“Middleton College in New York State is a respected institution of learning.  Professor Alex Bondar, teacher and authority in parapsychology, is about to give a demonstration . . .”

Well, which is it?  Are they respected, or do they have a department of para-psychology?  It can’t be both.  Dr. Bondar is about to give a demonstration of hypnosis.  He has determined that elderly Mrs. Canby can be put under by shooting sound waves through her head at 14,000 cycles per second.

In a few seconds the old woman’s face relaxes and her eyes shut.  The overly-optimistic Bondar does not check her pulse, but rather asks, “Mrs. Canby, do you know me?”  He tells his students that not only is she not asleep, but some are her senses are more acute than when she is awake.  He drapes a handkerchief in front of her face, and has a student hold an open book behind it.  She astounds the class by being able to read the text, although she mistakes a booger for a comma.

Bondar explains this feat by saying that under hypnosis, her mind might be more sensitive to infra-red rays.  Hunh?  He says he has also seen Mrs. Canby describe things that were far out of sight where infra-red rays wouldn’t explain it.  He awakens her by counting slowly from 10 down to 1.  And I mean he takes his bloody time and doesn’t miss a digit.

It is also a countdown of a different sort as Bondar has a bombshell announcement.  A college administrator has actually pulled his head out of his ass for once and canceled the parapsychology program, judgmentally calling it “nonsense.”  Bondar is leaving the College, and not by no astral projection, either.

He gets a call from the police that his colleague Dr. Bernhardt Mannheim, driving in from Montreal for a parapsychology lecture, has been missing for 2 days.  Bondar describes him as about 70, small, frail, with white hair, and having a goatee; so indistinguishable from every other German scientist on TV.

Back at home, Julie Bondar is saddened by the loss of her husband’s cushy job.  She suggests that maybe if he had concentrated less on the para- and more on the -psychology, he might still have the gig.  He says she was never supportive and considers his work “the foolish fumblings of the family idiot!”  Sing it, sister!

That night, the Bondars go to Dean Henry Stark’s house for tea and begging.  He implores Bondar to admit that his work is just a lot of hooey.  The Dean says, “Science explains what actually happens.  You’re trying to explain what has never happened.”  Right on, brother!

While there, the police call with an update on Mannheim.  Stark mentions that he had tried to hire Mannheim for the faculty.  But wait, why would he make an offer to a parapsychologist when he was shutting down the department and considered it nonsense?  Anyhoo, Mannheim used his credit card to buy gas about 200 miles from them, but then just vanished.  Stark has a brilliant idea — are we sure this guy is the Dean? — why doesn’t Bondar use telepathy or clairvoyance to find Mannheim?

Bondar is uncomfortable having his crazy beliefs put to the test like, you know, science.  He argues that such skills can’t be turned on and off like a water tap.  The Dean, quite appropriately, accuses him of not really believing in this stuff himself.  Bondar says that psychics usually have a possession of the victim to work with, like an article of clothing.  Whew, guess we can’t test my beliefs, nosiree!  His wife helpfully reminds him that he has a letter from Mannheim, and Bondar almost does a homina homina.

Bondar agrees to haul Mrs. Canby in at 10 am the next morning to try to locate Mannheim.  Julie is suddenly on team Bondar again and doesn’t want him to go through with it.  She fears the Dean will make a fool of him, and reminds him that Mannheim warned him he was throwing his life away.  Again, wait — this is the same Mannheim who was driving down for the parapsychology lecture, right?

In the classroom, Bondar fires up the parabolic dish pointed at Mrs. Canby’s grey noggin again.  To Stark’s delight, this time the sound waves just hurt her ears; especially the good one.  Heyyyoooo!  They fall back on a method that had also worked with her — a metronome.  Honestly, this is a great piece of business because the silence broken only by the perfectly regular clacks is indeed hypnotic; so much so, I wonder why I can’t recall ever seeing it used again on TV or in movies.  The camera slowly pushes in alternately on the metronome, then Mrs. Canby’s face in a series of shots that is — dare I say — worthy of Hitchcock.  Was SFT fooling around with the antibiotic fungus from two weeks ago?

That does not work either, so Bondar tries using light as a stimulus.  Maybe they were still using the fungus, because he shines a spot in Mrs. Canby’s eye, then shines it in Julie’s for no reason I can figure.  Trying to put Mrs. Canby under, Bondar counts slowly from 1 to 29.  Think of that — on network TV, they had a scene where absolutely nothing happened except a dude counted slowly for 30 seconds.  Maybe that earlier 10 second countdown tested well.  Mrs. Canby freaks out at the pressure they put on her and is taken away.

