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Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Across the Threshold (02/28/60)

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Poor Hubert. Even his chair emasculates him.

For the second night in row, we have a lonely man living with his parakeet.  At least Hubert tonight also has his mother At least Norman yesterday got a little peace and quiet.  Hubert Winters’ mother still treats him like a child.  She brings the 32 year old man his robe, covers his expenses, refuses to allow him to have a checking account, and kept him on her insurance until he was 26.

She says she knows he is unhappy because he has no job, but she is happy to have him there.  Without her son, she would have no reason not to cross the titular threshold to be with her dead husband Arthur; so Arthur is probably happy with the arrangement also.  She lets it slip that she still has her husband’s medicine which, taken in large doses, is fatal.

She worries that Arthur is not happy on the other side without her.  Hubert says he knows a young woman, and that she might be able to help her contact Le Morte d’Arthur.  Incredibly, the first part of that sentence is the less believable.

I don’t even want to think about what he brought to Irma.

Turns out, he does know a girl.  She is kind of a floozy.  She is happy to see Hubert, but disgusted when he says he must get back to his mother soon.  She is an actress and he reminds her of the time she played a medium in a play.  Hubert wants her to pretend to contact his father.

Later that week, Irma goes to Mrs. Winter’s house dressed in either a hijab or a Moe Howard wig.  Irma says she will go unconscious and Princess Artiti (Egypt, circa 1375 BC) will speak through her.  Oh, and the princess married her brother, which explains why this is the only AHP episode available on Pornhub.

Irma tells Mrs. Winters to concentrate on her husband.  Then she begins channeling the princess in a falsetto voice.  Mrs. Winters laps this up through her false set o’ teeth. [1]  Irma miraculously pierces the veil of this earthly plane and speaks with Arthur.  He responds with 1) a detailed description of the afterlife, 2) proof that there is a heaven, 3) Saturday’s lottery numbers?  No, he says he misses his old sofa.  Mrs. Winters gasps as that is sooo Arthur. [2]  Unfortunately, Arthur fades away.

OK, I’m a little curious.

The next night, Irma returns,  She fraudulently summons the princess, and the princess fraudulently summons Arthur.  Sofie has a question for him.  She just wants to know if he is happy.  Arthur tells her he misses her and that he is “lonely on this shore.  I wait for you.  I need you.”  Sofie tells Arthur she will come to him immediately.  After Irma leaves, she tells Hubert she will go to Arthur tomorrow night.

Sofie spends the next day doing things no sane person would do if they were going to do something no sane person would do that night.  She is paying bills, canceling magazine subscriptions, dusting.  She sends Hubert to the store to buy shelf paper for the birdcage since can’t wait for the Times to be delivered tomorrow morning.

There is a twist, but the real twist is how mediocre the twist is for an AHP episode.  Of course, Sofie ends up poisoning Hubert so the family can be together.  Yes, he was a momma’s boy, but there was really no suggestion that this might happen.  His mother was just nutty and ready to die, not a psychopath.  Plus, how did she know he would be drinking the poisoned booze at just the right moment?

There was a nice bit of business with her continually finding tiny chores that delayed her drinking her own poison.  Sadly, the suspense that should have flowed from this scene is torpedoed by the two leads.  Sofie is more annoying than overbearing.  Her son is so whipped that it is impossible to feel anything for him.

A rare misfire from AHP.

Other Stuff:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  All have crossed the threshold.
  • [1]  Shamelessly stolen.  I mean, it’s an homage.
  • [2]  I must admit I misunderstood Irma.  She relayed that Arthur missed his “comfortable old Sofie”, not sofa.  Although it was probably a little of both.

Twilight Zone – The Call (11/19/88)

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Lonely Norman Blaine worries that no one loves him and that when he dies, no one will mourn.  He returns home to wallow in his isolation and seclusion.

He dumps out some food for his only companion, a parakeet . . . which he keeps in a cage . . . away from any other parakeet . . . which will someday be flushed down the porcelain graveyard unmourned.  Not much room for self-awareness in this studio apartment.

