Beware any TZ segment that begins with that little pixie-dust musical flourish.  It does not bode well for your next 20 minutes.

Aspiring writer Ellie Pendleton is excited about her first day on her new job at the library.  The head librarian Gloria cautions her that this is a private library and “the books are not for reading by you, me or anyone.  The owners are very strict about that.”

They enter the library which contains endless shelves of books, down to the vanishing point and that’s just the James Patterson section.  Gloria says, to save space, they are going to be converting the books to holograms — which makes no sense. Understand-ably in 1986, the producers didn’t know what a Kindle was; but they did know what a hologram was.

Seeing that the books are titled with people’s names and birth dates, she leaps to the conclusion that they contain people’s lives rather than that she might just be in the ##0.#09 section.  Gloria admits there is a book there for everyone alive.  “Each is an up to the minute record of the person’s life, changing with each moment.”  When a person dies, her employer uses the book to determine their final destination, although Zeno’s Paradox would suggest the book will never get that far.

As is frequently the case with this TZ series, the insipid score undermines any suspense that this scene promised.  Ellie finds herself in the P section.  After she zips up ^[1], she pulls out the volume titled Ellen Pendleton.  It gives an account of her life including pulling the book off the shelf and opening it.

Back at the apartment she shares with her sister the nurse, she says her day was enormously unbelievable.  After dinner, she tries to work on her novel, but noise from the adjoining apartment is disturbing her.  She confronts her neighbor Mr. Kelleher who is laughing it up with his gal Carla . . . . . I don’t know if I can go on.

Ellie has had a mind-blowing experience at work, she is stood up by her sister, she has writer’s block, she is frustrated at the “cheapest drywall in the world”, she is angry at her inconsiderate neighbor, she confronts him and he is an obnoxious jerk.  So naturally the score sounds like public domain music that would play under two young lovers having a picnic lunch at a lake watching the sailboats.  It is inconceivable to me that this selection wasn’t drawn out of a hat.  OK, looking again, I guess this is the music on the neighbor’s stereo, but it is still a poor choice.

The next day, Ellie uses White-Out and a pen to edit Kelleher’s volume so he is a eunuch priest.  The segment regains its footing with Ellie’s entrance into her apartment after work.  The butterfly effect has changed the past, present and furniture which she trips over; and her sister is now a waitress — it is a good moment.  Note to Hollywood: Played with no score.

Ellie’s sister is consoling her crying friend Carla who was Kelleher’s gal in the original timeline.  She whines, “I’m 37 years old. ^[2]  I have no kids, no husband, not even a boyfriend.  My life is a complete and utter waste.” ^[3] The next day, Ellie writes her into “a relationship with that nice Mr. DeWitt in 304.”

After work, Carla is sporting a full length fur coat.  When Ellie enters her apartment, it is much more homey for one thing.  Her sister is now a lawyer helping Mr. DeWitt who, in this timeline, has been bankrupted by Carla’s spending.  Wow, nurse to waitress to lawyer — what a decline!

Ellie edits his volume so he is a successful real estate developer.  She sees de wealthy DeWitts as she is coming home from work. Mr. DeWitt tells her not to be late with the rent, and “and whatever your sister is trying to pull in that tea party upstairs, it’s not gonna work.”  Her sister is organizing the tenants in a rent strike against the over-bearing, do-nothing criminal landlord.  Heh, Tea Party indeed.

Ellie has had it with apartment living, so edits her volume for a nice beach house and bigger boobs, although I might have imagined that last part.  She gets home and finds her sister has died while rescuing a little boy from drowning.  D’oh!

She immediately returns to the library to erase the beach house.  And, by the way, probably condemns the little boy to die in the new timeline.

She tells them to keep CPRing while she runs back to the library, but her sister’s book has already been pulled.  Gloria finally realizes Ellie has been editing the books, so throws her out of the library like a 50 year old dude browsing in the Young Adult section.  She finds her sister in her nursing uniform waiting by the car, so all is as it was.

There is so much to like here.  The structure is pretty well-worn, but that’s OK — there is a reason why classics are classics.  This basically is the same genie/devil wish-and-consequence seen since The Monkey’s Paw.  In fact, a month ago we just had the same concept on TZ with a Leprechaun.  The 15 minute segment was well-constructed to work in minor changes in the timelines and interweave the characters.

