Nine year old Cathy is making her father one of those breakfasts that only a parent would find edible. I must admit she is pretty adorable as she presents him with a crudely wrapped birthday present — a wallet that she made. He opens it to find a family picture of Cathy, himself and his dead wife. For Father’s Day she got him a mug with his prostate exam results on it. Dammit, this is not what I want from the Twilight Zone! But it is heartbreaking.
Cathy says she wishes she was small enough to fit into her father’s pocket so she could go with him to work. [1] I was hoping Dad would call in sick and take her to SeaWorld or something, but no — he drives her to school and she is killed. A biker-boi comes from behind a car and in front of him. He swerves into a parked car rather than let Darwinian evolution takes its natural course.
Dad is OK, but Cathy is in a coma and her vitals are failing. As he is going home, he sees a little girl standing on the roof of a nearby orphanage.[2] He runs over to the where the 
nuns are just wrapping up a rummage sale. A nun tells him that is impossible because all of the children have been adopted. No wait, they just moved to a new building. As he is leaving, he sees the girl on a swing. She points to a large lump under a tarp. When he looks at it, then back at the swing, she is gone.
Why do people on TV always look away from weird phenomena? What happens to entities like this? Do they blink out, or fade out, or shoot off like a rocket, silently explode, break down into nanites, disappear into the earth? But I digress.
Under the tarp is a small bed. It is almost more like a coffin with a wooden headboard and wooden sides. Frankly, I think most kids would be scared to sleep in it, unless they were in a com . . . oh. He hands the nun a wad of bills and takes the bed home.
That night, the little girl comes walking into Dad’s bedroom. She says she wants Toby, and that the Sisters will be mad if they find her out of bed. She leads him back to the bed he just bought and climbs in. She introduces herself as Sarah and asks Paul to tuck her in. He looks away for a second — at nothing! — then back at the bed to see that she has just disappeared. Come on!
Paul goes back to the orphanage to ask about Sarah. The nun says Sarah died of TB before he was born. Paul asks her if she believes in ghosts, and she replies, “the Holy Ghost.” Zing! For some reason, she did hang on to Sarah’s tubercular Teddy Bear Toby for 40 years. Paul asks the nun if maybe God did not take Sarah’s soul, that maybe she had something to do here.
He goes to the hospital and infuriates them by carrying Cathy home before her insurance runs out. She is totally non-responsive as her father places her in the antique bed. He falls asleep exhausted by her side. The next morning as he is looking out the window, he hears Cathy’s voice, “Daddy?”
He is, of course, overjoyed to see his little girl awake. However, he is a little taken aback when she asks for Toby. But then she smiles and nothing else matters — like, what happened to Cathy’s soul.
And if this is Sarah, then why did she call him Daddy? Or are both of them in there together? Or if dead Sarah’s soul could import into this body, then why not Cathy’s? Did she die — is that what enabled the switcheroo? And why did Sarah’s soul hang around for 40 years until this particular moment?
It is a tear-jerker and not what I want out of this show, but it was well-done.
Post-Post:
- [1] This is just begging for a Prince Charles reference, but it seems inappropriate.
- [2] A similar unnerving shot was in It Follows of a man standing on a roof. There is just something creepy about a person standing on a roof as anyone who has known a roofer will attest.
- That was just gratuitous — everyone know it’s painters that you have to keep an eye on.
- Cathy (Andrea Barber) went on to be a regular on the unwatchable [3] Full House. Unwatchable except by the people who kept it on TV for 8 years.
- Sarah (Jenny Lewis) has had quite the career, including a series with Lucy which seems like it must have required a time machine.
- Available on YouTube.
Stephen has just rented a new house, and his girlfriend stops by. He immediately gets the feeling that “there should be an art deco chair and an oriental rug right there.” His deja vu brings on several jarringly edited, awfully-lit flashes to the past — exactly the motif that undercut New Year’s Day.
The next day, Stephen has more flashes of a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat. He later hears a woman’s voice calling for Maxie. He goes upstairs and in the same god-awful lighting sees a woman in the bathroom stripping down. I try not to purposely be negative in these posts, so I am being honest when I say the woman is singing one of the most annoying, terrible, tuneless songs I have every heard — it doesn’t even make up for the stripping [1]. A few seconds later, he sees her pop to the surface in a bathtub of bloody water. A hand forces her head back down.[2]
That night, Stephen awakens to jazz music and sees Max and Zelda bathed in the awful amber lighting. They are playing cards just as Stephen and Karen had played Scrabble [3] moments before. Once again, Max pulls a knife on her. Stephen tells this to his psychiatrist who hypnotizes him again . . . Max is at a party with Zelda. She is dressed as a flapper and flirting with some of the other guests as she dances to a song that is almost, but not quite, 
This is surely a waste of words but: In a featurette, the director made a point of saying that the walls were painted green in the present, but painted red in the past to reflect the passion of that era. So why is Zelda’s dress green in the past, and Karen’s dress red in the present? So she did not blend into the back-ground under the awful lighting?
aka 
Turns out the men are astronauts, but not from NASA. Their trip was subsidized by Standard Motors (a division of Average Mechanical, a wholly owned subsidiary of Just OK, Inc). The evil corporation will get half of anything they find, and any wallets they make. Bart is disappointed that they did not find any people on Mars. He suggests that since there is plant life similar to earth’s, that there should be intelligent life.
After Robbie leaves, Bart realizes his rabbit’s foot is missing and accuses Jack. Bart says it “didn’t just walk away by itself” which is a pretty god gag that I don’t think they even realized. Bart goes after Jack with a hammer and they start wrestling as we go to commercial. Robbie breaks it up and demands that they hand over their guns.
Frenchies Edmond Valier and Marie are have a tête-à-tête, french for sucking face big time. Valier says, “What would I do without you?” and Marie tells him he’ll have to figure that out because she is getting married. If that isn’t bad enough, she is marring his publisher / employer Charles Montcour because he is rich. This couldn’t have come up a little earlier?
Andre comes again to visit Valier who is exhausted and unshaven. He has brought the crystal ball into the house. He is concerned that he is going insane because he can see Marie in the crystal ball. He is so busy that he never gets around to visiting Marie before Montcour returns to town.
That night, Valier smashes the crystal ball. The end.
Jan Manning has taken over her husband’s dress shop, but business is not going so well. If sales don’t improve, she might lose the shop the same way she lost her husband — to another man; in this case, a banker. OK, maybe her husband died; I was dozing off during part of this.
At the bank, the manager tells her she has too much money tied up in inventory. He advises her to advertise, “That’s the way to get people in and move your stock.” As she is already selling at 50% off, this does not seem like the solution or the problem. Mel is waiting in the lobby and takes Jan to lunch.
Mel advises her to have her accountant take the books home with him so her records are not destroyed if there happens to be a fire. If Hillary Clinton were this diligent about protecting her records, she wouldn’t be indicted. [1] Back at work after her ti martooni lunch, she tells her assistant to have the auditor take the books home, then leaves with her sister.
Or do we know what happened? Was the gadget the arsonist’s way of starting the fire? It fired up at 1 am instead of 1 pm, and Mel did have an opportunity the fiddle with the timer. Mel acts as if his plan was carried out, but the insurance man said the skylight was blown out by heat, not as a means of breaking in. I’m going with Mel in the back room with a tea maker.