Brad Pitt — yes, that Brad Pitt — is street racing some dude.  It isn’t much of a race as the other guy inexplicably goes out of control — driving in a straight line — and does several barrel rolls.  Pitt didn’t really do anything except drive in a straight line.  He could have gotten out and run the last quarter mile and still won.

The next morning, Pitt pays a visit to a nice respectable member of the law enforcement community who once went by the name of “Iceman.”  Joe Garrett denies his street racing past, but Pitt’s character is — surprisingly — smart enough to see through the ruse.

They cross paths again at the malt shop where Iceman’s daughter Carey works.   Iceman is called away but Pitt hits on his daughter and takes her for a spin — because he’s Brad Pitt — before dropping her at home.  Before leaving her house, he leaves a few items in the Garrett mailbox — a big hairy spider and some newspaper clippings of a death that Iceman was involved in years earlier.

There is a bit about blackmail and Carey tied up in a trunk with a ball-gag in her mouth, but nothing much comes of it — sadly.  Iceman agrees to a race.

They are even-stephen crossing the finish line, but Pitt runs head-on into a bulldozer.  His last action is to drop his lighter, sending his wrecked car up in flames, and turning him into a  . . . wait for it . . .barbecue Pitt.

This would be close to an absolute zero without Pitt — there’s a reason the guy is a star.  The Iceman turned in a nice performance too.  The only other character, Carey, is mostly a non-entity.  She is given little to do and does little with it.

The big let-down is the story — there really is none.  No twist, nothing supernatural, no plot except guy A challenges guy B to a race in a straight line and guy A is so addle he runs into a stationary bulldozer.

Post-Post:

• Sorry to speak ill of the dead, but the episode had some typically annoying music by Warren Zevon.  I’m also not crazy about The Dead.
• Title Analysis:  Pointless since they wasted the perfect opportunity to use the great, titular King of the Road.

Outlaws Harley and Quintaine are pursued by a posse. They think they lost them 3 days back, but Harley is in pretty bad shape from a gunshot wound.  When he can no longer stay on his horse, Quintaine shoots him. The not-so-lost posse finds Harley’s fresh grave — which Quintaine idiotically marked; and with his partner’s initials — and continue their hunt.

Quintaine rides into a small frontier town, leading Harley’s horse.  Somehow, the posse has beaten him to the town and Texas Ranger McMurdo is waiting for him.

With no discussion, they walk out into the wide, dusty street and have a duel, which is not the way I remember the Texas Rangers operating; not even when George Bush owned them.  McMurdo takes a slug seemingly directly in the heart with trademark Peckinpaw-ish projectile bleeding, but stays standing,  The 2nd bullet takes him down.

He goes into the saloon for a whiskey.  A stranger tries to sell him a miracle elixir, but Quintaine is quite the negotiator.  Refusing to buy, the medicine man gives him a bottle for free and says he will pay Quintaine a dollar tomorrow if it doesn’t live up to his hype. He takes the bottle and chugs it.

The “snake oil” is fast acting as Quintaine hallucinates that he sees Doc Holliday, a bounty hunter that Quintaine killed.  Maybe there was more than one gunfighting dentist by that name in the old west — the Doc Holliday most people know died of TB (see Val Kilmer wheezing in Tombstone).

He begins to see other of his victims in the saloon.  Among the dead . . . Harley, Frank Little Bear, and Tom McMurdo, still, freshly dead in the street.

McMurdo tells him they are all in Hell. Quintaine screams like a little girl for them to all go way.  When he raises his head, the dead men are gone.  In their place is a gaggle of tourists being shown the saloon which has “it’s very own ghost, the legendary Billy Quintaine” according to the guide who surely regrets dropping out of high school now.

The tour guide relates the story that McMurdo’s posse cut down Quintaine after McMurdo was shot in a duel.  It might have been helpful for the posse to have been a little more pro-active.

Outside the saloon, Quintaine see a modern scene — a hot-dog cart, people on bikes, kids running around. I assume with a bigger budget this would have been a commentary on consumerism, capitalism, or fat American tourists in shorts.  He goes back inside and calls for Tom, but no one appears.

