Monthly Archives: October 2018

Outer Limits – Donor (01/29/99)

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Renee Stuyvescent is womansplaining to the hospital board that we have come far in just a few decades of transplanting hearts.  Now we are ready for the first FBT– Full Body Transplant — “in which we replace an entire disease-riddled body . . . joining the body, from the neck up to the limbs and torso, of a brain-dead donor.”

Joining the body from the neck up?  Ahem, let a man jump in here, sweetheart.  Isn’t this really a head transplant?  I know it sounds less scientific than Full Body Transplant, and frankly a little comical, but let’s be accurate here.   What’s that?  FBT could mean millions in grants, but the government would expect the Discovery Channel to fund Operation Noggin-Swap?  Carry on. [1]

Renee proposes the first person to be FBT’d should be the doctor who invented the procedure, cancer patient Dr. Peter Halstead.  She later tells Peter of her proposal.  He is dubious that there would ever be a body donor having his rare blood-type of AB-Negative with a splash of Worcestershire.  Renee goes in to action, though, she finds the perfect candidate and puts a bullet in his melon.

The next morning, Renee gives Peter the good news about the man’s murder.  She tells him she convinced the Board to allow the operation on him.  Peter tells her she “could sell snowshoes in Australia” which is kinda dumb since it does snow in Australia.  Did we learn nothing from The Man from Snowy River?

He feels guilty taking all the organs that could have helped many different people, but what the hey.  Renee says “it is the best gift anyone could ever get” but what the lovesick Renee really means is that it is the best gift anyone could ever give. Well-played.

The operation is at once, credible and silly.  It would have been a better fit for a good episode of TFTC.  On the other hand, it was graphic and bloody enough make it intriguing.  It is a success, and 32 days later, Peter is in physical therapy pumping iron.  Although since he just got a completely new healthy body, I’m not sure why it is necessary. But then I thought that about my body once upon a time and look what happened.

At 45 days, Renee moves him into her fabulous condo to recover.  Again I’m confused.  He was a doctor, not homeless.  Why can’t he just go home?  He asks, “What do you give someone who saved your life?”  His answer of a kiss on the cheek is clearly disappointing to her.  However, that night Renee in her nightgown, goes to Peter’s room.  This time he tests out his new equipment as they have the sex.

Unfortunately, Peter has begun having flashes of another life.  Anyone who has ever seen an organ transplant on TV knows what this is and knew it was coming.  I really don’t mind some tropes being used over and over; there are only so many stories.  But, please, put some kind of spin on it.  Peter tracks down the wife of the man whose body he received and they fall in love.  Seen it.  In fact, just seen it on The Twilight Zone.

Yes, there is a twist at the end, and it is a good one.  But it only occupies a few seconds.  Surely there was some other direction this could have gone to make a more interesting story.  Was there something unusual about the body that no one but the donor knew?  An alien or espionage implant?  An X-Men-esque superpower?  Had the donor previously had a heart transplant which introduces a third soul into the equation?  Had the donor killed his wife, and now a confused Peter goes after Renee?  Maybe not great, but that’s after 10 seconds of thinking about it by a guy who is, clearly, not a writer.

I’d be satisfied with time travel and body swaps every week.  Just add a little seasoning.  Maybe some Worcestershire.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] This assumes no Senators have a relative on the Hospital Board.
  • Renee was the low-talker who made Jerry Seinfeld wear the Puffy Shirt even though he didn’t want to be a pirate.
  • This is the first time I’ve ever noticed TV surgeons wearing the Victoria’s Secret brand masks — they are shear enough to see the mouth and teeth.  Maybe I’m behind the times on that.  I have never seen House, ER, Chicago Hope, Chicago Med, Grey’s Anatomy or Girls.  I know Girls isn’t a doctor show; I just want to be clear that I’ve never seen it.

Science Fiction Theatre – The Long Day (12/17/55)

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At the Pecos Proving Grounds, physicist Robert Barton and Carl Eberhardt are working on Operation Torch.  The goal is to light up the night sky, enabling glaciers to melt and fertile fields to wither even faster they do now.  Dr. Smiley has been dispatched from Washington to observe the test and determine if there is a way to tax the new illumination.

Carl shows Dr. Smiley the rocket which contains a “beautifully simple” method of producing light.  It is actually quite complex, at least in the number of words, but sounds good to someone who knows nothing about science, like me or the SFT producers.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Springdale, real estate developer Sam Gilmore is very upset about the latest person to buy in his new development.  He proudly proclaims, “I restricted against everything I could think of!”  Somehow, though, he neglected to restrict against “a convicted criminal — a jailbird!”  I’ll bet he thought the ** ahem** other restrictions would keep out the criminal element.

