Linda Wolfe is invited to the offices of the THE CARD card.  It is an exclusive new invitation-only credit card operated out of a strip shopping center across from the   7-11.

Ms. Foley immediately brings up Linda’s past problems.  “Mrs. Wolfe, you have a very spotty credit record . . . AMEX, Visa, MasterCard have all cancelled you in the past.  So have the department stores.  Even Union-76.” ^[1]  Linda swears she’s learned her lesson.  Mrs. Foley says they offer credit to those who can’t get it anywhere else, but they have some stringent requirements:  They require a minimum payment within se7en days of purchase.  She is honest that there are some serious penalties.  Mrs. Foley hands Linda a contract which has only slightly more fine print than a standard non-Twilight Zone cardholder agreement.  Like only 100% of applicants, Linda signs without reading.  Mrs. Foley hands her an onyx THE CARD with her name already embossed on it.

Back at home, her husband notices a bottle of perfume and the new card and asks about it.  Linda replies 3rd personally, “Are we going to start fighting about Linda’s problem again?”  Her husband, hoping to ever see her naked again, says, “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea at all.”  He does carefully ask her to be careful, though.

You know there is going to be trouble when a title card pops up that says “ONE WEEK LATER.”  She is looking for their cat, but he has disappeared.  No one else in the family even remembers them having a cat.

Two days later, they are shopping for a new refrigerator.  They pick out one with a $1,698 price tag, which would be — holy crap — $3,700 in today’s dollars!  Natch, she blows this purchase also, and the dog disappears.

Then the car breaks down; there’s another $360.  Using the card again even though she is already delinquent earns her an immediate penalty.  When she gets home, the kids have disappeared and her husband doesn’t remember them.  The mass extinction of all 3 kids at once answers one of my questions — why not just buy a bowl of goldfish and be late on the card every week?  I guess they delete all like items at once, so that wouldn’t work.  But you could still make it work for you — did I mention my pet termites, Mrs. Foley?

Linda understandably flips out like a woman whose kids are missing.  She runs to the kids’ room, but their stuff is gone.  The family portrait seen earlier is now just she and her husband.  She realizes it is the THE CARD card.

The next morning, Linda goes to the THE CARD office and demands to see Mrs. Foley.  While she is waiting, she sees her kids in the hall ^[2].  She screams for them, but they seem not to recognize her.  Mrs. Foley calls her into the office.  “Yes those were your kids.  Earlier this month, we acquired your cat and your dog.  What seems to be the problem?”  Linda finally hands Mrs. Foley a check to get her kids back.

Linda rushes home to yell at her husband about her day.  She says she wrote a check out of their joint account.  He says the bank called him to approve it and he told them not to honor it.  She screams and runs out to the car — which disappears.  She tries to call Mrs. Foley, but furniture starts disappearing.  Then her husband disappears from the family portrait which is now just of her.  Her The Card, lying on the floor, now says Linda Wilson, presumably her maiden name.  There is a good laugh as she digs through a kitchen drawer looking for scissors.  As she removes each item from the drawer and places it on the counter, it disappears.  Great stuff.  Or maybe I’m just reminded of Zinc Oxide.

She cuts the THE CARD card in half.  In an exterior shot, we see the house disappear.  The card halves flutter to the ground.  Even Linda has disappeared.

Great episode, and not just because I’m a sucker for nobody-else-remembers-what-I-remember stories.  There was a lot packed into this episode and they did an amazing job making it fit.

I’m undecided on whether they should have shown the kids again.  It provided an opportunity for Linda to give a great reaction; plus, it is creepy that they no longer recognize their mother.  On the other hand, I would have liked the idea of them just being gone, blinked out of existence.  I guess the The Card needs to make a profit off of them, though.

Maybe they have an adoption service that places the kids for a fee.  But what lucky guy gets the pixie-haired Linda as part of his Rewards Program?  Actually, it would have been the interesting for the 2nd segment of this episode to be a stand-alone story that showed The Card operation from the opposite POV.  We would see where the cat, the dog, the kids, Linda, her husband and the house go.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] I was prepared to say Linda had caused the jingoistically-named Union-76 to mercifully go under before it had the chance to trigger any snowflakes.  Turns out, they still have a few stations.  OK, 1,800.
• ^[2] I have no idea if that link is representative of their work.
• Classic TZ Legacy:  And When the Sky was Opened.  A rocket returns to earth with its crew.  One by one, the crew disappears with only one crew-member remembering them.  Then he disappears and no one at all remembers any astronauts . . . just like today.
• Skipped Segment: The Junction.

