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Outer Limits – Trial by Fire (S2E9)

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oltrialbyfire41A little out of order here as Hulu has suddenly decided to put Season 2 behind the pay-wall.  The Canadian-release DVD set is on order — that is how much I hate Hulu.  You can’t have commercials and charge a fee — pick one.

Luckily, this episode is on YouTube.  Even more luckily, this is one of the few episodes of Outer Limits that I recall seeing, and it is one of the best episodes of any TV series that I have ever seen.

On the night of his inauguration, President Halsey and his wife are diverted from the standard parties with fat-cat executives, slimy lobbyists and sycophantic journalists.  His limo ducks into a building which has a bunker for just such a “situation.”

NORAD has detected an object entering the solar system at about half the speed of light heading toward Earth.  It is not known what the object is, but it will be here in 30 minutes.

oltrialbyfire49Halsey assumes command, but is clearly out of his element.  This doesn’t stop him from being smug and condescending to the limited crew on hand.  If they speak in technical terms, he snaps at them to “speak English.” If they speak in simple terms, he snaps, “don’t patronize me.”  Further confirming his dickishness, he says pat-ronize rather than pate-ronize.

On hand to help is scientist Janet Preston, who looks amazingly like Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island.  She says it is not a comet because it is moving too fast.  The president, accurately portrayed with a politician’s arrogance says “I’d rather know what it is than what it isn’t.”

The president berates the staff for not knowing where the object will hit, but they explain that it doesn’t matter — this is pretty much lights-out for the world.

In the first of several intelligent twists, the object hits the moon rather than the Earth.  But then it is determined that the object was merely launched from a larger ship.  Was this a demonstration of power?  Hillary, er Mrs. Halsey, the insufferable new First Lady, gives her precisely $.02 worth, then the ideas and conjectures start flowing.  And there are real ideas.  Aside from Preston tritely commenting that “this is a damn testosterone festival,” this isn’t like anything you usually see on TV.

oltrialbyfire55There is constant reassessment of the threat as new information comes in.  There is the dilemma of whether to use nuclear weapons (naturally the president and his wife are horrified that we possess the weapons that might save us).  There are the reactions of the Russians and Chinese to both our weapons and to the alien threat to consider.

All the while, there is Hillary inserting herself into the planning, and the president who came into this situation as a dove, but is learning that sometimes force is necessary.

The pace is speedy, the cast is uniformly excellent.  There is a lot going on here, and it all works.

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Black Ferris (S4E4)

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As in Wheel.  Ferris Wheel.  I have no explanation for the truncated title.

Ten year old Hank watches Mr. Cooger from the carnival get on the black Ferris Wheel.  As it spins backwards, Cooger’s laugh goes higher in pitch and we see a young boy get off of the ride wearing an identical suit in a petite size.

Hank follows the boy back to Mrs. Foley’s house where he has been taken in much like Willie in Hail and Farewell.  Apparently when Bradbury was young, you could adopt any kid who came to your door.

Hank recruits his friend Pete to come see this miracle.  Sure enough, they get to the closed carnival just in time to see Cooger again board the ride as a man and get off as a boy.  Fortuitously, Cooger’s clothes shrink down along with his body.

He once again runs to Mrs. Foley’s house where the boys think he is planning something against the old lady.  They tell her their concerns, including the miraculous Ferris Wheel, but she runs them off and threatens to tell their parents.

rbtblackferris05Hank goes home and is grounded.  He calls Pete and they agree to spy on the boy at Mrs. Foley’s house.  To be sure he doesn’t sneak out, his father bizarrely orders him to strip.

Pete shows up in the pouring rain at the Foley house.  Hank shows up a few minutes later.  He has outsmarted his father by sneaking out of the house and running across the neighborhood completely naked. This is really creepy and Pete is not nearly as mortified as he should be at his naked friend.

Turns out the boys were right.  Cooger Jr. steals Foley’s jewelry and high-tails it back to the carnival.  The boys — Hank now wearing Pete’s raincoat — pursue him back to the carnival.

Cooger Jr. is able to make it back to the Ferris Wheel where Igor begins the spin cycle to age him back to adulthood.  And not only does he turn back into a man, he also somehow acquires a fabulous hat and carnation in the transformation.

rbtblackferris13Hank is quite the kid and jumps Igor causing the wheel to spin out of control.  Cooger rapidly ages like Walter Donovan, or Walter Jameson. Or Barbara Walters, for that matter. When the Ferris Wheel comes to a stop, the bag of jewelry falls from his cold dead hand.

So Hank is quite the hero for figuring out this ruse.  I just hope he can live with the fact that he really executed Cooger for the robbery when he interfered with his attempt to age back to adulthood.  I have no problem with it, I just hope he is OK with it.

Post-Post:

  • Something Naked This Way Comes.
  • A three-peat for Roger Tompkins who has directed the last 3 episodes.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Glass Eye (S3E1)

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ahpglasseye06Rosemary Harris and William Shatner are boxing up the possessions of their cousin Julia who just died.  Julia died alone, never married, and Harris wonders if she ever dreamed of leaving the room and escaping her loneliness.

That opens the door for Shatner to tell her story.  It all begins with a glass eye.  Actually, it ends with a glass eye, but that is enough to launch his tale.

Julia (Jessica Tandy) was an aged, decrepit spinster, which in the fifties meant she was 30 and unmarried.  Her only social engagement is taking a local neighbor boy to the music hall.  The insufferable brat goes with her to a ventriloquist act where she is entranced by the ventriloquist Max Collodi.