The resident who sold Matt Brander his house had to know he was a criminal.  His trial was in all the papers back when people read them.  The Trumpian Gilmore wanted this to be “the finest development anywhere, with the finest people.”

Afraid that property values will plummet, he plans to run Brander out of town.  His partners point out that this is illegal.  Mr. Law N. Order now says, “The law has nothing to do with this!  We’ll use my truck and we’ll dump his stuff right out in the desert!”  Self-awareness is not among Laurel Manors’ amenities.

Gilmore picks up a baseball bat and asks his partners how they can care so little about a scumbag living in their community. Then he pulls a nylon stocking over his head and insists they join him in the attack that night when no one can see their identities.  Self-awareness is not among Laurel Manors’ amenities.

His partners agree to help him terrorize Brander into leaving.  Gilmore isn’t sure of their loyalty, though, so demands that they take an oath.  They repeat after Gilmore, swearing their loyalty like a couple of kids, or Masons (Free, not Brick).

The next morning we see Brander — hey, it’s Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy! — and his wife standing amidst the horrific mess, the debris, oh the humanity!  Wait, the Gilmore gang has not attacked yet; it is just moving day mess.  Brander vows to his wife they will not be run out of their new home!

Back at the Pecos Proving Ground, the boys launch their rocket successfully,  However, it doesn’t fall to earth as scheduled.  That night, Springdale is illuminated by a “substitute sun”.  Washington instructs them not to self-destruct the rocket.  It goes on lighting up the sky all night.

Well, old man Gilmore sees this localized phenomenon as a sign.  He tells his posse, “Last night we were going to pull a dirty trick.  But it didn’t get dark, you see!  It didn’t get dark!”  He sees this as an opportunity to do the right thing.  He calls off the attack.  Maybe he’ll also get out of the real estate developer business and shave off that pencil-thin mustache.  He leads his bois in a new more inclusive oath.  Coincidentally, the rocket burns out at just that moment, plunging Springdale into normal nighttime darkness.

The episode was nothing special, although I did like how they tied the stories together.  But it was worth it just to hear Pencil Thin Mustache again.

Other Stuff:

  • Yesterday’s AHP about a guy who couldn’t go to sleep starred the same guy who was in a TZ episode about a guy afraid to go to sleep.  Today’s SFT is about an unnaturally lengthy day; there was a TZ about an unnaturally lengthy night.  I got nothing for this.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Insomnia (05/08/60)

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Cheers to Dennis Weaver!  He is like the TV Gene Hackman — if he is in a show, you can trust it will probably be pretty good.  He was in a couple of a long-running series [1] and a ton of other stuff.  Somehow he managed to do it without overdosing, beating up his wife, or condescendingly mouthing off about issues he didn’t understand.  Best of all, at some point, he just went away.  Whatever happened to actors like that?  Oh yeah, they went away. [2]

Tonight at 3:50 am, Weaver is having trouble sleeping.  Sitting here typing at 12:50 am, I can tell him what has worked for me the past three years as long as you don’t mind being called a moron occasionally.  He is suffering from acute insomnia.  He turns on the light and reaches for a cigarette, neither of which seems like it would help.

Maybe his room is too cold.  He sits up, puts on his slippers for a 2-step journey, slips into his robe and sashes it, then walks to an old heater a few feet away.  Frankly, bundling up like the dude in To Build a Fire took more time than just going to the heater.  Unfortunately, when he lights the heater, it belches a yuge flame at him.  Frustrated and exhausted, he flops on the bed.  On the plus side, he is not on fire.

Weaver finally decides to see a psychiatrist.  He reveals that his wife died in a fire a year ago.  He tells the doctor of a recurring dream — wait, I thought he never slept.  He dreams of his wife Linda in their old house.

She is standing by the stairs, seemingly unaware of the fire approaching her rear from the rear.  Weaver screams to warn her, but he doesn’t actually, you know, make any effort to rescue her.  The flames engulf her.

Weaver is quick to point out this is not what happened.  They were in bed when the real fire reached their bedroom.  Blinded by the smoke, he screamed for Linda but she did not answer — in the bed might have been a good place to start feeling around (as it usually is).  He was able to get to the bathroom and jump out the window.  The doctor suggests guilt is keeping him awake, but Weaver disagrees.

He does admit to being bothered by the accusations of Linda’s brother Jack Fletcher that he did nothing to save her.  Oh, I guess Mr. Tough Guy would have run right into the fire to save her!  Easy to say, safely after-the-fact from some comfy . . . “military hospital in Maryland”.  Oh.