What follows is not clear.  It is either a flashback to what actually happened after the duel, or Quintaine is getting a second chance.  We did not see the first iteration, but this time he is clearly aware there are other shooters, and he impressively kills several of them before finally being shot down.

Also not clear:  We see some modern tourists gawking at the grave markers of McMurdo and Quintaine.  After they leave, McMurdo and Quintaine ride up on horseback to see their own graves.  They are chummy and in pretty good spirits for a couple of guys in Hell. Also they are part of a bunch that all have horses and the freedom to ride off wherever they want to.  Is this Hell or a Dude Ranch?  The guys in City Slickers weren’t this chipper.

And where exactly are they riding to?  Back into the past to pick up the next gun-fighter who is killed?  Does the group just get bigger and bigger?  Does anyone ever actually go to Hell?  On the plus side — probably many houses of ill-repute in Hell. ^[1]

Great episode as far as performances and directing, but a little muddled on the story.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Meh.
• McMurdo says, “Heaven or Hell, whatever you want to call it. It’s warm here; it’s quiet.” Another man says, “We’re all here — those who lived by the gun and died by the gun.” So the murderers and and lawmen and even the innocent trot-by shooting victim are in the same place simply because their deaths were gun-centric?
• And don’t get me started on why it took the posse 3 days to catch them.
• Written by Frank Darabont, so I’m sure I’m missing something.  Unless they ejected him half-way through like on The Walking Dead.  Darabont should have come back from the dead like McMurdo and collected the dumb-asses who stuck the Walking Dead group at that farm for a whole season.
• ^[1] I’m fairly libertarian myself, so would not consign the houses of ill-repute to Hell; or would at least locate them conveniently near the entrance.

In this scene in the episode, Felicity (the one WITH her head) is at the bottom of the stairs.

The cringing starts immediately with Robert Patrick playing a DJ.  I have become convinced that it is impossible to play a DJ on screen.  They are always dreadful and would have zero audience in the real world.  I’m looking at (but not listening to) you Clint Eastwood, Adrienne Barbeau, Stephen McHattie, Arte Johnson, Eric Bogosian, Kathy Bates, and the casts of WKRP in Cincinnati and NewsRadio.  I would include Wolfman Jack in that list, but he actually was inexplicably successful on the radio.

Robert Patrick, a very good actor, is particularly awful playing Lothar, a bandanna-wearing hipster in dark glasses who seems to be playing to a late night goth crowd, although his shift ends at 10 pm. After his shift is over, the next host David Warner enters — he is a child psychologist and author of “The Art of Ignoring Your Child.”  WTF is programming this station?

He gets a call from Nora, a frequent caller. Her daughter has taken to banging her head against the wall; most likely because her mother keeps the radio tuned to this station.

In order to prove his worth and save his show, Warner agrees to come to Nora’s home to see Felicity.

He goes to Nora’s house accompanied by his producer (Twiggy) and the station manager (Joan Severance). After Joan is knocked on her fine, fine ass by an electrical short in the doorbell for no reason, the door is answered by Zelda Rubinstein, the imbecile in Poltergeist who prematurely declared the house “clean.”

They go in and hear Felicity screaming upstairs.  Zelda says Felicity’s father will be home any day . . . from WWII.  So the nut didn’t fall far from the tree.

They look for Felicity and go down a hall covered in the chewed grape bubble gum that her mother bribes her with.  They enter her bedroom and find a lot of crazy stuff, including Joan’s dead, though still crazy-hot, body.

At the bottom of the stairs, Warner and Twiggy see Felicity, a little girl wearing a mask. Warner runs down to meet her, but she runs away.  Twiggy, still at the top of the stairs is decapitated, in a complete non-sequitur,  by a descending ceiling fan blade and tumbles down the stairs; followed by her head.

Warner regains consciousness tied to a chair.  He asks her to sit on his lap and maybe make her happy.  He tricks her into loosening his restraints and begins choking her.

Zelda enters and tells him he should be ashamed of himself.  Felicity falls from his lap, and her mask falls off revealing a face not unlike the Cryptkeeper.  “I spoiled her to death,” Zelda admits.  “She’s been dead 40 years.”  They spin Warner’s chair around so he sees several eminent child psychiatrists, dead, mummified and cob-webbed.