I guess my only complaint is the score.  It is not unusual for the overly-syruppy scores the undermine TZ segments.  I am just baffled by how this was allowed.  I know they were going for a kindler, gentler, not-your-father’s TZ — misguidedly, in my opinion — but at least the sappy music often accompanies a sappy scene.  Here, it just made no sense.  I’m not going back to check, but it seems to me the most effective scenes in this segment were the ones played with no score.  The occasional heavenly choir bit worked, so I am not advocating silence.  Just don’t have the score at odds with the tone of the scene.

Just the slightest dark edge could have made this great.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] She wasn’t wearing pants, but I couldn’t think of another way to say it.  See, like she was urinating in the P section.  Just urinating and urinating and urinating. Cuz it’s the P section.  Where Pendleton would be.
• ^[2] The actress is 41.  F’in actors, man.
• ^[3] C’mon this was already being mocked in 1980.
• Classic TZ Legacy:  Take yer pick of genie and time-travel episodes.
• Written by Anne Collins who also wrote the dreadful Ye Gods.  I’m willing to bet that one also had the pixie dust flourish.  She has a huge resume; maybe she is just not getting a fair shake on TZ.
• Skipped Segment:  Take My Life . . . Please.  I like the premise, but it was just about unwatchable.  Many others seem to like it, so maybe I will get up on the wrong side of the bed in a couple of hours.
• Skipped Segment:  Devil’s Alphabet.  No one seems to like this one.  The whole time, I kept thinking it seemed like a segment that could have easily fit in on Night Gallery.

Jeck Henries is changing a tire on a dirt road in Loma.  The most interesting thing we will get out of him is that someone took the trouble to make up the name Jeck for a character that will disappear in less than 2 minutes.  His similarly over-monikered neighbor Wiley Whitlow suddenly appears.  Wiley whispers something in Jeck’s ear and Jeck suddenly starts screaming.  It is a good opening, but the effect is blunted because it’s just not a very good scream.  Is it fear, is it pain, is it a scream of insanity?

The government sends Edward Sayers (William Peterson, CSI: Twilight Zone) to investigate.  He is met by Amanda Strickland.  She had called her senator, but apparently only ponied up a big enough campaign contribution for one investigator to be sent out despite 25 people being effected, including her father.  She takes Sayers to see him at the local nut mental hut health facility.  After some creepy chit-chat, old man Strickland begins screaming his head off.

Then they go to the Hotchkiss house.  She had stopped by to see Mr. Strickland earlier that day.  The elderly woman serves them fresh bread and tea.  All is fine until she tries to stab them.

Sayers goes to work in the high school science lab.  He has deter-mined that the craziness is not caused by anything breathed or consumed.  Amanda has an idea that it is a contagious disease and describes the connections that caused it to spread.  I hope it isn’t sexually transmitted because every resident in this town seems to be 80 years old.

Sayers calls his boss in Washington, DC to see if they can set up a quarantine to contain the lunatics so they don’t do any more damage.  Sadly, his boss refuses to build a fence around DC, but promises to send troops to Loma.

Amanda has found hayseed-zero in Andrew Potts who is appropriately-monikered as she describes him a “local crackpot.”  He has gone crazy, but his brother Jeffrey — a professor of Far Eastern studies — still lives in town.  Sayers finds him at home.  With a degree in Far Eastern studies in this farm community, where else would he be during the day?  He says on his last trip to The Orient, he learned “the meaning of everything. Man’s purpose and destiny.  Life after death.  God.  Devil.  Existence.  Everything.”  He leans in to whisper it to Sayers, but he recoils.  No matter, Jeffrey is going to broadcast the secret over the radio.  He brains Sayers with a vase and heads for the radio station.

Sayers races back to Amanda’s house. As Jeffrey is about to give away the big secret, he rushes into her house yelling, “Turn off the radio!” even though he hypocritically left the radio in the Jeep on.

She whispers in his ear and he looks into the camera.  Over an exterior shot of the house, we hear his scream.

The randomly triggered violence reminded me of The Crazies and The Happening.  The mind-blowing revelation reminded me of Monty Python’s Killer Joke.  The whisper reminded me of Scarlett Johannson.  That’s OK, I like all of them.  I don’t even remember The Happening being as bad as everyone claims.