The camera pans over to Julie who has not moved an inch.  She seems to be in a trance as she walks to her husband. ^[1]  She is not feeling well and asks him to drive her home; and to use the Stone Mountain route so she can get some fresh air, and maybe a Pecan Log Roll.  Julie tells her husband to stop at a certain point, then tells him to go down the hill and look around.  At the bottom of a steep hill, he sees Mannheim’s car where it crashed 3 days ago.  Bondar’s paranormal beliefs are vindicated because Julie’s clairvoyant vision made her stop them at this specific place; or it might have been all the flies.

Like Tales of Tomorrow, you really have to grade this series on a curve.  Objectively, the episode is awful.  However, considering the budget, the times, and compared to the rest of the series, parts of the episode are just a masterpiece.  The metronome, the editing, the counting, the shot compositions . . . there was just a lot to like here.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] OK, it is a great idea that Julie was caught in stray light that was intended for Mrs. Canby.  But it’s not like she was right behind Canby.  Bondar really had to swing that light around to get it in Julie’s eye, and do it more than once.  It would have been so easy to just line them up so Canby caught the light on the left side of her face and Julie behind her caught it on her right side.
• Major kudos to the director Eddie Davis.  He has a ton of credits, but nothing that indicates an auteur.  Maybe I should rewatch his earlier SFT effort, The Strange People at Pecos.
• BTW, IMDb has his age at 115.  Maybe they need a — dare I say — Dead Man’s Switch.  At some point, ya just know you missed an email.

In which Truman Bradley demonstrates an explosive test tube without proper eye-wear. ^[1]

“This is the setting of our story . . . the blazing inferno of heat-drenched emptiness unfit for the meanest of God’s creatures.”  

Surprisingly, the narrator is not talking about South Florida, but of Death Valley.  Crazy desert rat Charlie is driving David Brooks out to the ol’ Dunlap place.  Charlie says that Dunlap died a week ago, so in this heat, he should be pretty easy to find.  This surprises Brooks who received a telegram from him two days ago.

When they get to the Dunlap ranch, Norman Conway drives up.  He chews Charlie out and says he intended to pick David up at the airport himself, but will make it up by helping him with those gutters.  He nastily tells Charlie to beat it, then explains that he was Dunlap’s closest neighbor and best friend.  They go inside to see Dunlap’s widow, The Widow Dunlap.

They confirm that Mr. Dunlap was killed in an explosion of one of his experiments.  Sheila admits that she sent that telegram to David, but signed John’s name to get him here as soon as possible.  He is not happy at the deception and plans to catch the next flight out. Sheila entices him to stay by offering $25,000 for two weeks work, but he declines.  C’mon, that is $230,000 in 2018 dollars!

He doesn’t care for her because John had told him months ago that she had left him.  Sheila admits she fled to New York when his grant money started running low.  In her defense, she says she came back a week later.  She pawned everything she had to get them $3,000 to further fund his research.  OK, so where is this $25,000 coming from?  What else was she pawning in New York?

To further complicate things, it is revealed that David and Sheila were a couple ten years ago.  She admits that she left David for John because he made more money.  Wait a minute, John was working on his crazy experiments and would have come close to bankruptcy without Sheila’s help.  How was he making more than David?  Al-Qaeda’s money isn’t this hard to follow.

Sheila and Norman convince David to at least stay for dinner and consider their offer.  Norman asks David what the world would be like if water could be created in all the deserts of the world.  That was John Dunlaps’s dream.  He wants David to follow John’s work all the  way to the patent office.  Sheila says she sold Norman a 50% stake for him to further fund the research.  They offer David 10% but he still isn’t interested.

As David prepares to leave, Sheila shows him John’s research.  After glancing at the notes, he agrees to stay a little while.  The next morning, David asks Norman to drive him to the sight where John exploded.  He finds no evidence of an explosion at the site.  David later tells Sheila he thinks John was murdered.

David learns from the sheriff that Norman bought some dynamite shortly before John blew up, and has the ACME receipts to prove it.  BTW, I guess in an atypical effort to give a character a little depth, they have the sheriff 1) have his shirt unbuttoned a little too far, 2) wear his holster and sagging gun-belt while sitting at his desk, 3) chase a fly around the office with a swatter, and 4) have a pre-#MeToo girly calendar in his office.

David accuses Norman of killing John in order to have the money and Sheila for himself.  Although, in my opinion, it was mostly the cash.  Norman pulls a gun on them.  Sheila does some fast thinking and throws acid in Norman’s eyes.  They escape to the desert; and by escape, I mean run to certain death. Norman wipes the acid from his eyes and pursues them.