Weaver realizes that his insomnia did not begin until Fletcher was released from the military hospital in Maryland (oh why the hell can’t they just say Walter Reed?).  Despite making 20 years of progress in their first session, Weaver is not cured.  That night he is tossing and turning in bed again.  He picks up a paperback but the phone interrupts him.  It is Fletcher, saying he is in town.  He menacingly says, “You know why I’m here, don’t you Charlie?”

That night in his pajamas, Weaver calls the military hospital [3] to get Fletcher’s new address.  What the hospital lacks in HIPAA privacy rules, it makes up in 24-hour service.  They happily give him Fletcher’s new address in Manhattan.  Weaver goes to visit Fletcher.  BTW, Weaver pays Fletcher the respect of dressing up, but this is the 3rd day he has worn that same necktie.  Oh well, maybe his others were lost in the fire; and it is a snappy number.

When Fletcher opens the door, Weaver sees that he is in a wheelchair.  He begins threatening Weaver about letting his sister die.  They begin fighting — yeah, Weaver vs a guy in a wheelchair.  It’s a closer match than you would expect unless you’ve ever seen Weaver.  Fletcher pulls out a gun, evening the odds quite a bit.  Fletcher is no rocket scientist despite the resemblance to Stephen Hawking.  Weaver gets his hands on the gun and they struggle over it.  Weaver manages to point the barrel toward Fletcher’s noggin and shoots him in the face.

Weaver goes home, has a beer, kicks off his shoes, lights the heater and falls into the deepest sleep he has had in a year.  He even sleeps right through the sirens and roar of the fire engines.  Although, he was probably long dead by that time from the smoke the heater put out.

Despite the great performance by Weaver, I’m a little ambivalent on this one.  Despite him being so twitchy, I still didn’t think of him as a coward who abandoned his wife.  The first fire just seemed like a tough circumstance that he was lucky to live through himself. It even works out that his guilt and self-loathing were tied more to a fear of Fletcher than to his inability to save Linda.

Shooting his brother-in-law might have been extreme, and illegal in most states, but Fletcher really was a threatening dick.  Sure he was in a wheelchair, but he had pointed a pistol at Weaver and literally said, “Here’s my legs!”  It’s hard for me to get too upset about his murder.

Ultimately, it was a nice set-up and spike of brutal cosmic justice.  Ya hear that, yesterday’s Twilight Zone!

Other Stuff:

  • [1] For example, he was in 290 episodes of Gunsmoke.  What amuses me is that isn’t even half the run of the series.  Maybe that was an early example of him knowing when to get out.
  • [2] Actually, I see one reason he slowed down is that he died in 2006.  He still seems like a reg’lar guy, though.
  • [3] Now referred to as Dover Veteran’s Hospital, but they’re not fooling anyone.
  • Weaver was also in a sleep-centric episode of the original Twilight Zone one year and 3 days after this aired.  In that story, he was trying not to go to sleep.  It was remade into a 1986 TZ episode where I was trying not to go to sleep. [4]
  • [4] To be fair, I think it was actually one of their better episodes.
  • For more info on the episode head over to Bare*Bones Ezine.

Twilight Zone – Stranger in Possum Meadows (01/14/89)

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Did I forget what the original Twilight Zone was like?  Are my memories of loneliness, terror, cruel irony and remorseless cosmic comeuppance just romanticizing an old TV show?  Because this series is becoming more predictably lame than the dark days of Ray Bradbury Theater.  I thought it was impossible for the narrator to be more miscast than Charles Aidman.  This new guy, though, has the edgy menace of an NPR host.

I like them french fried potaters.

The insufferably twee narrator introduces us to young Danny who lives in a trailer with his mother.  There is a glimmer of hope as Danny puts a toy boat in a stream “and follows a trail just to see where it goes.  But today that trail will lead Danny through a private reserve which lies just inside the borders of the twilight zone.”

Unfortunately, the narrator foreshadows the utter banality to come by speaking in the chirpy tones usually reserved for giddily introducing yet another goddamn segment on cowboy poets.

They even jerk us off — sorry, this has taken an ugly turn — by having the toy boat go through a strange white mist.  Is anything done with this?  Of course not.

Danny encounters a man walking though the woods dressed like Sling Blade.  The immaculate long pants and fully buttoned shirt should be a little disconcerting.  However, the man’s gentleness and the insipid score ensure no suspense is created.

After a sad conversation about Danny and his mother, Danny invites the man to dinner.  We get an idea what the man — named Scout — is up to when he mesmerizes a deer and makes it disappear.  They have a nice dinner where the scariest thing is a spilled glass of water.  Danny has a new friend, Mom is starting to take a liking to this new fella, and all is right with the world.

