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Ray Bradbury Theater – Marionettes, Inc. (05/21/85)

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Annoying preface:  

I started this blog because I spent $9 on a box set of this series, and bailed after one season. Determined to get my money’s worth, I needed something to force me to watch every remaining episode.  I started with the first episode I had not seen, Season 2’s The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.  With the unexpected deletion of Science Fiction Theatre from You Tube for copyright and presumably humanitarian reasons, I have opted to complete the coverage of RBT. [1]

Annoying commentary:

John Braling (the insufferable James Coco) is trying to eat breakfast, but his pestering wife won’t shut the hell up.  Like one of those Alfred Hitchcock Presents wives, she just goes on and on (i.e. asks for it).  To be fair, all of her yapping is about making him a nice breakfast and getting him out the door dressed warmly for work.  Also like AHP, she tempts fate by asking, “What would you do without me?”

Surely you can’t be serious.

When Braling starts up his computer at work, it seems to have been hijacked by Marionettes, Inc.  Misc personal information scrolls up the screen.  He later picks up a newspaper [2] at the newsstand and there is a Marionettes, Inc business card attached.  At lunch, the waiter brings his bill and there is a Marionettes, Inc. card attached.  He demonstrates a 1985 laptop at a client’s office and the Marionettes Inc. logo comes up again with his personal information.  Most embarrassing: it states his favorite show is Wheel of Fortune.

He goes to a bar where he sees a friend and demonstrates the computer’s strange behavior.  He decides to pay a visit to Marionettes, Inc.  I’m not sure how he found the building since there was no address on the cards.  After wandering down numerous dark hallways, he enters a dark office that is sparsely decorated with only a desk, a couch and Leslie Nielsen.  What?  This is some major star-power compared to the later RBT episodes.

Nielsen asks Braling if he is happy.  He tells Braling he is “a sad man rushing to the edge of the cliff, toward his own destruction.”  He offers Baling a chance to be happy.  In another office, he shows Braling an exact duplicate of himself, amazingly even wearing the same tie.  Neilsen suggests the robot could stay home with Mrs. Braling while he did whatever he wanted to do.  And all this for the low, low price of every penny in his bank account.  Braling calls it madness and leaves.

However, in the next scene, he drags his friend Crane to his house where Braling also appears to be sitting on the couch with his wife.  Braling explains he is ecstatic with his new freedom.  He keeps the Marionette in the basement and switches places with it as needed.  He is having a grand old time “going to movies, bowling, all the things I’ve wanted to do.”

Crane suggests “wine, women and song”.  Braling admits he hadn’t thought about girls.  How exactly would the Marionette help him?  He’s still James Coco; and also now has no money.  Maybe he would have been better off investing in the 1985 Kelly LeBrock Marionette.

Crane is so impressed he decides to get a Marionette of himself.  Crane goes home and grabs his bank book — his balance is $0.00.  He puts his ear to his wife’s chest and hears a clanking robot heart.  When the B-plot is better than the main story, there is a problem.

Still watching through his living room window, Braling sees his Marionette give his wife a gift of some lingerie.  He sneaks into the basement, opens the Marionette’s box, and presses the remote which causes his double to come to the basement.  He asks, “What am I supposed to do now that you’ve got her all riled up?”  The Marionette goes on at length about what an ingrate Braling his.  His wife only wanted to make him happy.  So he stuffs Braling in the Marionette box and goes back upstairs to take Braling’s place.

This story was previously filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. [3]  This episode is light years better than the later seasons of RBT.  It has more than one recognizable face, and shows some skill in the direction.  This is from the first season, before RBT fled the country like a celebrity on November 9th (oh, you’re still here?). It was directed by the ubiquitous Paul Lynch (Prom Night, Ray Bradbury Theater, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits).  Also, yesterday’s TZ.

However, it still is not as good as the AHP version.  Both versions suffer from having too much story for a 30 minute episode.  This version also suffers from having too much James Coco for a 30 minute episode.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I will probably also circle around on Alfred Hitchcock Presents once I’m staring down the barrel of those hour-long episodes.
  • [1] Also, still haven’t gotten my $9 worth.
  • [2] The newspaper also blows the whistle on this being a Canadian production — the headline references the CBC.
  • [3] The character there had an extra I in his name — Brailing.  However, there was a non-I Braling in RBT’s The Coffin.

Outer Limits – Hearts and Minds (02/06/1998)

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A squad of soldiers is positioned outside of a factory.  Their scanners read an “infestation” in the Pergium factory.  And infestation is the right word as their enemy is are is giant bugs.  At the captain’s signal, they begin streaming laser blasts in from half a mile away which doesn’t seem all that effective.  The fire from the distant rifles is deadly, but must be targeted on the individual bugs.  What they really need are missiles, rocket-launchers or a really big shoe.

Since the satellites aren’t in range, the squad must go in to confirm the bugs have been squashed.  They all “juice-up” by taking hits of an antibiotic that prevents them from getting cooties from the enemy.

They enter the factory and find 11 bleeping dead alien bodies in a hallway.  How exactly did they die inside the factory from those laser shots?  Ricochets?  Lt. Rosen takes a blast to her vest, but is able to kill the last alien.

