Charlotte (Sherilyn “should be a much bigger star” Fenn) and Jack are enjoying the afternoon car-shopping as presumably they could not find a dentist available to do a root canal with no anesthetic.

A hand turns on the radio in a car a few spaces away, luring them over for a look with the song Some Day We’ll be Together.  Her husband describes the car as “flashy,” but c’mon it’s a Volvo.  Charlotte climbs into the driver’s seat and takes the song as a sign that she and the car were manufactured for each other.

That night she asks if he is mad that she wanted that used car and not a new one.  She also asks if her husband is tired of her.  She suggests that his medical students must be tempting to him.  At this time, Sherilyn Fenn was a beautiful 31 year-old who could easily have passed for 25.  Even made up with mom jeans, frumpy glasses and an awful hairdo, there is no hiding this.  She thinks maybe having a baby would give her life more meaning.

The next morning, after having started work on the baby, Charlotte describes the car as “frivolous” for a new mom.  C’mon, it’s a Volvo.  Either these two know nothing about cars or they speak English as a second language.  Later that day, Charlotte gets in the car.  In her rear view mirror she sees a young woman in the back seat saying, “We’re going to have a baby.”

She calls her husband.  The hospital says he is in surgery, but can we paged.  WTH, when I’m being operated on, the surgeon is returning calls?  Driving home from a friend’s house, she notices a home pregnancy test in the car.  It is showing a positive. There is also a credit card slip signed by a Lucy Sykes.

There is no Lucy Sykes in the phone-book, but there is a G. Sykes.  Couldn’t they come up with more unusual name to make it believable that there was only one in the phone-book?  Where did she live, Chinatown?  At least they didn’t go with Smith, which had four numbers listed.  Getting no answer by phone, she drives to the address.  Turns out G. Sykes is Lucy’s uncle.  While waiting for him to get home, Charlotte gets the “We’re having a baby vision” again, this time with Lucy bleeding from the wrists.

Lucy’s uncle confirms that she committed suicide in a car just like Charlotte’s.  He offers Lucy’s stuff to Charlotte.  When Jack gets home that night, he finds clothing and personal items strewn on the floor and up the stairs to their bedroom. At the top of the stairs, he finds Lucy’s driver’s license.

In the bedroom, Charlotte is wearing Lucy’s glittery red dress.  She says she bets Jack liked the dress when Lucy wore it.  She produces a picture that shows Jack with Lucy on the hood of the red Volvo that they just bought — the same car Jack originally bought for Lucy.  This would have been more impactful if Lucy were actually wearing the same dress in the photo, but I guess that’s too much to ask of Night Visions.

Charlotte confronts Jack about his cheating and knocking up Lucy, then flees in the Volvo.  In the car, she hears Lucy talking again, and even sees visions of Lucy and Jack as a happy couple.  One shot shows Lucy dancing in a glittery dress very much like the one Charlotte was wearing — but a different color.  Why, why, why?  The vision continues with Jack telling Lucy they can’t have a baby, so she tells him, “Then kill your wife!  Kill your wife!”

The car stops, the locks go down, Charlotte can’t escape.  Smoke begins pouring into the car as Someday We’ll be Together comes on the radio again.  Lucy appears and I’m not sure what happens.  It looks like she has something wrong with her teeth, but it could just be the horrible quality of the video on You Tube.  But then she leans into Charlotte’s neck like a vampire before we cut away.  So this is either inconceivably stupid, or just a poor decision on the staging.  If Lucy is going to bite her like a vampire, that is just a complete non-sequitur.  If she is not a vampire, why lean into her neck with her mouth open?  And wasn’t she going to die from smoke or CO2 inhalation anyway?

Back at the house, Jack hears a long solid blast from a car horn.  He looks out the window and sees the Volvo roll up the driveway.  He goes out to the car, the horn still wailing.  He opens the door, and Charlotte spills out of the smokey car.  The radio again plays Someday We’ll be Together, and it is also written in the condensation in the windshield.

What was that horn-blast all about?  I guess Charlotte was dead and slumped against the horn the whole time and Lucy “drove” the car home.  Charlotte’s neck is bloody, so I guess they did go for the vampire thing, although with ghost-like tendencies..

Finally, the song could have made sense, but Night Visions once again dropped the ball. It was nice that it was initially interpreted as Charlotte and the car “will be together.”  The callback at the end would have been great if Jack were the one who had died — then Lucy would have had her way and she and Jack would “be together” for eternity.  As it is, who “will be together”?  Lucy and Charlotte?  Hot but nonsensical.