I’m not sure if this happiness was to set up the next scene, or if I’m just getting tired.  It is pretty creepy, though.  The next day, Scout meets Danny at the trailer.  Scout invites Danny to go exploring.  Danny says his mother told him to stay there until she got home.  Scout says, “I talked to your mother” and Danny skeptically says “You did?”  Scout says they’re all going to have dinner at his house, and they walk off onto the woods.  In fact, it is so chillingly creepy that I’m not sure that was their intention.

Dull story short, Scout is an alien (and based on that last scene, should be on To Catch a Predator) collecting specimens of earth life.  He is going to take Danny, but the thought of his own family makes him change his mind.

After a brief detour last week where TZ knocked off a teenage girl, it is back to the sappy vibe that sank this run of the series.  It’s like if Henry Bemis remembered the spare glasses in his coat pocket.

Despite the episode being a stain on the TZ franchise, I must say the performances were all very good.  There was nothing wrong with the script that a different script couldn’t fix.[1]  Just the tone was entirely wrong.

Pfft:

[1] The script was fine for what it wanted to do; I just mean, a different story.

Takes from the Crypt – Only Skin Deep (10/31/94)

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Carl goes to a Halloween party thrown by his friend Bob.  He is quickly busted by Bob because he was not invited.  Seems Carl just got a divorce and Bob’s wife decided Carl should not be invited.  Bob might be costumed as Lincoln, but he sure lacks Abe’s backbone.

Bob is clearly not a historian, though.  While his get-up does, admirably, include a bullet wound, it is in the center of his forehead.  Hey, Bob, John Wilkes Booth wasn’t firing from the stage, you know!  Every school kid knows Lincoln was shot in the temple. [1]

Carl’s ex Linda sees him at the party.  She quite reasonably asks if she needs to get a restraining order.  Then she tells Carl that you can’t make someone love you no matter how much you hit them.  Zing!  I hope they aren’t setting Carl up to be the protagonist here.  By the time he says he should have killed her and threatens his host, I speak for the audience in saying, what an asshole!

Carl goes into the kitchen and hurls a pumpkin against the wall.  He is witnessed by another guest in leather thigh-highs, platinum hair, and a plain white cat-like mask.  She overheard Bob & Linda, and sides with Team-Bob, which is a warning sign right there.  Bob asks what she is dressed as.  She answers, “a body-bag . . . a synthetic shell with a corpse inside.”  It might not read like much, but it is a beautiful response in context.  Kudos.

Carl goes back to Molly’s apartment.  She peels off the gear to reveal underwear that is much less leathery, and a lot of skin which is not leathery at all.  The cat-face stays on, though.  Carl jokingly — which is far out of character for this dullard — asks if she is making sexual overtures.  She replies, “I don’t do overtures.  The curtain goes up or it stays down.”  Again, kudos!

They have the sex.  At Carl’s suggestion, they leave the masks on.  There is gratuitous nudity of Carl’s butt and appropriate nudity of Molly’s boobs.  She tells him to really go at it and take his aggression out on her, but all he really does is some enhanced humping.  That’s enough for Carl to get a little girly, remove his mask and blurt out his real name and occupation.  It only takes about 2 minutes before he is his old violent self.  Granted, in those 2 minutes, he did find her collection of sawed-off human faces, so maybe this time he is justified.

He tries to remove her mask, but just claws her face.  She cries, “It was never a mask, Carl!  It’s the way  I was born!”  He is immobilized thanks to the drink she gave him earlier . . . hour earlier.

Everything does not need to be explained, but it just feels like too much is left unanswered:

  • What caused her to be this way?
  • How does her deformity lead to cutting dudes’ faces off?
  • She was at Bob’s party; does he know her?  He seemed to be enforcing the guest list pretty ruthlessly.
  • Carl has 3 separate visions of one of Molly’s previous victims.  Why just that guy?  Budget issues?

This could have been overcome stylistically.  There are a few interesting choices and compositions, but it is not sustained.  It really feels like one of those Hitchhiker episodes where something happens,  but for no descernable reason. We’re just supposed to accept that oddity in place of plot.

The “mask” is more off-putting than intriguing.  And Carl is so buff for a 40 year old dude that it is creepy.

I can see a good episode buried in here, but there were some iffy choices.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Even this is not accurate as he was shot behind the ear.  I guess it just worked for the old joke.  But the better joke is the one about Mrs. Lincoln.  Best ever, maybe.
  • Title Analysis:  Appropriate, but that’s it, no awful pun?  Plus we had Only Sin Deep in season one.