Our introduction to Lucius Winton is quick and to the point.  His house-keeper comes into his estate and sees that the vast lighting system he has installed is out.  She turns the lights back on and we see only Winton’s withered, radiated arm drooped from a chair streaming blood to the floor.  The end.

We get a great overhead tracking shot of the cubicle farm where Harlow Winton (Michael Rapaport) is toiling away in a soul-crushing job.  Kudos for the name of his company being F-Mart. ^[1]  He gets a Jif-Ex overnight package containing a letter informing him of the death of his great-uncle ^[2] Lucius.  He must attend the will reading to collect his inheritance.  On the plus side, an airline ticket is provided; on the downside, it literally says Oceanic Air.

Lucius’s attorney Matson informs Harlow he is the last of the line, the lone heir, the sole survivor.  He has inherited the 23-room estate with a monthly stipend of $25,000 . . . as long as he lives in the house.  Bwah-ha-ha-ha!

Why would Ticket Prepared By = Winton?

Thumbhead told us in the intro that the estate has 12 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms.  Assuming one kitchen, that leaves only one slot for a Living Room, Dining Room, Den and such rich-guy niceties as a Library, Art Gallery, Solarium, Butler’s Pantry, Billiard Room, Etc.  That must be one great-ass room.

Matson tells him that the old man had a pathological fear of the dark, hence the collective 5 billion watts of bulbs around every nook and cranny of the house. Harlow looks at pictures of the industries his uncle owned. Matson says that at one time, the family employed almost everyone in this town.  “Old time capitalists,” the episode’s writer — er, I mean — Harlow sneers.  “So they exploited the workers, huh?”  Being an idiot, he naturally assumes, “I guess the Wintons weren’t well-loved by the locals, huh?”  Because capitalist.

The attorney suggests that if he donated the house to the town, he would get a significant tax windfall.  I am neither H nor R Block, but I don’t see how this works if you have no income to off-set the taxes.  Yeah, he is getting the $25k/month stipend, but that ends if he unloads the house.  Must be one of those evil rich-guy tax scams that I don’t understand.  Winton is more interested in party-planning than tax-planning, anyway.

As he settles in for his first night, he begins putting away his clothes. There are even bright lights in each drawer Winton opens.  One of them brightly illuminates a dead radiated rat.  When he turns off the light, he hears creepy sounds so sleeps with the lights on like a child.  Imagine if he had actually seen the menacing shadows that crept along the walls — he might have made a wittle pillow-fort.

Harlow calls in electricians to rewire the lights.  After just one night in the evil house constructed on the backs of the poor, down-trodden towns-people, he berates the workers, tells them they better call him “mister” and “you treat me with respect!” Because that’s how all rich people are.  Geez, is this a long-lost Rod Serling script?

As Harlow leafs through a scrapbook full of evil headlines like WINTON MAKES FINANCIAL HISTORY, BIGGEST STEEL SALE EVER, RAILWAY COMING TO ST ALBERT, WINTON MINES BOOST OUTPUT and WINTON BACKS CANAL, the menacing shadows advance on him in the now not-sufficiently well-lit room. How did that greedy son-of-a-bitch live with himself bringing cash, a rail line, more jobs and seaport to this little town? Oh, the humanity!

Sadly Matson rings the doorbell before the creeping shadows reach Winton. He again stresses how Lucius Winton exploited the townspeople. He suggests that Winton is profiting from this and might like to donate the house to the city to ease his conscience. Winton quite appropriately tells him to buzz off. The idea might not seem so crazy when a few minutes later Winton actually sees the creepy shadows fry a rat.

Matson tries again, this time bringing a $70,000 offer for the $2,000,000 estate.  He again stresses how many people suffered to create Lucius Winton’s fortune.  He says over 700 were killed in the family’s coalmine, scores more died in the tenements where he was a slumlord.  Well OK, now I understand the hatred of the old man.  He was a liar, treated co-workers like crap, employed thousands in dangerous dehumanizing conditions.  I guess all would have been forgiven if he had created the iPhone.

Matson tells Harlow the shadows are the dark deeds and dark thoughts and dark hearts — the greed and evil of generations of his family manifested itself in the shadows like the oil slick that killed Tasha Yar.  BTW, what happened to all those generations that resulted in Harlow being the only survivor?

