Frank is driving his brother Eddie in their Ferrari — driving it like a Volkswagen according to Eddie. Eddie jams his his foot on top of Frank’s, sending them speeding until Frank agrees to see a doctor about their condition. They pull up at a bar and get out revealing the are conjoined twins. So unless they move to Europe, Frank will continue doing the driving.
They artfully hop up on the bar stools in unison as though they have done this many times. Eddie starts crudely hitting on babes and Frank whips out Man’s Hope by Andre Malraux. There is a cute girl next to him who happens to be reading Malraux’s Man’s Fate; what are the odds. Well, about a billion to one, so Frank should have been tipped off that something was up. But then, so should I and I fell for it.
The episode is helped immensely by the presence of Timothy Stack as Frank. His brother Eddie is well-played by Jonathan Stark. Marie, the reader at the bar, is the very cute Jessica Harper who demonstrates that bug-eyes can be pretty damn cute.
On the dance floor, Marie tries to twirl between the brothers and is nearly clothes-lined by their connective tissue. She runs away in horror, but later calls to apologize.
They end up end in bed, chastely lying side-by-side; while Eddie is being ridden by a dominatrix. Marie can’t stand it, and heads for the bathroom. The dominatrix joins her and it turns out they are in cahoots.
Frank actually has feeling for Frank and tells him it was all a set-up to get him to sign a release for a risky operation that could separate the twins. Eddie is not pleased by this and kills Marie with a cleaver. Eddie happily calls the police to confess knowing they can’t put just one conjoined twin in jail. Things don’t work out exactly how he expects, though.
There are several small gags that make this a great episode. I suspect Stack and Stark, both comedy writers, came up with some of these — the bar-stools, the dance floor, the peephole, the bedroom reveal, the fight, just great imaginative stuff.
Combine with a nice twist at the end and I rate this one the Dionne Quintuplets.
Post-Post:
- Malraux’s novels about the Spanish Civil War and the Chinese Revolution seem a strange choice for the books they are reading at the bar.
- At the end, Frank is reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles; OK, that one I get.
- So I guess the titles are the important part of the Malraux books. It doesn’t quite work, though, because Fate and Hope don’t tie neatly enough into the characters. Still, I appreciate the effort. Bravo.