He cooks up a Swanson Lonely-Man TV Dinner in an oven that is suspiciously clean for a single dude.  He falls asleep watching TV and wakes up at midnight to a loud infomercial, though, sadly not for Girls Gone Wild.  The announcer is hawking classical records [1], which interests Norman.  He grabs a pencil to jot down the phone number 555-4221 (this must be a local infomercial) [2].  He is so addle that not only can’t he remember this easy number, he even writes it down wrong.

He calls the number and an American woman answers which should have been his first sign that something was amiss.  He immediately realizes he has dialed the wrong number and apologizes for waking her.  She says she was just sitting around and heard the phone ring.  The two lonely people decide to have a little chat.  Her name is Mary-Ann like the cute girl on Gilligan’s Island; his is Norman like the psycho killer.

The next day at work he is telling his obnoxious office-mate Richard about the 90 minute conversation he had last night with a girl,  It was unusual for him because 1) it was so comfortable, 2) it was like they were old friends, and 3) it wasn’t $6.00 for the first 5 minutes.  Richard misses Norman’s more customary silence, but advises him to ask Mary-Ann out.

The next night, Norman calls Mary-Ann again.  This time they talk for 3 1/2 hours.  Mercifully, we hear only the last few seconds.  Mary-Ann says how much she enjoys their talks.  He asks to meet her somewhere, but she refuses.  She wants to keep the NATO strategy of No Action Talk Only.  That would be swell, he lies.  He agrees to call her again the next night.

This goes on for five nights.  He complains to Richard about her refusal to meet him.  Richard helpfully explains how to determine the address of her phone number without waiting 20 years for Google to be invented.  Apparently Norman takes his advice because we next see him walking into the Civic Art Gallery and asking for Mary-Ann.  The receptionist doesn’t know a Mary-Ann but suggests Norman stick around to ask the Director.

Norman wanders around.  He picks up a white courtesy phone and dials Mary-Ann’s number.  To his surprise, he hears a phone ringing nearby.  He doesn’t hang up the receiver, but goes to the other phone and picks it up.  He seems surprised no one is on the line, but what did he expect?  He hangs up and looks at a sculpture nearby of a girl on a bench.  Another art-lover tells him it is a self-portrait, the last work the artist ever completed before killing herself.  And her name was Mary-Ann Lindeby.

That night, Norman calls her again.  Mary-Ann says, “I saw you come by today.  You were standing right in front of me talking to that woman.”  Before she can say, “Did you think she was pretty?” Norman says “That’s impossible” and hangs up on her.

Facing the prospect of moving on to the Swanson Horny-Man TV Dinner, he quickly calls her back.  She apologizes to him, saying she never should have answered the phone.  She was just so lonely, and it was so dark.  She says goodbye and hangs up.

Norman thinks about her all the next day.  That night he stares at the phone.  He finally calls her, but gets no answer.  The next day, he goes back to the gallery.  He tells her he felt like he was nothing and that he had nothing until they met on the phone.  For the first time he feels like he is in love.  He moves to kiss the sculpture, but a security guard busts him.  Oh the humiliation!

That night, Mary-Ann calls him — this script really could have used some tightening up.  Rod Serling loved his long-winded speeches, but I’ll say this for him — it padded out an episode without so much repitition.  She says she heard what he said and it reminded her of herself just before she committed suicide.  “Come to me now,” she says.  “Tonight.”

He goes to the closed gallery and finds her sculpture.  He hears her voice, “It’s been so long since anyone said they loved me.”  He sits on the bench.  She says, “I don’t want to be alone anymore.  Stay with me.”  He says, “Forever.”

The security guard comes around again and now there are two bronze figures sitting in the exhibit about to kiss.  His flashlight stops briefly on them, but continues on.  Whaddya want for $12 an hour?

Seem like they could have done more with this.  Why is she trapped in the sculpture?  Is it punishment for the “sin” of suicide?  Is she really better off dragging Norman to the same fate?  Is he happier?  Sure, they are together, but they are both trapped in this hellish “locked-in” existence.  Even worse, they are in a permanent, not-quite embrace which must be frustrating.  Now that they are together, will they begin making Jerky Boys type calls?  What will happen to Norman’s parakeet?