Just as in the first segment of this episode, they had most of the pieces, but just put them together wrong.

Post-Post:

• Hart Bochner (Jack) went on to be the coke-snorting douchebag in Die Hard.  And by “went on” I mean 13 years earlier.

We first meet Dr. Sears when the parents of an anorexic girl hire him to heal their daughter.  He has the “talent or a curse” that he can “feel what other people are feeling.”  He can draw their illness out of their mind into his own.  Moments later, the girl is chowing down.  In a really clever shot, Sears later sees his reflection in the elevator door and perceives his reflection as a fat bastard.  Well done.

In the next scene, he has ordered enough room service food to cater a wedding.  As he gazes upon this borgasmord laid out in front of him, he perceives the grub as rotten and covered by roaches, beetles and literal grubs.  He forces himself to dig in.  I’m not sure this makes sense — isn’t anorexia more about body-image and not about food being gross?  But it works.

His doctor is concerned that it is taking Sears longer and longer to row back from absorbing his patients’ maladies.  Taking a few days off, he is tracked down by a woman seeking help for her son Mark.  She takes Sears to the boy’s bedroom where is is rocking and repeating over and over, “Now he’s coming thorough the woods. Now he’s coming through the yard.  Now he’s coming in the house.  Now he’s coming up the stairs.”

This started after an accident where his mother ran over a pedestrian. The victim’s head smashed into the windshield right in front of the boy. Sears feels his pain and the boy suddenly runs downstairs to his mother.  Their maid goes to see Sears and he has collapsed on the bedroom floor. After a handful of psychotropic drugs, or possibly hawaiiantropic drugs given the fruity mixture of colors, he feels much better.

Everything is both hunky and dory as Sears is back on his feet, then sitting down at their kitchen table.  Mom and the nanny are happy, and the boy is chirpy.  Until he isn’t.  The boy is suddenly terrified.  He runs back to his room and starts his “Now he’s coming thorough the woods” shit again.  Sears goes to the window to show him that there is no one coming through the yard, but is interrupted by the man coming through the yard.

The kid continues his screaming four sentence play-by-play more obnoxiously than John Madden as the man comes in the house and up the stairs.  Sears is baffled and says the condition can’t manifest itself physically.  The non-manifested condition pounds on the bedroom door.  Sears believes this is all in his head, but Carol tells him she and Mark are real.  He screams at her that she is not real and suddenly finds himself alone in the silent bedroom.  He walks out into the house and finds everyone brutally murdered before he is himself attacked by the mystery man.

That’s it, end of story.  You can validly interpret the killer as a “physical manifestation” or the doped up doctor.  The gravitas of the two murdered women and the child effectively trumps any churlish plot issues.  Except it is not the end.

Snap — we loop back to the just-cured boy running downstairs to his mother.  The nanny goes upstairs as she did in the first iteration.  She finds Sears sitting in the corner blankly rocking back and forth repeating those same four sentences.  The end.

Thumbhead’s closing remarks did not offer any revelations this time. I am at a loss to explain how something this egregious comes from a good writer, gets past a story editor, and into the final product.

Nevermind the logic of the hallucination, what really bugs me is the very ending.  The zinger is that Sears is sitting on the floor rocking back and forth just like the boy.  But that should be no surprise — it is his standard reaction. Just the way curing the anorexic girl gave him the symptoms of anorexia, it is perfectly predictable that he would have reacted by mimicking the boy.  In fact, following the logical course, shortly thereafter he should have metabolized the symptoms and be back to normal.  It’s a happy ending for everyone — who wants that?

In fact, so wrong is this ending, that I think it would have improved the episode to have the two iterations in exactly the opposite order.

Post-Post:

• The episode kept reminding me of The Empath on Star Trek.
• I really enjoyed Allison Hossack as Carol.  She was believable as the mom and also believable as the anonymous, slightly androgynous cutie in the restaurant (not that they would be mutually exclusive types).
• The nanny, on the other hand, was a mess.  She seems to have been coiffed by Ayn Rand’s hairdresser on a bad day.  Or was she the nanny?  Maybe they were a couple.  Carol was rocking that man’s blazer and a snappy short haircut.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Not.  At.  All.
• Theresa falls up the stairs, Theresa falls down the stairs.