Yada Yada, Harlow builds a Rube Goldberg device to kill the shadows.  He ends up being blinded.  Instead of living in in perpetual lightness, he will live in perpetual darkness.  The big question is why he bothered to hire a cute nurse.

This is a perfectly adequate story brought down by the casting.  Michael Rapaport is an actor of Bill Paxtonian awfulness.  Like Paxton, he seems to be capable of portraying only one character convincingly — a grating obnoxious dick which I assume must be his true self.  I would like to think that is is why Rapaport’s annoying character on Prison Break was named Don Self — kudos to the producers for the in-joke.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Presumably not a play on S-Mart, but funny on its own.
• ^[2] Uncle = brother of a parent.  Great Uncle = brother of a grandparent.  Great Great Uncle = put you in his will.
• Complete non-sequitur — a Chevy Avalanche just pulled into the Panera parking lot.  WTH kind of name is that for car?  Is an avalanche ever a source of anything but destruction and misery?  I’ll hand it to Japan, they’re not going to produce the Toyota A-Bomb.  Although the Porsche 911 is cutting it pretty close.
• BTW, this aired 5 days before 9/11.

Andy Harris (Chad Lowe) is walking and talking, but sadly this was not written by Aaron Sorkin, so he walks right into a wall of a Russian and falls to the ground.  The Russki has splashed cappuccino foam all over his face; or maybe, judging from the howl he lets out, he is rabid.^[1]

Harris is a stand-up guy after he stands up, so apologizes.  He gets no response from the comrade other than the aforementioned howl.  He thinks maybe Ivan put a curse on him as people immediately begin treating him like shit.  His brother chews him out, a waitress is surly, and his boss reams him for being late to a meeting for the 3rd time in 2 years.  In an action that I would absolutely welcome, his boss ejects Harris from the meeting. Unfortunately, he also ejects him from the firm.

Walking home with an ex-bankers box under his arm, he inadvertently walks through a construction site.  One of the city workers blasts him for ignoring the cones, then shockingly takes a shovel to him; then a pipe grinder ^[2], making it his most productive morning in 10 years.  Harris barely manages to escape and find a cop.  The cop seems to already know the details of what happened.  He tells Harris that it is a scene from a book he read last week.

Harris goes into some sort of archaic bricks & mortar shop that sells books made of dead trees — the late-great Borders if I know my fonts (this was back when this country had two kinds of borders, heyooooo!).  He sees a video of author William Price reading from his book Hate Puppet — he is performing the scene with the commie.  He even uses Andy’s name and says that the man’s howl meant “You have filled me with hate, and so hate shall fill those around you.”

He finally makes it home and his wife Linda seems nice and normal . . . at first.  Amazingly, she saw the same book and purchased it because she noted the similar name and likeness to her husband.  He tries to grab it to see his fate (SPOILER), but she refuses to hand it over, and suddenly also turns against him.  I mean, really against him — pointing a gun at his melon.

He tries to explain that her anger and irrationality is being caused by the curse . . . no, the one issued by the Russian.  As she is about to fire, he wrestles her to the ground and she ends up being killed in the struggle.

Distraught, Harris takes the gun to William Price’s home and points it at him.  He goes all Annie Wilkes on him and demands that Price write a sequel that reverses everything that has happened today.  At gunpoint, Price begins typing as Harris dictates.  In the sequel, as per Harris, it was all a bad dream and his wife is still alive. Before he can get to the part about her having bigger boobs, the cops arrive, and Harris kills himself. Relating the tale to a bartender, Price says that Harris was just a crazy fan.

There is a switcheroo that is well-intentioned, but so so botched that I don’t even want to recap it.  OK, briefly:  the idea is that Harris’s plight has now descended on Price.  You would expect that the beats would be repeated, but tightened up.

• In the bar, Price sees a commercial for a movie called Breakdown Lane which will be the theme of his ordeal.  Harris had no such harbinger.
• He accidentally runs into another hulk of a man.  In his case the man does not lay a curse on him, but just walks away.
• He has knocked out of the man’s hands a manuscript entitled Breakdown Lane. Nothing similar in Harris’s case.  Price reacts as if this is very ominous, instead of laughing and saying, “Dude, I just saw an ad for your movie!”
• Driving home, his car stalls in front of poster for Breakdown Lane.  Getting even more meta than Harris.  More meta than a man from St. Ives.
• He opens the hood of his car and stuffed into the battery is a page from the screenplay for Breakdown Lane.  What the hell?.