Still, I liked the premise and it has left me thinking.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Sadly the great commercial with Basil Rathbone hawking classical records does not seem to be on You Tube.  Found it.
  • [2] At first it seems like an error to have this be a local number, but it is actually necessary.  They couldn’t have him mis-dialing a long-distance number, then making repeated trips to The Louvre.  First, there was no budget to go to France, and second, that Mona Lisa . . . not a looker.
  • Classic TZ Connection: Long Distance Call, Night Call, really any episode with “call” in the title.  Miniature has been mentioned elsewhere.
  • I didn’t know how to work it in above, but nice rack on that sculpture!  And some fine detail work on the nipples.
  • If the phone were in the Picasso Gallery . . .
  • If the phone were in the Rubens Gallery . . .

Tales of Tomorrow – Read to Me, Herr Doktor (03/20/53)

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Professor Kimsworth is looking snappy in his smoking jacket.  He goes to his bookshelf and carefully makes a selection.  He holds it very close to his face like a man with presbyopia or a Hustler subscription.  Confirming it is the desired volume, he hands it to someone just out of frame.  The person begins reading A Scandal in Bohemia and the game is afoot.

Not as sophisticated as the robot on the new Netflix Lost in Space, but less robotic than the new John Robinson.

A former student, Sidney Strong, rings the bell at the remote house and Kimsworth’s daughter Patricia lets him in.  She takes Sidney into the reading room.  He relieves himself after the long trip, then they go to the room where the actual reading is happening.  Sidney doesn’t want to interrupt, but Professor Kimsworth tells Herr Doktor to stick a bookmark in it.  Sidney is stunned when he sees Herr Doktor is a robot.

Some time later, Patricia calls Sidney.  She is worried because her father has started having literary conversations with Herr Doktor.  After first the reading, then the discussion, she wants to put a stop to this before her father asks for any other oral pleasures from Herr Doktor.  Of course, the primitive robot was not actually conversing; Kimsworth just seemed to be getting a little demented.  Sidney is more interested in making money.

She goes to the reading room, but finds her father has dozed off.  Herr Doktor says, “Wake him up, wake him up so that both of you can hear what I’ve got to say.”  Patricia is terrified as Herr Doktor has never appeared sentient before.  She tries unsuccessfully to shut him off.  It says, “What good are switches?  Switches are for machines.  Switches have no effect on men.”  The professor says to him, “That will be all for now.”  Herr Doktor replies, “On the contrary, that will not be all for now.  In fact, we have only just begun.”  That’s about as good an act break as you’re going to get out of this series.

When we return, Kimsworth is still proclaiming that this is impossible.  Herr Doktor condemns Kimsworth, “You made a man.  A man but not a man; a half-man.  And then you fed it romance and adventure.  You filled its coils with love for living.”  This is shockingly good stuff from this series.  Herr Doktor tells Kimsworth he must finish the job.

Oh, the irony:  Herr Doktor forces the professor to read to him.  He drives the old man to exhaustion.  It really makes no sense as the robot could have absorbed this info much faster than a human could read it to him.  But the symmetry of the master becoming the slave is just too delicious to worry about that.

While Herr Doktor is taking his final exams — no, really — Sidney comes back.  He rings the bell, which alerts Herr Doktor.  He strangles the professor and demands that Patricia send Sidney away.  She sends him away, and Herr Doktor releases the professor so he can grade his exam — no, really.

When Herr Doktor and Patricia are alone, he apparently decides it is time for post-exam Spring Break.  He begins quoting a Shakespeare sonnet to Patricia.  OK, not exactly Beach Blanket Bacchanalia, but he is clearly looking for love, using the ideas he has learned while reading the classics.  He laments how the professor built him as a machine to read, but exposed him to ideas of love and romance.  “He gave me beauty to read and beauty to look at.  Don Quixote, D’Artagnan, Romeo — men who loved, and a machine can love too.  And to the machine, you were always the woman.”