This is just the kind of story I like, and kudos to TZ for choosing the dark side once in a while.  However, a couple of things were problematic.  The screams were just not well-done at all.  A recurring problem is Charles Aidman’s narration.  It is becoming just as much of a buzz-kill as the scores.  TZ made a great choice having Sayers look directly at the camera after the whisper, however, the lackluster scream followed by Aidman’s raspy avuncular voice just drained the menace from the ending.

Still, there was a lot to like.

Post-Post:

• Amanda was played by Frances McDormand.
• Skipped Segment:  Need to Know was less than 20 minutes and the balance of the episode was a very good segment, Red Snow.  There was a 30 Days of Night vibe, but this 26 minute segment had more meat than that movie.  The main similarity was vampires above the arctic rim and extended “nights”.  However, Red Snow had the additional elements of a cold war gulag and the vampires’ adversarial / symbiotic relationship with werewolves.  A great movie could be made from this premise.

Professor Joseph Fitzgerald wraps up his Wednesday Harvard Economics lecture by saying. “We’ll pick this up on Monday.”  So the Harvard Economics class-week is only 3 days?  That would explain a lot.  I know the day of the week because it is November 21, 1963.

One of his students mentions he will be writing a paper about President Kennedy’s speech at the Trade Mart the next day.  In the incredibly unlikely event that the speech doesn’t occur, he wisely has a sure-fire backup plan to interview Aldous Huxley that afternoon.  Back in his office, Fitzgerald empties his pocket of some trash, a piece of gum and a 1964 dollar coin bearing Kennedy’s profile.  He draws the curtains and a colleague from the future, Dr. Kate Wange, materializes.  It is not a formal status report. She just wants to know how he is doing.

Fitzgerald is upset that he must be so detached from everyone here.  He is especially troubled that he has spent the last three years studying Kennedy but hardly got to know him as a man — maybe they should have sent Kate instead.  Now his assignment is ending and he will be forced to watch the assassination.  She busts him for violating the rules by carrying the coin, but wishes him well on his trip to Dallas.

Fitzgerald transports 3,000 miles to Dealy Plaza just as Kennedy’s motorcade makes the turn.  I guess he transported ahead a day to the 22nd also, but that isn’t mentioned. He raises a camera that puts Abraham Zapruder’s to shame and films the cars.  He pans up the schoolbook suppository building and sees Oswald.  He just can’t let history play out as it had before.  He shouts a warning, Kennedy ducks, Oswald misses, and Jackie gets to wear that snappy pink dress another day.  Most injured in this new timeline:  Aristotle Onassis.

The Secret Service detains Fitzgerald, but quickly determine he is “an upstanding citizen.”  He’s from Harvard, after all, and knows Robert MacNamara.  He is taken to Love Field to meet Kennedy who was disappointed to find out it was an airport.  They have to make a quick exit as tornadoes are bearing down on them — wait, what? Fitzgerald is invited to fly back to DC on Air Force One.

Fitzgerald learns that his disruption of the timeline caused the tornadoes, and now the Russkis have captured West Berlin, and Khrushchev was assassinated.  He determines that his shenanigans will inevitably lead to a nuclear holocaust.  He reluctantly admits to JFK that he is from 200 years in the future, and shows a holographic film of the assassination as it really happened.  JFK realizes he must go back and take the bullet in order for the world to survive.

Hologram: Still more solid than Oliver Stone’s version.

Fitzgerald manages to save the world and JFK and not blow the timeline.  There is another fun wrinkle but why give away everything.  Well-played!

Andrew Robinson does an amazing job as JFK in every facet that he has control over — the accent, the inflections, the mannerisms.  Unfortunately he does not bear the slightest resemblance to JFK — and has his own very distinct look — so his performance, though excellent, is a little jarring.  Enormous credit must also be given to the script by J. Neil Schulman which must serve multiple functions; not only the premise, but the dialogue that drives it, the political discussions, and having the words tailored to be absolutely believable coming out of JFK’s mouth — all amazing.  Maybe it is an idealized version of Kennedy, but that’s OK.

At the risk of gushing a little, the set design and production are also phenomenal. Jackie didn’t really have anything to do but was perfectly placed and costumed.  Dealy Plaza and the assassination were cut together — I assume — with footage from another production, but it flowed beautifully.  Even the White House, seen in hundreds of movies, felt more real than ever, down to JFK’s rocking chair in the Oval Office.

The best TZ segment so far.