David flees the house empty-handed, but somehow in the desert he suddenly has a canteen.  It doesn’t help much, though.  Within seconds, they are dehydrated and near death.  They see a mud-hole where apparently John had successfully performed one of his tests.  They use their last strength to run to it and . . . well, not so much drink it as splash it on their face.  Like Dr. Chomsky from last week’s Nightmare, they seem to think water can be absorbed through the cheeks.  Hearing Norman’s jeep, they run for cover.

They are not hidden for long.  Even before Norman spots them, David gives away their position by reflecting the sun off the canteen and into Norman’s eyes.  Blinded, Norman tries to shoot them anyway, but misses.  He then reloads his double-barreled shotgun, which is strange, because he only shot once.  In a fiasco of staging and editing, David rushes Norman from the front, but somehow manages to clock him on the noggin from behind with the canteen.  Wow, that canteen can do everything!  Now if they only had some means of storing water.

Even on the SFT curve, a meh episode.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] He does demonstrate the paradox that water is the only element that expands when it is either heated or cooled.  Who designed this crazy system?

The phone rings at the US Weather Bureau Hurricane Warning Center.  Jim Tyler picks it up and a few seconds later says, “US Weather Bureau . . . yes, mam.  Fair today and Thursday.  No change in temperature.  Moderate southwest winds.”  Really, people are calling the US Weather Bureau to get the weather report?

Dr. Bronson is heading out to have dinner with Dr. Fredericks.  Tyler tells him to say hello from his old student “Hurricane” Tyler.  He says Dr. Fredericks gave him the nickname “because I used to be fascinated by hurricanes.”  Used to be?  Working in the Miami branch of the US Weather Bureau, I hope he still has a passing interest.

Tyler’s wife Julie and son Bobby come by the office.  Bobby is in a scout uniform and excited about his camping trip that night.  Tyler says it is a good night for it and gives Bobby a compass and a dollar.  Just after they leave, a crazy report comes across the teletype.  A freak hurricane has appeared out of nowhere with winds of 200 MPH.  Colonel Stewart calls in from the Air Force Base to confirm this.  Tyler is astounded.  “200 MPH!  Are you sure, Colonel?  There must be some kind of mistake.  I’ve never heard of a rotary speed that high.  The record is only close to 90!”  Wait, what?  It has to be 74 MPH to even be classified as a hurricane.  Did hurricanes only get up to 90 MPH in the 1950s?  Have they gotten that much worse?  Was Al Gore right?

Tyler calls home to tell Julie to keep Bobby at home.  He is in a danger that could traumatize him for life, and that’s just from the Scoutmaster.  Bobby has already left, though, so Julie tries to call some of the kids not yet picked up.  Meanwhile, Dr. Bronson and Dr. Fredericks come back to the office.  A new teletype message from a navy ship reports that there was a huge explosion just before the hurricane formed.  Fredericks suggests that a submarine be dispatched to the hurricane to take some water samples.

After being stationary, the hurricane finally starts to move toward Miami with speeds now up to 250 MPH.  Fredericks says, “Being out in a hurricane like this can be certain death.”  Kudos for the unintentional laugh as they whip-pan over to Julie who gasps, “Certain death?”  She pleads with Jim, “We’ve got to find those boys!”

There is not a lot of story in the rest of the episode, but there is a lot of fabulous stock footage.  We get to see Air Force planes fly into the hurricane, waves crashing, warning flags going up, rainy gusts blowing down deserted streets, switchboard operators trying to keep up.  Soon it is uneventfully over.

Julie and Tyler are still worried about Bobby, but he comes bounding in and they are happily reunited.  Drs. Bronson & Fredericks smile and clink their coffee mugs together in congratulations like they had something to do with his safety.  Kind of like when the FBI was high-fiving each other and saying “We’re #1!” when they caught the Unabomber . . . after 20 years . . . when his brother turned him in.  Good job, fellas.

Bobby says, being a scout, he was prepared.  The scoutmaster took the boys into a cave to safely ride out the storm.  In a good series, he would have credited the compass for saving them; but I probably would have complained about that too.  To their credit, they did surprise me by explaining the explosion that created the hurricane.  It was a meteorite.  Does that sense?  I don’t know.

For what it was, I can imagine this being pretty entertaining to a kid 60 years ago.

Other Stuff:

• Margaret Field as Julie . . . ha-cha-cha!