Price reads aloud, “If Price had heeded the radio he night not have made the acquaint-ance of the axe-wielding maniac standing behind him.”  OK, that’s pretty cool, but the idea of the parallel story just has crazy random differences.  Harris seemed to have free will, it just so happened that the book predicted his actions. Price seems to actually be stalked by Breakdown Lane; the forth wall is breached as it inserts itself into his reality. That could have been a good episode, it just isn’t a good fit here

So Breakdown Lane is a movie about a writer who is a character in that same movie who has written a book about a character that thinks he is a character in that same book.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] He also rent his garment, but I can’t compete with this guy.
• ^[2] Well they called it a pipe grinder, but I had no idea what it was.  It didn’t look like any pipe grinder that Google found.
• Only one picture in this post.  The visuals didn’t really grab me and the YouTube quality was awful.  Too bad . . . cuz them Lowe boys sure is purty.
• There actually is a movie called Breakdown Lane, but I suspect you’d spend your time more wisely watching Breakdown.
• Not relevant, but this aired 5 days before 9/11.

Kate Morris’s alarm goes off at the crack of seven.  Her husband David shuts it off, opting to awaken her by lightly squeezing her nostrils shut. This is the creepiest affectionate gesture since John Travolta — no, the one in Face/Off. ^[1]

Kate seems to like it, though.  Or is at least happy he didn’t murder her. She fixes a fabulous bacon and eggs breakfast for David and their daughter Wendy.  Kate takes a Polaroid of David eating and has a strange reaction to the photo.  Dang if I can figure out why, but then this is another low-quality You Tube video, so maybe I’m missing something.  It is a keeper, though, so she puts it in the world smallest photo album.

After putting Wendy on a respectably-lengthed bus, she turns back to her house and runs into a wall of a man.  He roughs her up, even dragging her by a purse strap around her neck.  When it breaks, he runs off.  The police come, but Kate refuses to go to the hospital.

I hope this lettering is not foreshadowing anything.

The next day at the grocery store, a man is following her, buying each item that she buys.  And from this selection, both of them ought to weigh 300 pounds — a box of crackers, those tasteless crunchy orange Styrofoam sandwich thingies, cookies, and a carb-fest for breakfast. This man also begins roughing her up, saying, “You’re coming with me, Kate.”

She arrives home to find her purse on the lawn.  The first thug has rifled though her it and taken her photos.  Although he did take the time to remove them from the wee album.

Her husband suggests that she go get her hair done to feel better.  Seems like a 1950s thing to say, but is it really wrong?  At the salon, she is able to forget about being attacked by men — this time she is assaulted by a woman.

Her husband suggests that going to a doctor might not be a bad idea. Kate disagrees and begins chopping bell peppers with a ferocity that I think is supposed to have some meaning other than that they’re having stir-fry tonight.  If there is some significance to this, please let me know.

David takes Wendy to a friend’s house for a sleepover more timely than Dana’s in Poltergeist.  Kate gets a call from a man, then a woman who also says “We’re coming to get you Kate, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”  Kate tears out in her car and finds the Emergency Broadcast System on every channel.  This drives her mad; also, into a light-pole.

She awakens in an ambulance and sees the men and woman who had attacked her are now the EMTs.  She escapes back to her house, but opening a door, she sees herself in a medical ward with tubes up her noise.  She then occupies her body in the bed.

David and the people who attacked her are all doctors.  She has been in a coma, which is “not the way the warden wants a convicted murderer serving her time.”  She murdered her abusive husband and lost the baby girl she was carrying.  She then hung herself which I guess ties into the purse-strap strangulation.  She begs the doctor who is her husband in the coma to be sent back into the coma where she was happy.

When they refuse, she jabs herself with a syringe, going back to coma-world and her happy family.

The camera pulls back into a nice proscenium shot which again seems to signify nothing.  Then there is a camera shutter click and it turns into a photo.  I guess this ties back to the Polaroid in some way but damn if I can see how.

Like the first segment in this episode, there seem to be many things set up to be significant which never pay off.  I could sit here and try to figure it out, but other people are waiting for the table.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] There is plenty to mock about Face/Off.  But just looking at the cover, shouldn’t they have at least made the eye colors the same for Cage & Travolta?
• From the writer of Rest Stop and After Life.  Then a Farscape episode, and she was done.
• Wendy was just a kid here, but in 10 years, yowza!