Mind blown.  Did this inane little series actually just circle back around to A Scandal in Bohemia?  The famous first line of that story, read aloud by the professor earlier, is “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.”  And who better for Herr Doktor to identify with than the emotionless Sherlock Holmes?  If this wasn’t a coincidence — and it might well have been — then bravo!

Unfortunately, Herr Doktor must have also read de Sade as he starts getting rough with Patricia.  He then clubs the professor when he tries to help.  He insists that Patricia must love him because he fought for her.  He must be referring to the brief clubbing of the 90 year old professor.  There isn’t much honor in that, but credit again to the writer.  The classics he read taught him a woman must be fought for, or won in a duel.  How many people have to die before we put warning labels on these books!

She yells at him, “The books are wrong!” and this rocks his world.  Herr Doktor stumbles back to the reading room und ist kaput.  The professor opens him up and removes the defective part.  “The heart of the machine is broken . . . like Don Quixote, he was a man in love.”

Of course, by any objective standard, the episode is dreadful.  Judging it within the series, though, it is a winner.  Yes, the robot is Ludacris, but whaddya gonna do?  They had no money.  However, I appreciated the signs of life in the writing.  It was more ambitious than almost any other episode.  Even this was uneven, though.  What was the point of Sidney even being in the episode?  He comes, he goes, he comes back, he leaves, he returns, Patricia gets rid of him.  I really expected him to peek in a window, see there was trouble and break in for a proper duel.  But no.

Other Stuff:

  • Mercedes McCambridge (Patricia) went on to be the voice of the demon in The Exorcist.  Could this proper 37 year old low-budget TV actress have ever imagined that in 20 years she would be on the big screen telling a priest his mother sucks c****s in hell?

Outer Limits – Sarcophagus (08/07/98)

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Natalie is running an archaeological dig in Alaska with three dudes who are not her husband, but I think he has nothing to worry about with this crew.  As she sinks an explosive charge to map the underground caverns, her hubby Curtis drives up with supplies.  She has spotted a capstone.  Being a Hollywood [1] archaeologist, her first act is to destroy the ancient site.  Although, to be fair, she fell through the roof.  It’s not like she purposely knocked over a giant statue, destroyed a wall of intricate carvings, and stole an ark.

In the chamber, they find an alien preserved in amber.  Emmet thinks they need to bring in a bigger crew, but Natalie has had people steal her discoveries before even though her name was written right on the bag, and refuses.  She holds an eye-dropper of acid over the amber and squeezes out a few drops.  The amber sizzles and smoke puffs out of the site.  She repeats the test with the same results, then says, “Negative, no reaction to hydrochloric or carbolic acid.”   Well, it did sizzle and smoke; was she looking for fireworks?  I’m starting to feel sorry for Curtis.

Curtis tries to cut into the amber, but his mind is taken over by the alien.  From the alien’s POV, he sees primitive villagers and tribesmen being tossed about by the alien.  Curtis passes out and the group sees the amber rise like a great souffle, then fall like a lousy souffle.  An alien skeleton is revealed.

Twenty minutes in, this thing is a bit of a slog.  Lisa Zane as Natalie brings exactly the same adequateness as she did in The Nurse, but nothing more than that.  Her husband is a mystery.  He is also an archaeologist, but seems to be a slack-ass who just tags along with Natalie on her digs.  She jumps on him for wanting a cushy teaching job.  However, I understand her frustration — they have just discovered a bleeping dead alien, and the guy could still not be less enthusiastic.  Even with this historic find, he still wants to go back to the states.  Even their argument is boring.

Robert Picardo plays Emmet.  He’s a fun character actor, but I had the sudden realization that he always plays Robert Picardo.  Aside from some stubble, his Emmet is often indistinguishable from his holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager.  The other two crew-members are non-entities; like Harry Kim on Star Trek: Voyager.

Meh, it goes on.  Curtis and Natalie try to help the alien, and then it helps them.  The bad guys die, the good guys win.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] By Hollywood, I mean Vancouver.