We open on a cleaning woman cleaning, and the announcer announcing, ” . . . and a vacuum cleaner screamed its defiance at the usual quiet.”  The woman is pretty defiant also, screaming at the tenants over the noise, “I know it’s noisy!  Ain’t my fault the noise bothers you!  I can’t help it if you got sensitive ears!”  Then she just scream-screams as a man runs into frame and strangles her.  Thus far, he is the hero of tonight’s episode.

One of the neighbors recognizes the man as Dr. Finch, and the police haul him in.  He protests, “I am a man of science.  I have never inflicted pain on a single human being.”  C’mon, WWII was just ten years ago.  He claims he can’t even remember where he was that day.

Finch’s niece Nan takes his arrest pretty hard.  She and Finch’s associate Dr. Seward go to see the Governor rather then, say, an attorney.  The Gov has the facts, though.  He lists off the evidence: Finch was spotted at the crime-scene, the victim’s skin was under his fingernails, a hair on his coat came from the victim, particles of dust and carpet fibers were found on his clothes, and he was positively identified by an eye-witness.  The Governor’s case is undermined, however, by the ridiculous circular tuft of hair sticking out of the side of his head.

Seward argues that Finch’s record of service to medicine should get him a break.  Not only that, he implores the Gov to just think of the millions who will benefit from his future research.  However, Seward doesn’t offer up any new hard evidence or campaign contributions so the Gov leaves Finch on death row.

Seward assumes Finch’s position at the lab.  Nan is none too thrilled with this.  She barges into his office and says, “Why, your best couldn’t possibly equal the least of my uncle’s abilities!  You’re a fool if you think you can replace Albert Finch!”  She further accuses him of taking credit for her uncle’s research and storms out of his office.  Strangely, she was fine with it earlier that day.  You don’t often find such irrational behavior in fictional women.

Seward goes to check on their new scientist, Dr. Clements.  Seward tells him he doesn’t think they could have found a better person for the job. ^[1]  He also conveys Nan’s pleasure that he was carrying on her uncle’s work.  Clements seems surprised by this news.

At the end of the day, Seward offers to take Nan home.  They hear a ruckus in the lab.  Clements has gone nuts and attacked a subordinate.  When Seward intervenes, Clements threatens to kill him.  After a mild defense, Clements runs out.  Seward is baffled by this.  “What’s the meaning of this?  Resentment one minute, a cheerful greeting the next.  And now this.”  He looks at Nan and says, “What about you?”  He confronts her about her earlier hostility, but she remembers none of it.  She suggests he’s the one who been acting strangely.  Yet, the sap still drives her home.

Back at Nan’s place, her son Kenny is mad at her.  While Nan is cooking dinner for them, Seward notices a bruise on Kenny’s arm.  Nan walks in and asks, “Who did this?”  Kenny says, “You know!  You did it!  You know you did it!”

The next day, after what must have been an awkward dinner, Seward goes to see Dr. Upton, a psychiatrist.  He needs Upton’s expertise to determine the effects of a fungus they have been developing as an antibiotic.  It is supposed to be more effective than penicillin.  What is it with fungus and infections?

With just hours until Finch goes to the gas chamber, Seward decides to test the fungus on himself.  Upton ties him to a chair and injects him with it.  After an hour, his heartbeat accelerates 10 BPM, his pupils dilate, and he begins to perspire.  So either the fungus was having an effect, or he kind of digs this bondage.

An hour later, he becomes psychotic.  After another hour, he begins to have visions.  Finally after four hours, he violently thrashes about trying to escape from his restraints so he can kill Upton.

Seward and Nan visit the Governor again to explain that he had proven that Finch had acted under the influence of the fungus.  Since they have compelling new evidence and witnesses, he calls the warden to stop Finch’s execution.

The announcer assures us this was a fictional story, however . . .

“The discovery of a similar fungus derivative that can produce experimental psychoses for study in the laboratory is fact!  The drug, known as LSD, has enabled science to relate mental illness to the chemistry of the body for the first time.”

Wow, I wonder if this was the first mention of LSD on TV?  I see it actually was available by prescription starting in 1947.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1]  OK, he says man, not person.

Army engineers are using a chainsaw to cut something from the ice in the Arctic, and that always turns out well.  They teletype their findings to the Institute of Scientific Research in DC, apparently a competitor to the United States Scientific Research Commission in DC mentioned in an earlier episode.  The narrator tells us they found something frozen in the ice, “a weird, frightening relic belonging to the very dawn of time,” just like this series.