Six year old Megan McDowell comes downstairs to her parents watching TV.  She says, “Daddy, I’m scared.  There’s a man in my room.”  Actually, I think it would have been more realistic for her to be shrieking, “Daddy, there’s a man in my room!”  The scared part would have been implied.  Show, don’t tell.

Jeff takes her upstairs and shows her there is no man there.  When he clicks off the light, he sees a six year old Vietnamese girl in bed and hears helicopters.  Lights on, back to normal.  He turns the lights off again — which would not have been my next move — and everything is cool.

The next day when Denise brings Megan home from school, Jeff already has the wine flowing.  A kid in his class asked him what he did during Viet Nam.  He answered that he was in school, but did not mention it was in Canada.  He asks, “Why do I feel so guilty?”  Yeah, I wonder . . .

Megan comes downstairs and says the man is back.  Denise takes her in the bathroom to wash her hands. In the mirror, she sees a scruffy bearded man in a Veteran’s Administration wheelchair roll out of sight.  She runs downstairs and meets Jeff. She says, “Did you see him?  Did he come past you?  The man in the wheelchair?”  Jeff steals my thunder by pointing out the man could hardly have wheeled the chair down the stairs past him.  He doesn’t find the man, but does find wheelchair tracks in the plush shag carpeting.

Jeff suddenly flashes back to a past he did not have — he is in a swamp, under fire in Viet Nam. His first instincts are to take off his helmet, throw his rifle aside, and give away their position by screaming like a maniac — so maybe he was right to go to Canada.  He quickly returns to his very patient wife.

He says the man being here is his fault.  “I got drafted, but I chose Canada.  I copped out on Viet Nam.  And now it looks like Viet Nam is catching up with me.”  He thinks maybe the legless man had to go in his place.  Or maybe he died because Jeff wasn’t there.  As he hugs Denise, he flashes back to the war and is making out with a Vietnamese girl, though thankfully not the six year old.  When he snaps back, he does what comes naturally — gets in his car, and drives away.

The next day at work, Denise gets a call from Jeff asking her to come home.  But a few minutes later, Jeff comes to her office looking for her.  Uh-oh.  She arrives home first, finding the man in the wheelchair — a bearded, grizzled, legless doppelganger of Jeff.  Jeff-2 suggests there was a fork around 1971 and they took different paths.

Denise died young in Jeff-2’s timeline.  Ya might think that would be used to validate Jeff-1’s choice, but nothing really is done with it.  Jeff-1 has a random idea that by holding hands, they can exchange memories, giving Jeff-2 some happier ones to cling to.  From there it gets new agey and kumbaya in the way that caused such damage to this TZ reboot.

I appreciate that the episode didn’t come down hard on either side of the draft-dodging question.  It really just addressed the fall-out of each man’s choice without placing blame.  Despite the mushy ending, it was a good journey.

Other Stuff:

• Title Analysis: More like the Road Not Taken than The Road Less Traveled.  But the both came from the same source.  I mean literally . . . literally literally.
• But what’s up with the 2 L’s in Travelled?
• Cliff DeYoung (Jeff) is still on my sh*t-list for his role in detonating that atomic bomb in Valencia.  [UPDATE] Turns out that was Raphael Sbarge.

Ricky Frost is minding his own business tapping out a tune on the table as if he were playing a piano.  Unfortunately, he is in prison where that translates as “break my fingers, please” with an encore of “thank you sir, may I have another.”  A fight breaks out nearby and Ricky stupidly tries to help a friend.

He gets a minor wound in the hand that is a little baffling.  As a pianist, his hands are his life.  Yet, at no point is he overly concerned about this wound to his hand.  There is no suggestion that this could end his piano playing days.  Given that, why was the wound even written to be on his hand?