Post-Post:

• Classic TZ Legacy:  In Back There, a man goes back in time to save Lincoln.  In No Time Like the Past, a man goes back in time to save Garfield.  Where’s the love for McKinley?  Also, Barbara Baxley (Wange) was in Mute.
• Title Analysis:  I’m not thrilled with this one aspect of the segment.  I get that it is a reference to Profiles in Courage, and to his profile on the dollar.  But then, Profile in Coinage would have been much worse, so maybe it’s OK.
• Chappaquiddick!  Whew, been holding that in for 30 minutes with nowhere to use it.

Johnny Davis (Steve Railsback) is driving like a maniac.  Unfortunately for a little convertible and several bicyclists, he is doing it in a semi. He passes the convertible and several of the cyclists run off the road to avoid getting what they deserve.  This is enough for him to have his insurance canceled.

He meets his father’s old friend Pete at a strip club.  Johnny could work with Pete, but Pete tells him it is a terrible job, a real last-resort gig.  Johnny has had 4 accidents in two years, so jumps at the opportunity. The very next day, they are rolling down some unfamiliar roads to a camp.  The gates are opened by guards wearing visors.

Johnny is disturbed by the shambling, moaning prisoners being herded onto the truck. The guards are visored, scarred brutes who are able to light cigarettes with their palms which troubles Johnny because who smokes anymore?  He goes to help a woman being whipped.  Pete holds him back, telling him these people are not alive.  He proves it by repeatedly knifing one of them.  The man has no reaction which makes me wonder how effective that whip was.

Pete tells us in China and India they have trains, in Russia they have tram-lines, in Mexico it’s old buses — all used to take deliver wretched souls from the Annex to Hell Proper.  When they enter Hell, Johnny is surprised there are no flames.  Pete explains that “Management” doesn’t care if they suffer — the goal is to keep them away from decent people.

They pull into the warehouse which is abuzz with activity.  It is like a multi-level prison, with people running all about.  If I saw this as a kid, I would have never forgotten it . . . unless I did see it and forgot it.

Their cargo breaks the rails on the truck and escapes — maybe before they got to Hell would have been a better plan, though.  Some of the damned tell him why they are there. A woman says it is because she was self-centered, a man says it is because he is dull, another woman says she was a bad mother.  Another man says he is there for not believing in God.  Johnny is heart-broken that he can’t help these lost souls or find hookers on the bill of lading.

There are prison-riot style disturbances in Hell as people are being damned for minor infractions.  A corporate lackey tells Johnny that the Boss isn’t making the decisions anymore, so things have gotten fouled up.  He tells Johnny he can help and gives him the location of “The High Road.”

When Johnny is spotted talking to the man, he is taken to meet Management.  Johnny tells him that he has met many people that didn’t deserve to be there.  Management tells him he has “been taken in by a lot of secular intellectual propaganda.”  He says his predecessor was not a religious man; that he thought there could be some discretion in who went to Hell.  Under new Management, the rules tightened to include not only murderers and rapists, but everything from jay-walkers to pornographers.

When hauling his next load, Johnny pulls over and questions his cargo.  The first man “offed a cop,” the next was a rapist and an arsonist.  From there, the infractions get a lot tamer.  An old librarian is there for stocking books by Vonnegut, Salinger and Huxley.  Another woman is a junkie.  There is also a draft-dodger and a gay dude.  Johnny opens the truck gate and lets those last four out.  Luckily the cop-killer and the rapist draw the line at a little pushing and shoving to escape a trip to Hell.

What a vault!  If only there were some way to escape this truck to Hell.

He gives them directions to The High Road which might lead to Heaven.  Johnny tells them about the time between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection ^[1] when Jesus was in Hell rescuing the righteous that did not belong there.  He’s just trying to do the same.

He re-locks the truck gate, sealing in the remarkably well-behaved group of doomed souls on their way to eternal Hell.  Although, not to nit-pick, but there was no roof on that transfer truck — these thugs could climb out and escape anytime.  Show some initiative, sheeple — you’re on a Highway to Hell!

I’m a sucker for a good Hell / Purgatory story, especially when live humans are enablers.

I rate it 660.

Post Debris:

• ^[1] As mentioned in Apollo’s Creed, the Gospel of NicoDerm, aka the Acts of Pilates, and the folk stylings of Peter, Paul but not Mary.  But I might have missed a few Sundays myself.
• Title Analysis:  Perfect.