Zelda places a radio on Warner’s lap on which Lothar announces he has taken Warner’s time slot.  Felicity dances around his chair as he repeats, “Ignore it. Ignore it.” The End.

Many questions are left unanswered, and uncared about.

Post-Post:

• Title analysis:  So who is the new arrival?  Warner is the latest in a string of child psychologists, but that doesn’t seem enough to merit the title.
• On the plus side, I did like the girl in the mask.  It started to lose me when I thought it was just going exploit a deformed child; but a 40-year dead zombie is A-OK.
• Sadly, not pictured.

While Fred is searching through a cookbook for more permutations of squid than Bubba had for shrimp, his wife Erma is butchering the latest in a long line of squid served in their squid-only restaurant.  Fred is convinced that he will do with squid what Col. Sanders did with chickens.

Drifter / clean-up guy Gaston suggests that maybe the restaurant might just bring in bigger crowds with, oh say, BBQ rather than squid.  Fred spends a late night chopping vegetables when his landlord Chumley walks in and demands the 3 months back rent owed to him.

Fred loses his temper just briefly enough to nick Chumley’s hand with the chopping knife, and is witnessed by the stoop-dwellers across the street including Gaston.

Officer Phil comes in for breakfast, but Erma tells him they might have some eggs left.  When she looks in the fridge, there are eggs, but also some steaks piled on top of them.  Gaston says a friendly BBQ distributor gave him a good deal.  Can any human being not predict what the steak is?  Especially seconds later when Officer Phil says Chumley has disappeared.

The smell from the steaks starts attracting other customers off of the street.  When Fred sees Gaston using Chumley’s handkerchief, he gets suspicious.  As business picks up, Gaston must get more steaks from the freezer so he goes in and starts hacking away at Chumley’s fat ass.  Fittingly, Chumley is played by Meat Loaf.

At the end of the day, the restaurant takes in $1,500.  Gaston convinces Fred to keep quiet since the blame would fall on him and Erma.  Soon the Gaston, Fred & Erma Steakhouse opens to lines out the door.

When Officer Phil tells Fred that they might be able to track Chumley’s killer by a residue left by the knife in blood taken from his car, Fred gets worried and Gaston gets busy.

While Fred is at the restaurant, he goes to see Erma and tells her what is happening and that it was Fred’s idea.  There are a couple of nice twists.

Just an OK episode.  What happened to Christopher Reeve is beyond tragic.  He is still the definitive Superman, and always seemed like a very nice guy; just not much of an actor.  The stiffness actually served him well in Superman (in both roles), but not so much in a comedic episode like this.  Judd Nelson and Bess Armstrong delivered, though.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Meh.
• This was 3 years before Christopher Reeves’ accident.
• Coincidentally, Director Gilbert Adler was later a producer on the dreadful Superman Returns.
• I can’t believe I almost missed this great gag on Fred ‘n Erma’s sign.  Sadly, as frequently happens with the punny titles, there is no relation to the episode.

Mimi Rogers is auditioning for a commercial. The camera starts on the nape of her neck, and she says, “What’s your favorite part of a woman, the nape of the neck?”  The camera pans across her back and she says, “The line of her back?”  Then she says, “or the shape of her breasts?”  I though we had established a rhythm here; the cameraman really lets us down on that last one.

She is advertising a perfume called Ballbuster.  It’s not for just any woman, it’s for the woman who means business.

The director is effusive in his praise.  As far as he is concerned, she has a job — cut to Mimi saying, “What do you mean I didn’t get the job?” to her agent.  Mimi is worried that she has been at this for 10 years and hasn’t gotten a break.  Worse, she finds out that her young beautiful roommate (Kathy Ireland) got the part.

Really, the rest is kind of a snooze.

Some reviews say the episode is saved by a twist ending, but it is really kind of stupid.  The Pageant for Miss Autopsy is asinine — you have to have some basis in reality to be effective.  And the special effects on Mimi Rogers are ludicrous, not remotely resembling an autopsy incision.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Non-Sequitur.
• Even the cover art is terrible — no one is hanged in this episode.
• Complete waste of Mimi Rogers, Buck Henry and Kathy Ireland.