The doctor worries that Ricky is not fitting in.  He has pissed off the white gang, and “even though you play like Ray Charles, you hardly qualify for the black gang.”  Ricky refuses to stand by while others get knifed.  The wound gets him a cushy work detail.

It was 90 years ago today . . .

He is handed off to a grossly miscast Norman Fell as Eddie O’Hara.  Maybe having been there 50 years, you get special privileges.  He has a hat, smokes a cigar and is wearing a vest even though the last thing I would want to be in prison is a dandy.

Eddie: You’re the piano player.  Knocked off your girlfriend.

Ricky:  She was my former girlfriend.  They found her in a car that had been stolen from me but I couldn’t prove any of that.

That exchange bugged me, but it’s not worth dissecting.  The bishop is coming to the prison, and O’Hara wonders if Ricky can play Ave Maria on an old piano they have in the attic.  It was a gift from O’Hara’s old pal Micky O’Shaughnessy around the time he disappeared, back when major appliances were allowed as gifts in prison.  And there’s nothing guards encourage more than a huge supply of unguarded piano wire in prison.

Ricky opens up the keyboard.  He finds sheet music for The Maple Leaf Rag in his stool — heehee!  As he begins playing, he is transported back to 1899.  He is a member of a band dressed like Sgt. Pepper playing a concert in a park.  When he stops playing for a second, he is transported back to the prison attic.  Later in the yard, he asks O’Hara how to avoid trouble.

Ricky: How do you get along in here?

O’Hara:  I believe in the 11th command-ment.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you . . . but do it unto them first!

This sounds clever, but makes no sense in multiple ways.  Again, let’s just move on.  The next time Ricky is able to get to the piano, he plays the WWI song Over There.  He is transported back to a bar in 1917 where dough-boys are waiting to ship out.  He pockets a box of matches and manages to sip a beer while playing with one hand.  When he removes both hands from the keyboard, he re-materializes back in prison.

While the doctor is removing the stitches from his hand, Ricky tells him about the piano.  The doctor, understandably, is dubious.  However:

Dr. Puckett:  If I were smart, would I be working here?

Bloody hell!  You’re a doctor!  OK, you’re not doing cancer research, but you earned a medical degree!  Maybe it’s time to point out this teleplay is from a writer with only one other credit on IMDb — another TZ segment which did not interest me enough to post about.

Apparently Ricky has freer run of the prison than Michael Scofield, because he is soon back in the attic with the piano.  Today’s selection is Someone to Watch Over Me (1928). ^[1]  O’Hara comes and Ricky asks him if he would like to go back to face O’Shaughnessy.  He proves it is possible by showing him the box of matches he pocketed.  He says, “I was there yesterday, the Shamrock Club in Chicago.”

What the hell?  He got those matches when he transported to the WWI bar.  One of the soldiers referred to being from 103rd street which sounds a lot more like New York than Chicago.  He offers to take O’Hara with him, but ends up being transported by himself.

O’Shaughnessy is critical of Ricky’s ivory tickling skillz.  He’s not crazy about the piano, either.  He orders a lackey to send it to young O’Hara at the state pen.  Then he sits beside Ricky and takes over the piano playing.  Since there was never a break of hands on the keyboard, O’Shaughnessy is now the driver and Ricky does not fade away.  Once O’Shaughnessy quits playing, he transports to the prison where old O’Hara punches him out for framing him and stealing his gal.  Ricky is a free man, and goes on to tickle the ivories of O’Shaughnessy’s flapper gal. ^[2]

Despite some gaps in math, dialogue, casting, and logic, this is a winner.  It takes a simple, high concept story and plays it out with justice being meted out all around.  Joe Penny has had a huge career, but he seems like such a natural talent, I’m surprised he wasn’t in more prestigious shows and movies.  Even though I felt Norman Fell was miscast as O’Hara, he’s still Norman Fell and that counts for something.  Another great asset is that, since this episode centered on certain songs, there was less opportunity for the awful TZ scoring to ruin the episode.