Science Fiction Theatre – The Human Equation (10/15/55)

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We open on a cleaning woman cleaning, and the announcer announcing, ” . . . and a vacuum cleaner screamed its defiance at the usual quiet.”  The woman is pretty defiant also, screaming at the tenants over the noise, “I know it’s noisy!  Ain’t my fault the noise bothers you!  I can’t help it if you got sensitive ears!”  Then she just scream-screams as a man runs into frame and strangles her.  Thus far, he is the hero of tonight’s episode.

One of the neighbors recognizes the man as Dr. Finch, and the police haul him in.  He protests, “I am a man of science.  I have never inflicted pain on a single human being.”  C’mon, WWII was just ten years ago.  He claims he can’t even remember where he was that day.

Finch’s niece Nan takes his arrest pretty hard.  She and Finch’s associate Dr. Seward go to see the Governor rather then, say, an attorney.  The Gov has the facts, though.  He lists off the evidence: Finch was spotted at the crime-scene, the victim’s skin was under his fingernails, a hair on his coat came from the victim, particles of dust and carpet fibers were found on his clothes, and he was positively identified by an eye-witness.  The Governor’s case is undermined, however, by the ridiculous circular tuft of hair sticking out of the side of his head.

Seward argues that Finch’s record of service to medicine should get him a break.  Not only that, he implores the Gov to just think of the millions who will benefit from his future research.  However, Seward doesn’t offer up any new hard evidence or campaign contributions so the Gov leaves Finch on death row.

Seward assumes Finch’s position at the lab.  Nan is none too thrilled with this.  She barges into his office and says, “Why, your best couldn’t possibly equal the least of my uncle’s abilities!  You’re a fool if you think you can replace Albert Finch!”  She further accuses him of taking credit for her uncle’s research and storms out of his office.  Strangely, she was fine with it earlier that day.  You don’t often find such irrational behavior in fictional women.

Seward goes to check on their new scientist, Dr. Clements.  Seward tells him he doesn’t think they could have found a better person for the job. [1]  He also conveys Nan’s pleasure that he was carrying on her uncle’s work.  Clements seems surprised by this news.

At the end of the day, Seward offers to take Nan home.  They hear a ruckus in the lab.  Clements has gone nuts and attacked a subordinate.  When Seward intervenes, Clements threatens to kill him.  After a mild defense, Clements runs out.  Seward is baffled by this.  “What’s the meaning of this?  Resentment one minute, a cheerful greeting the next.  And now this.”  He looks at Nan and says, “What about you?”  He confronts her about her earlier hostility, but she remembers none of it.  She suggests he’s the one who been acting strangely.  Yet, the sap still drives her home.

Back at Nan’s place, her son Kenny is mad at her.  While Nan is cooking dinner for them, Seward notices a bruise on Kenny’s arm.  Nan walks in and asks, “Who did this?”  Kenny says, “You know!  You did it!  You know you did it!”

The next day, after what must have been an awkward dinner, Seward goes to see Dr. Upton, a psychiatrist.  He needs Upton’s expertise to determine the effects of a fungus they have been developing as an antibiotic.  It is supposed to be more effective than penicillin.  What is it with fungus and infections?

With just hours until Finch goes to the gas chamber, Seward decides to test the fungus on himself.  Upton ties him to a chair and injects him with it.  After an hour, his heartbeat accelerates 10 BPM, his pupils dilate, and he begins to perspire.  So either the fungus was having an effect, or he kind of digs this bondage.

An hour later, he becomes psychotic.  After another hour, he begins to have visions.  Finally after four hours, he violently thrashes about trying to escape from his restraints so he can kill Upton.

Seward and Nan visit the Governor again to explain that he had proven that Finch had acted under the influence of the fungus.  Since they have compelling new evidence and witnesses, he calls the warden to stop Finch’s execution.

The announcer assures us this was a fictional story, however . . .

“The discovery of a similar fungus derivative that can produce experimental psychoses for study in the laboratory is fact!  The drug, known as LSD, has enabled science to relate mental illness to the chemistry of the body for the first time.”

Wow, I wonder if this was the first mention of LSD on TV?  I see it actually was available by prescription starting in 1947.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  OK, he says man, not person.