She asks the brat twice if he thinks Collodi could be Italian.  I don’t know what that meant in the fifties.  She immediately buys another ticket to return alone to see the show again that night.  Now obsessed, she quits her job and begins following him to other theaters like the world’s first Deadhead.

ahpglasseye11Finally she gains the confidence to try to meet Collodi.  He resists her, saying that he never gives interviews.  She counters, like any good Match.com customer and sends him a photo that is 10 years old.  She wears him down to where he agrees to meet her.  Under certain conditions.

He will only promise her 5 minutes in a dimly-lit room — hey, that’s my line!  She accepts his conditions and nervously gets her self dolled up to meet Max Collodi.  She knocks and Collodi calls for her to enter.  They have a short chat, then Harris sees that her allotted time is just about up.  But she can’t resist just touching his hand.

This leads to one of the great reveals in TV history.  The dummy is actually a Vertically-Challenged American, and Max Colloid is merely a mannequin.  I’ll admit that this caught even me off-guard, but then I hadn’t ready any spoilery blogs.  The mannequin falls over and she runs away in horror, inexplicably scooping up an eyeball as a souvenir.

She kept the eye for the rest of her life as a reminder of her one great love.  Shatner says Collodi went on to be a clown in a small travelling circus.  We cut to him driving a horse-draw wagon, sporting an eye-patch.

ahpglasseye27The patch really makes no sense as it was the mannequin that lost the glass eye. Maybe the short story explains this.  Other sites claim this is a tribute in honor of “Max” but that doesn’t really makes sense either.

No matter, this is one of the greats.

  The Post-Post:

  • Rosemary Harris played Aunt May in the Maguire Spidermans.  And William Shatner, c’mon . . .
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Pretty lively group.  Rosemary Harris, Patricia Hitchcock, Paul Playdon and, of course, “The Shat” are still kickin’.
  • [Update] Coincidentally, I was just reading an article about Disney’s animated Pinocchio and learned the source of Collodi’s name — Carlos Collodi was the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Night Gallery – Dr. Stringfellow’s Rejuvenator (S2E9)

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ngstringfellow02This is Serling’s contribution to this fairly ignominious episode.  We start off in a nice western frontier town where Forrest Tucker is beating a drum to draw customers to his wagon.  And by customers, I mean rubes.

He is hawking an elixir, “a strengthening cordial that reinvigorates the stomach, stimulates the liver, regulates the kidneys and restores health and vitality.”  It cures cholera, yellow fever, acne, chills and dizziness of all kind.  Although I think a cure for anthrax or syphilis might have gone over better with this crowd.  Being a humanitarian, he is willing to let this miracle tonic go for only $1 per bottle.

One of the suckers comes to Stringfellow’s wagon and asks him to look at his daughter.  He finds her in an uncovered wagon.  She says there is a pain in her abdomen and it is growing.  Rather than thinking she is knocked up, Stringfellow unsurprisingly prescribes his Rejuvenator and predicts she will be up and around in a week.  He pockets a buck for the tonic and a small honorarium.

As he walks away pocketing the 2 bucks, he is approached by a Dr. Snyder who calls him out on his flim-flammery.  Snyder makes a much more medically sound diagnosis of the girl

ngstringfellow04When the rube’s daughter continues to “die an inch at a time,” he confronts Stringfellow. Stringy prescribes another bottle of the Rejuvenator.  Another honorarium probably wouldn’t hurt either.  He changes tacks and says that he is actually selling faith, and that “if that child crosses into the shadows, I will bring her back to life.”

Sadly, the girl does cross into the shadows (i.e.croak).

When Stringfellow goes outside, across the dusty road he sees the dead girl rocking in a chair.  He asks her if it is a haunt or a resurrection.  She stands and the camera cuts to Stringfellow and then back to the empty chair.  The girl has disappeared, but the chair is still rocking.  This makes no sense as even if she is still there, but invisible — she had stood up, so the chair should not be rocking.

Then he croaks.

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  Murray Hamilton was Mr. Death in One for the Angels.  But he is more better known as the mayor in Jaws, and most better known for his cool anchor jacket in that movie.
  • Skipped Segment:  Hell’s Bells.  Neither good enough nor bad enough to merit comment.  It does, however, star the always-entertaining John Astin.  He is playing a hippie kind of like Bob Hope would play in sketches long after the hippie era ended cuz a 106 year old dude saying “groovy” spellz komedy.

Night Gallery – A Midnight Visit to the Neighborhood Blood Bank (S2E9)

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I wouldn’t normally write about one of the short Night Gallery sketches, but this one fails so completely on every level that it can’t go without recognition.

  1. The Title — There is no blood bank in the story.  Then I thought that maybe the titular blood bank was a metaphor for the girl.  Like when Jack Torrance referred to Wendy as “the old sperm bank”  in The Shining (although he could have been referring to his own impotence).
  2. The Description — From the DVD menu:  A vampire attempts to open an account at a blood bank but only plans on making withdrawals.  OK, so the title did refer to a literal blood bank.  Well, where the hell is it?  There is no account being opened — the entire sketch takes place in a girl’s bedroom.
  3. The Dialogue — As the vampire is about to bite the girl, she says, “I gave at the office” and he withdraws dejectedly.  OK, I get that this references an old joke about dodging people seeking contributions, but does she work at a blood bank?  Is that the office?  I am very confused.
  4. The Cast — The girl is played by the producer’s daughter in her only IMDb credit.  On the other hand, admittedly, Victor Buono is great as the vampire.
  5. The Effort — Zero on the above points.  The segment only runs 1:36 and 14 seconds of that is spent on the oil slick at the beginning.

So was the wrong segment put on the DVD?  Was it just severely edited for time?  Rod Serling did no intro for this segment — were they just embarrassed to show it to him?  I am at a loss.

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  None.
  • Odd Couple Legacy:  Victor Buono was highlarious playing an exorcist.