This is never going to be considered a classic, but it would have been a worthy episode on the classic 1960s series.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] The sheet music for Someone to Watch Over Me says 1928.  Since it was written in 1926, I take it we are to believe 1928 is the date Ricky goes to.
• O’Hara has been in jail for 50 years, or since 1936.  So how did O’Shaughnessy send him the piano at the prison 8 years before he got there?
• ^[2] By ivories, I mean boobs.  Just to be clear, boobs.  Under the B, boobs.  Which probably didn’t get much sunlight.  So, ivory-like.
• ^[2] So this girl ended up banging all 3 guys.  Flapper, indeed.
• Thank God for CTL-F or O’Shaughnessy would never have been mentioned by name.
• I would encourage people to click the Maple Leaf Rag link above because it is very entertaining.  Here is a more convenient link, but to be honest, it is to pictures of Emily Ratajkowski.

Terry Farrell knocks on a door and a man won’t let her in.  That might be the single most unbelievable scene in this episode.

Marsha Cole begs the security guard to allow her into the Galleria Mall which is closing . . . just for the night, not permanently like most malls.  She begs him, and he lets her in because she looks like Terry Ferrell. A couple of creepy guys watch her walk to the elevator; also because she looks like Terry Farrell.  She goes to the toy store across from Athlete’s Foot.  The store is dark but suddenly lights up like every room she enters, because she looks like Terry Farrell.

A clerk appears and she asks for a Cornfield Kid doll.  While the clerk goes to get one, a boy scares Marsha with a toy spider.  She asks his mother how the boy knew her name.  Weird thing is, the boy never said her name.  I can’t see any story-related reason for her mistake, so I guess it is just an editing artifact.  The boy begs her, “Take me with you when you go!  Please!”  This also makes no sense if you know what’s coming.^[1]

The clerk returns with the doll.  Marsha wants it as a gift for her landlord’s daughter.  When she moved in a month ago, the landlord waived the first month’s rent because she had no money and looked like Terry Farrell.  She says the girl’s birthday is Saturday, and the clerk asks why it was so important for her to get to the mall on Wednesday night.  She says she was at home reading and felt a sudden urge to go to the mall.  The clerk then asks her all kinds of questions about her past and her family, but Marsha has no answers.  As the clerk gets more persistent, Marsha freaks out and runs from the store.

She passes numerous closed stores, just like in any mall, except they will open again in the morning.  She goes back to the store she entered through, calm enough to remember where she parked.  She is able to muscle through the store’s mall doors, setting off an alarm.  She bumps into the security guard who let her in.  He falls to the ground and his mannequin head shatters.

Followed by the creepy guy, she runs through the store.  She finds her way to the offices.  There are some great scenes of disembodied mannequin heads and limbs that come to life.  Marsha is terrified as the heads begin chanting her name and the arms grab at her.  She runs away, knocking over a couple of naked mannequins in the hall. Unfortunately, they are the only ones who do not come to life.

Creepy guy is not very subtle when he yells, “We’re all mannequins!”  Marsha doesn’t believe him, but then one leg turns to plastic.  Creepy Guy and the clerk follow her as she limps away.  Creepy Guy tells her that she had her month to go out and experience the world like Rumspringa, now it is someone else’s turn.  Unfortunately, he does not explain this down by the Victoria’s Secret.  Piece by piece, she becomes more and more plastic just like a real actress mannequin.

This was, of course, previously a classic episode of the original series.  As with Shadow Play, neither is clearly superior, and both are good.  One nit-picky thing that bugs me about both versions is the treatment of the main character by the other mannequins.

• Why did the security guard only grudgingly allow her into the mall?  She was expected, even required to return.  Sure, she later bashed his head in, but he had no way of knowing that would happen.
• Why did the clerk spend so much time going through the motions of selling her the doll?
• Why were they so menacing to Marsha instead of calmly explaining what was happening to her?  Margaret White was more sympathetic to Carrie’s body issues than this group.

Of course, all that is for dramatic effect.  When it works, all is forgiven, and it works here.  Good stuff.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] She is on the way back from her time in the real world, not just heading out. You could say he’s just a dumb kid, but he seems to know the routine.  Also, given the twist, he might be just as old as all the grown-ups.
• Classic TZ Legacy:  Duh.
• Skipped Segment 1:  Lost and Found.  Time-traveling tourists steal a girl’s pencil cup.
• Skipped Segment 2:  The World Next Door.  George Wendt brings Norm Peterson’s energy and work ethic to a TZ episode.