Stephen Baldwin is getting the crap beat out of him.  Shockingly, it is not by his brother Alec.  He owes money to some bad eggs who think nothing of taking a Louisville Slugger to his gut and standing on his guitar hand. He is able to brain the guy with a liquor bottle and make a run for it.

Brief aside: Next time you get your hands on a liquor bottle — i.e. now, for me — note how thick they are.  It is really possible to break one over a person’s head and not kill them?  The windows at the White House are not as thick as a bottle of Gentleman Jack.

He carjacks Amanda who is driving though an insanely dangerous part of town.  She is a veterinarian, but still agrees to stitch up Baldwin’s wounds.  Did they learn nothing from Tea-Bag?  No, the one in Prisonbreak — wow, there’s a word you don’t want to Google too deeply ^[1].  Naturally, she takes the beaten, bloody stranger back to her house; then invites him to spend the night on the sofa.  The next morning, before he wakes up, she has gone to the pawn shop and rescued his guitar with the ticket she found in his pocket.  I don’t get treated this nice at family reunions.

That night, the guy with the bat comes up in rotation again.  When he lets himself in Amanda’s window, Baldwin sics her two dobermans on him.  Amanda comes downstairs to see what the racket is and Baldwin tells her the dogs killed the man. “Good dogs,” she says.

Amanda takes charge, burying the man.  Even Baldwin thinks this is a little extreme.  He goes upstairs to get his guitar.  When he is at the top of the stairs, one of the dogs goes up on his hind legs and shoves Baldwin down the stairs.  He wakes up in Amanda’s bed with a broken ankle.  She has set the break using her mad vet skillz.  She must also have some mad weight-lifting skillz as he is, for some reason, now upstairs again.

He limps downstairs and tries to use the phone, but one of the dogs is guarding it. When he finds another phone, the other dog yanks the cord out of the wall.  The dogs then block him from the exits.  He cleverly drugs the dogs with the pills Amanda had given him, but passes out.  When he awakens, the dogs are gone.  He begin walking out and slips on some brown chunky material which, thankfully, he identifies as dog food.  They trap him in the bathroom, even turning the knob to come in after him.

Amanda shows up and literally calls off the dogs.  On the other hand, she does plunge a syringe into him.  He awakens in the basement chained to the wall.  Blah, blah, blah . . . she is treating him like a dog.

All this is fine as far as it went, but it seems to be missing a final act or twist. There are a couple of red herrings that seem more like sloppiness than misdirection.

Amanda’s dogs seem to be far more intelligent than normal dogs; they seem more intelligent than the dog in Watchers.  They shove Baldwin down the stairs, yank phone lines from the wall, and open doors as if they had once been human, but are now stuck in the bodies of dogs.  Hmmmmm, but that goes nowhere.

Amanda asks Baldwin to play her a tune on his guitar which she got out of hock for him. He refuses in a way that sounds suspiciously like he doesn’t know how to play.  This also goes nowhere.

Finally, Baldwin ends up chained to the basement wall.  I guess that is OK, I was just expecting something more — maybe she would use her vet skillz to transform him into a dog, like the walrus in Tusk.^[2]  Amanda tells him he will have to learn to behave, unlike her previous victim.  OK, what then?  What is the end game here?  What happened to the previous victim?

Post-Post:

• ^[1]  Although, it seemed to work out for Mike Ehrmentraut who got a bullet wound sewn up, a job offer and a snausage.
• ^[2] Or the snake in Sssssss.
• The only TV episode directed by JoBeth Williams.
• The last of many TV episodes written by Earl Hamner, Jr.
• In no way relevant, but this episode aired 12 days before 9/11.

Little Brian seems to be a bit of a firebug.  When we first meet the 7-year old, he is getting quite the little campfire going in the backyard, but he ain’t camping.

His sister Julia, who calls him “The Mutation” wishes that he would actually torch the house so she wouldn’t have to stay there anymore. Their mother, who Julia refers to as “Der Fuhrer” comes out and turns a hose on the little fire (not to be a grammar-Nazi, but wouldn’t she be Die Fuhrer”?).  Mom reminds Brian that she has told him not to play with matches.  The 7-year old outsmarts her by holding up a lighter.  If the matches ain’t lit, you must acquit.  His mother laughs and gets all kissy-face at his dangerous insolence.

