Police Officer Harry Siegel is appropriately interrogating a low-life about a missing boy. And by “appropriately,” I mean he ties him up, pounds him in the face and threatens to cut out an eyeball if he doesn’t talk. The scumbag gives up the boy’s location — uh, upstairs. Really, you couldn’t even search the house before going all Jack Bauer on him? The pervert plans on inflicting a little off-book punishment of his own. Just before saving the taxpayers a million bucks, he tells Siegel that he will never let him forget this night.
After the perp, Rory Bemell, croaks from natural causes (being beat to death after abducting a child), Internal Affairs hauls Siegel in and goes through a stack of suspects Siegel has worked over. The IAD suit gets a big smile from telling Siegel to turn in his badge.
Fifteen years later, Siegel is working as a private dick staking out a philandering husband. He gets no pleasure from playing tapes he made for the man’s distraught wife. He does, however, get pleasure from playing another tape for the woman — one of her banging her husband’s brother, which is worth tripling his fee.
The next day, he meets with Meredith Kane. She is another woman suspecting her husband of having an affair. She wants Siegel to get the evidence “to make him pay.” She says there is a run-down house conveniently across the street from their home where Siegel can set up his surveillance equipment.
Neither Siegel nor Mr. Kane get lucky the first night. Siegel does, however, pick up some strange voices from the Kane house. The voices and a light in the window suddenly go respectively silent and dark. The voices start up again and he determines that they are coming from inside the house he is using. He looks around and finds a pentagram drawn on the floor of the basement. He catches some kids who snuck in on a dare. One of them tells Siegel that some kids had once been killed in this house.
Finally at 3:06 am, he hears a man and woman and sees their silhouettes in a window of the house across the street. The woman says she was burned with cigars . . . by a cop named Siegel. He meets with Ms. Kane again to quit the case, but she won’t let him.
The next night, through a large widow he sees two young kids in the house watching TV downstairs. In an upstairs window, he sees a man with a knife. Then through yet another window, he sees the man coming down the stairs with the knife raised. Christ, this greenhouse ain’t the place to conduct a clandestine affair. Siegel runs across the street and busts down the door only to find the house deserted, not even any furniture. Looking back across the street at the hovel he was perched in, he sees a face in window over there. So he runs back to that house and hears a swirl of voices that talk about being stabbed, burned, beaten.
He sees a lot of other crazy shit in the house. Finding himself locked in, he turns and sees dead Rory Bemell standing there with a knife. He says, “I didn’t deserve this, Harry.” He tells Siegel that a girl Siegel burned was innocent and now lives in pain. And a kid he kicked senseless turned out to be a witness.
In the house, Siegel experiences a flashback to an incident when he was a kid. After his older brother pulls their father’s pistol out of the closet, Siegel accidentally fatally shoots him. Siegel’s father tells him that this must remain secret and they secretly bury the kid. OK, I guess Siegel’s mother was already dead. But what did they plan on telling the school and the neighbors? That his brother went to live on a farm?
Blah, blah, blah, Siegel realizes Meredith Kane set him up to be killed by the haunted house. He heads over to her real home to mete out some of the justice he was used to as a cop. Then there is a twist that left me a little cold. I know it is bizarre, but I think the problem is that the twist is too good for the show. Meredith suddenly has a back story that was a complete void. Even the haunted house has a history that is too-briefly summed up in one sentence.
This is the first episode on the disc, but the second episode to air. It makes me suspect that this was to be the premiere, but The Sacrifice just worked better so they went with that. Not that this is a bad episode at all — the performances were good, the visuals were interesting, it just seemed that there was too much story to fit into one hour. To be honest, it might not even be possible to tell this complete story and keep the current structure. It was probably as good as it could have been.
Post-Post:
- Harry Siegel changed his name to Bender after he was fired from the force. On the wall of his detective office, he has clippings from his career. I guess he counts on no one reading them and asking who this Harry Siegel was and why he looks identical to Harry Bender.
- Second consecutive show where IMDb got a name wrong. Yesterday, Joanne was credited, but she was always called Joanna. Today, Eric Roberts’ character is credited as Siegel, but a police name tag says Siegal.
- I’d love to say Harry Siegel’s name was a Dirty Harry homage — Harry Callahan’s first name and the last name of that film’s director Don Siegel. But who knows?
Tim Hathaway is knocking back the hooch. This show is so old, you could only get 3-year old scotch back then. Heyoooo, I’ll be here all weekend! I mean right here, on the couch.
Tim confronts Joanne about the mysteries and she admits that she has changed. She has also discovered that she can control objects with her mind. As proof she makes a statue topple over and shatter — pretty racy for 1951 TV, the statue was topless. She believes she is evolving to “a brand new kind of human being.” Her night table now groans under the weight of thick books on physics. Say, a woman reading science books — that is crazy!
In the Berkeley Electronic Lab, Tim begs her to come back to him. She says she is the first of a new race, a new kind of being. In a nifty scene, she goes through a door to get her coat. A few seconds later, Jim checks the door and sees that it is just a broom closet and Joanne has disappeared.
A great deal of potential was squandered in this episode. The idea of the woman evolving was a great concept. In fact, it was so great that they used it again in another 
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.
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]
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 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.
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]
For anyone who thought the 
One day, as he is sneaking to the fishin’ hole, he checks out behind the barn just to be sure. There is indeed a mound of fresh dirt. Well, looks like dirt on You Tube, but I’ll give Shane the benefit of the snout when he says it is just 
The next day as Shane is working on the horse, or whatever it is that you do in a barn, Jennings shows up. He tells Shane’s father that the boy has been naughty — Shane has been trespassing on his property to fish. The thing about causing him to have his arms chewed off does not come up.
The next day, when Shane goes to Jennings’ house, the old man is bobbing for soup. It is just very sad to see his face covered with food, and him have to ask Shane to feed him. On the plus side, Jennings does say it is time to do some auguring. When it jams, Jennings suggests that Shane stick his arm in there.
A woman is hit in the hat by something too small to be a dead bird, and the doorman sees a pair of eyeglasses shatter on the sidewalk. Clearly neither of them needs glasses as they are able to spot Carl Adams on the ledge 17 floors up. I’ll say this for people who go out onto ledges — they always seem to pick the ledge that has the best exposure. No one ever threatens to jump into the alley or down into an obliette-like courtyard.
Police Sargent Barrett climbs out on the ledge to talk him out of jumping.
In another flashback, the man finds Liz unconscious in their home with an empty prescription bottle in her hand. He finds a suicide note. “