Dr. Robinson tears the report from the teletype.  He is adamant that the object be preserved.  Dr. Avery says, “All those specimens found in Siberia were completely ruined in the excavating.”  This is as close as they get to divulging that it is a mammoth that has been found.  Whether this is an effort to build suspense or a flaw in the script, I do not know; but I have a hunch.  Because the object has been exposed to the sun, Robinson wires them back to pack it in ice and fly it back to DC.  Strangely, he adds, “And club the sh*t out of some seals and toss them in the plane, too.  Mama needs a new pair of boots!”  Boy those were different times.

“Log entry #17 . . . hour 3: Still melting.”

Zoologist Dr. Myrna Griffen joins the team when the mammoth lands in DC.  Over her objections, reporter Warren Keath also joins the group.  They observe the block of ice through a window.  Steam is piped in to melt the ice, and it is about as exciting as watching ice melt.  Keath asks what Robinson expects to find.  He says, “even though he has been dead for half a million years, his organs might still contain living material such as bacteria.”  Dr. Griffen suggests that if the specimen was flash-frozen, they might even be able to briefly revive it.

Finally, by 5 am, all the ice has melted.  The group goes to see the specimen which is  — surprise! — a mammoth.  We are 10 minutes into the episode, and just learning this.  There is no big reveal — and God knows SFT loves them some crazy orchestral stingers — so, I think they really did just forget to script that fact earlier.

Despite the all-doctor cast (even the reporter has a PhD), this is not a bright bunch.  It is described as “larger than any animal we know now” totally dissing the blue whale.  The mammoth, maybe 5 feet tall, is described as being just a year old. ^[1] OK, but one of the doctors says it will grow to 10 times its current size.  Really, like the size of the Cloverfield monster?  They actually seemed to top out around 12 feet.

And I assume this brain-trust also designed the equipment.  While I appreciate that it is not just a bank of blinking lights, why would the gauges be 7 feet off the ground so you needed a step-ladder or, fortuitously, a mammoth to read them?

They apply a “galvanic shock” to revive the beast.  Dr. Griffen has said it could only revive it for a few heartbeats so I don’t know what the point is.  After the shock, Dr. Robinson says, “Apply the oxygen”.  This is to be done with a standard human-sized face-mask.  Which 10% of the beast’s mouth will it cover?  Or was it used on the end of its trunk?  Sadly, the picture is too dark to tell, because that would have been a hoot.  It’s all good, though, as the mammoth leaps to its feet.

30 minutes later, the group is observing the mammoth through a window.  Keath and Griffen want to go into the steam-room to take pictures and maybe have a schvitz.  Robinson reluctantly agrees.  They find the mammoth to be agitated.  Aside from being revived from the dead, being yanked from Mammoth-heaven, awakening 400,000 years later to the crushing loneliness of being the only mammoth on earth, and being enclosed in a strange wood-paneled room under florescent lights rarely, if ever, found in nature during the Pliocene epoch, they can find no reason.

Dr. Griffen suggests maybe it misses its mammy.  It could be Griffen’s own maternal instinct kicking in.  She reveals to Keath that her husband and son were killed in an accident five years earlier, although that might just have been her way of saying she is available.  Just to make the beast’s misery complete, they name him Toby.

Toby begins to eat and grow, however.  This, despite that fact that the doctors calling him a mammoth is really just fat-shaming.  The doctors agree Toby can be released to an open area to live in open air.  They hire a driver to take him to a compound where he can live to a ripe old age as long as it is not the Kennedy compound.  Dr. Griffen is quite the good sport.  Seeing Toby is scared of the trailer he is being hauled in, she rides with him in the tiny trailer.  Unfortunately, the truck jack-knifes on the way.  Dr. Griffen is found unconscious, but Toby has honorably stayed by her side, not galumphing his fat ass off to lawyer-up and fabricate a laughably transparent lie about the accident to preserve his political viability. ^[2]

The accident puts Myrna in the hospital, and Tobey is moping around too. Keath visits her in the hospital and sees a newspaper headline TOBY NEAR DEATH.  Against doctor’s orders, Myrna leaves the hospital with Keath to see if Tobey is OK.  Sadly, Tobey dies seconds after they arrive.  Keath suggests Tobey died because he was unloved by another mammoth and uses the opportunity to ask Myrna to dinner.

Meh, more of the same.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1]  Nice oxymoron there:  the opposite of a jumbo shrimp = a tiny mammoth.
• ^[2] When is that freakin’ Chappaquiddick movie coming out?  I’ve been hearing about it for months.  IMDb says it is a 2017 movie, but it now has a 2018 release date.  I smell a conspiracy.  Roswell!  Roswell!  If this is my last post . . .