Julia says that lately she can’t even look at her mother without wanting to stab her repeatedly. ^[1]  She hates being there so much she takes out a small cassette player and says, “I hate this place.”  She likes it a little better when she sees a local slab of beefcake mowing the lawn.  Well, not lawn so much as he is mowing a wooded area whose chief vegetation seems to be dead leaves on the ground.

At lunch, Mom throws the lighter at the Dad, blaming him for Brian’s indiscretion.  Mom repeatedly protects Brian against suggestions from the others that some punishment might be in order.  Quite reasonably in this crazy family, Dad breaks out the scotch at lunch.  Julia opines that “Dad is like an echo.  A tiny pathetic reflection of whatever mother says.”  He certainly echoes her attire — both sport an odd pairing of flannel shirts covering a turtleneck.^[4]

According to Julia, her father said he bought this place to get away from things, but she thinks what he really wanted was to get away from his family.  Again, understandable, but why would buying a family vacation home accomplish that?  Claim you have to go out of town for work.  Or send the kids to camp — that Camp Crystal Lake has a nice brochure.

Julia sees the handyman still working in the yard.  She wants to take him a drink, but Mom tells her to knock it off, that he is here to work.  Julia later sees the handyman drilling holes in 2 x 4’s.  She unbuttons a couple of buttons on her blouse and approaches him.  He doesn’t acknowledge her.  In fact, he walks toward the house and passes right through her like a ghost.  The man, his wood, and the drill all disappear.

Julia tries to tell this to her family. Brian says Mom says there is no such thing as ghosts.  Dad says he has heard Mom say that.  Julia correctly points out that the hunky handyman always seems to be working here but, like Ralph and Alf ^[2], he never seems to get anything done.   She concludes that he must be a ghost.

Julia is pining away for the “10” woodsman in her bed that night, dreaming of being drilled. She hears a noise, and sees the man pounding nails into the wall, which is almost as good.  She tries to speak to him, asking how long ago he died.  It is only after hitting his thumb with the hammer that he can see Julia, so apparently profanity pierces the veil.  He flees the room.

The next day, Julia asks her mother why she never believes anything she says.  Julia’s case might have been stronger had she not lied about crying 3 seconds earlier.

The next day, she sees the handyman washing his ghostly SUV.  He gets in the vehicle and Julia jumps in the front seat, unseen by the man.  When she touches his face, he suddenly sees her and crashes his SUV.  He screams that he just wants to be alone, that he is not responsible for what happened to them, that they’re dead . . . dead!

Julia is suddenly transported back to the house.  Now she sees that it is a burned out shell.  Brian finally burned the house down.  She realizes the handyman was horrified seeing her dead body, scarred by the fire.  Mom is able to convince her to accept that they are dead.  Once Julia buys in, they all continue living in the sunny day on the lakefront vacation home for ever and ever.

The basic story has been done countless times — one notable example is The Others which opened just 2 weeks before this episode aired.  But originality is overrated, it is really more interesting to see how the story is presented.

The actor portraying Brian is just unbelievably awful.  For a 9-year old, though, this is really more about the casting and direction than his talents.  Plus he was playing a 7-year old, so at least he had range.  The father was written as a non-entity, but I’m not sure why. Maybe grief over what happened to his family, but he seems to be more a victim of depression and a nagging wife.

On the positive side, the Mom was very good even if I often found her motivation baffling.  Julia (Marla Sokoloff) really carried the episode, though.  She was in every scene, sometimes just providing narration.  She also played a few years younger than her age, in 20+ minutes convincingly portraying anger, teen angst, indifference, insecurity, crush-love and finally acceptance of her reality.  She has a great career in shows I never watch.^[3]

Overall, a very enjoyable outing; and with Bitter Harvest, a very solid episode.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Julia attributes this line to “a girl in some TV show.”
• ^[2] Shamefully, there are no decent clips available of Ralph and Alf from Green Acres.  Internet, pfff!  Here is Hank Kimball instead.
• ^[3] Except when she was Joey’s sister in an episode of Friends.
• ^[4] When grabbing pictures, I finally realized that Brian shares this sartorial quirk.  Mom, Dad and Brian do share a bond that Julia does not, but how this corresponds to flannel, I have no idea.  Sadly, unlike Mort’s in the Bazooka Joe comics, Brian’s turtleneck does not cover his mouth.
• Title Analysis: Presumably a take-off on the TV show that had gone off 5 years earlier.  Maybe that was the show.^[1]