the doctors alive so they can research how to greatly increase food production before he reveals his youth serum to the world.  Dove says, “Their work may take years.  My serum will keep them alive and active.  And when people notice that they never wrinkle, never weaken, never grow holder, then they will disappear and show up elsewhere” with younger girlfriends.  

Blah blah.  Lockhart is sent to jail for passport fraud.  Without the serum, he shrivels up and dies of old age off-camera in his cell within days.  Or so Hillary Clinton would have you believe.

Dreadful.

This is how bored even the host of the show was.  Hey, the camera’s still running, dude!

Other Stuff:

• The book Science Fiction Theatre: A History of the Television Program tells us Gene Lockhart picked up a cool $2,000 for his work as Dr. Dove.  It was worth it to not have an actor tell us how dreamy Adlai Stevenson is, and that Eisenhower is Hitler.  
• Strangely, the chapter devoted to this episode has several typos.  I like to think the author was easing his pain the same way I am.
• Epstein didn’t kill himself.

At yet another SFT generically named college, “Geneticist Anna Adler ^[1] is conducting a series of intensive experiments in an attempt to discover what specific hereditary traits are transmitted in animals.”

Two years ago, Dr. Adler discovered that her lab-rats were so sensitive to high-pitched sounds that they were driven into a frenzy.  “By careful breeding, the professor developed a pure strain of these mice.”  Now, eight generations later, she has bred vermin that react crazily to an ultrasonic whistle.  Congratulations for ending up where you started.  A government grant must have been involved.

Dr. Hughes tells her, “Congratulations, you’ve created an inherited characteristic!”  Well, didn’t the fact that it was enhanced by breeding mean that it was already an inherited characteristic?  Breed circumcised baby boys, then you’ll impress me.^[2] No, seriously, [2] now.

Hughes has also made some breakthroughs in breeding with Dalmatians.  C’mon man, you know what I mean.  He has a pup that is constantly sniffing around the corner of her cage.  He says that is where the pup’s grandfather had his food dish; or maybe where he dragged his ass.  His conclusion is that she inherited that memory.

Dr. Adler says it is preposterous to think that memory can be transmitted through genes.  Dr. Hughes says this accounts for deja vu, although they were afraid to use that exotic word on TV in 1956.  She challenges him to find a family with 100 generations of written memories to test his theory.

A hot blonde walks in and busts them for quarreling as usual.  Frequent SFT viewers know that scientists on this series frequently have hot daughters, and often the daughters date their father’s proteges.  Although there have been many female scientists on this series, I think this is the first with the cliché daughter.  Dr. Adler says her daughter Marie disproves the genetic memory theory.  “Distinguished scientists on both sides of the family, and Marie has not one brain in her head.  How do you explain that?”  Marie says, “I’m a throwback to Aunt Elenora.  She didn’t have a brain in her head either”.

Anna goes to teach a class, and Marie invites Dr. Hughes to go to a fencing match with her.  Marie says Joe Castle is just as good a swordsman as his father, which is the plot of a video I just saw at Pornhub.  Hughes starts thinking maybe genetic memory has something to do with it.  After the exhibition, Castle’s father says his son is training for the Olympics despite only fencing for a year.  Hughes excitedly asks him, “How did you feel when you first picked up a foil?  Did you have any sensation of having fenced before?  Or dueled before?  Did you have a feeling the movement or stance or holding of the foil came instinctively?”  Joe says literally, “What, who, hunh?”

Marie tells him about Hughes’ genetic memory theory.  Fortuitously, Castle Sr’s hobby is genealogy.  Back at casa de Castle, the father shows Hughes paintings and scrapbooks going back to the 1300s.  They are so old, he used 23 and Thee to do the research.  Hughes notices that Giuseppe Castillo looks exactly like Joe Castle.  Not only that — and I am serious here — he takes it as a confirmation of his theory that Joe Castle’s name is the anglicized equivalent of Giuseppe Castillo.

Shockingly, Dr. Adler is skeptical.  Hughes angrily demands that she wake up and smell the coffee. ^[3]  “The almost identical facial structure — the chin, the nose, the eyes!  The enormous similarity in their personality!  Both men fearless to the point of recklessness!  The both of them rebels against social convention!  And both of them wonderful swordsmen!  Genes can carry memories!”  Well maybe memory could play a part in the fencing skills, but the rest of his tirade does nothing to support his hypothesis.

Hughes also makes a plausible point by observing that Giuseppe Castillo raced a horse called Esmeralda, and Joe Castle named his race car Esmeralda.  However, he squanders this bit of credibility by predicting Joe Castle’s death.  Giuseppe Castillo died after being thrown from his horse Esmeralda in a race when he was 22 years, 180 days old.  Joe is racing his car next week when he will be exactly that age.  This load of Esmeralda-manure gets Dr. Adler starting to believe in genetic memory even though it does not seem relevant at all.

Joe sits out the race.  When there is a crash in the race, all agree that is a sign that if Joe had been in the race, he would have been killed, but that it would have been great TV.

This one was painful to sit through.  The premise was Ludacris, and the ideas presented to support it were infantile.  Dr. Adler sports a heavy German accent.  She calls her own daughter out as a moron and the girl has no reaction.  Peter Hanson (Dr. Hughes) has an annoying style of shouting his lines when he is the least bit angry or excited.   Joe Castle is portrayed as a muscle-head boob, then at least sharp enough to race cars, and ultimately Hughes gives him a lab coat and recruits him onto the research team.

Just a mess.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Oh, I get it.  She is named after Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler.  Or maybe famed acting coach Stella Adler.  No, definitely Alfred. ^[1a]
• [1a] Cheap shot as usual; Virginia Christine had a huge career.
• [2] I didn’t really want to go there, but couldn’t figure out how to describe how women could be bred to naturally have boob jobs.  I mean, they couldn’t be born that way.  It’s just creepy.
• [3] Virginia Christine went on to appear in Folger’s Coffee commercials as Mrs. Olson for 21 years.