The squad then travels through caves to the munitions plant.  En route, Rosen discovers the bullet damaged her juicer so she has not been getting her antibiotics or roughage.  If they encounter an alien, she is guaranteed to die, but she bravely goes on.  They do find one, but she is able to shoot him from a distance.  She has trouble focusing and feels like a murderer.

This group of people is more bland than the Alien: Covenant crew.  While the men are merely dull and all need a shave, the two women are indistinguishable.  Both are dressed in black with short dark hair and black berets.  Both have dark eyes and a microphone coming out of their helmet.  In addition, most of the scenes are not well-lit, so you just have a group of uninteresting, interchangeable grunts.

Turns out Rosen — I guess the other woman has a name, but I have no idea what it is — swapped the antibiotic in their juicers with Folger’s glucose to prove it was a ruse.  So they fear they are not only vulnerable to the alien cooties, but diabetes as well.  One of the dudes — who also probably has a name — puts a gun to her head.  She says the juice was actually a drug to make them fight and to hallucinate the enemy as aliens.  She believes the man she killed was with the Asian, not alien, coalition.  The government is behind this to protect the profits of Big Pergium.

To prove her theory, she leads the squad to meet the enemy.  When they see the enemy, they are indeed humans although the scene is so darkly lit, the effect is diminished.  Having always been targeted by this group, of course, the Asians run from the American squad like they were a giant fire-breathing lizard.

They try to make nice with an Asian worker left behind.  They lay down their rifles.  The Asian coalition returns, however, and lights their asses up.  Of course, they are on the same juicing drug as the American coalition, so see them as attacking monsters.

C’mon, Vulcan wasn’t that close in the Star Trek reboot!

It took me two viewings to appreciate this episode.  After the first, I considered it to be a slow, padded-out slog.  A day later, however, I appreciated it much more.[1]  The characterization, as mentioned before is pretty slim, but there are many other elements to make up for that weakness.  Some of them might be looked upon as cliches or standard tropes, but there is a reason they are used so much.

The grunts question the mission.  I’m sure this has gone on forever, but in the modern era it invokes memories of Viet Nam.  When I hear them talking about the corporate Pergium profits, I hear Mr. X taking about Bell Helicopter, General Dynamics and Brown & Root.  So it goes.

It can’t be an accident that the enemy here was the Asian coalition — especially since I can’t remember a single Asian actor in The Outer Limits up to now other than Jade.  It was an interesting parallel to the Japanese being portrayed as non-human in WWII propaganda.

The other outstanding element was the settings and set design.  From the canyons of the opening scenes, to the caves, to the factories, everything just looked great.

Original Assessment:  Episodes like this are why I can’t do this 365.  So some good does come out of them.

Revised Assessment:  Despite some interchangeable characters, the ideas and production design won me over.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I was actually willing to drop $15 more bucks to give Alien: Covenant the same opportunity, but it only lasted 2 weeks at my theater.[2]
  • [2] Sorry, AMC & Regal, I’ve been spoiled by comfy recliners and booze at the theater.  Mostly the booze.
  • Title Analysis:  Another Viet Nam reference.  A neat little encapsulation of how their hearts will change now that their minds are clear.  You know, if they hadn’t all been killed.
  • The fictional Pergium was also mentioned in the original Star Trek.
  • [01/06/18 UPDATE] The Men Against Fire episode of Black Mirror has the same plot device where soldiers are drugged to see the enemy as monsters.  It is better executed there, but the overall story is better here.

The Hitchhiker – Out of the Night (10/29/85)

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A blind Stan Lee doppelganger is walking his dog.  He passes a Bob Dylan doppelganger.  Someone yells, “F*** you all!” since this is HBO and guest star Kirstie Alley is unlikely to take her top off.  We hear a gunshot.  He looks around to see where it came from — the blind man looks around, I mean — this is The Hitchhiker, after all.

We cut to an 18 year old kid running away from a motorcycle cop.  He passes through an intersection which has a traffic jam of old-timey classic cars, then runs into the kitchen entrance of the San Marino Hospitality Inn.  The butcher-knife wielding chef chases him out.  He enters the lobby of the hotel which is filled with Felliniesque menagerie of weirdos, freaks, drama queens, and weirdos.  Did I mention this is set in California?

He sees the chef talking to the cop.  The cop pursues him with his gun drawn, for some reason bringing the chef along.  The cop says, “Are you sure it was him?”  Is he sure it was who?  It’s not like the chef identified someone from a mugshot.  He just said he said he saw an 18-year old kid.  The cop says, “He sure made a mess of things.  I can’t wait to get my hands on him.”

The kid is also packing heat.  He wanders into a bizarre room, made more bizarre by the from-nowhere entrance of Kirstie Alley.  As he spins around, she shoves a puppet in his face and is lucky he doesn’t shoot her.  She shouts, “They don’t like me either, but they’re stuck with me.”  He asks who she is and she pulls a card magically out of the air.  It says:

NECROMANCY

ONEICROMACY [1]

THAUMATURGY

The card changes before his eyes to say The Amazing Angelica.  He asks how she did that, but she says she has a lot better tricks.  She then pulls dead flowers out of a hat which is not a better trick.  She leaves, and the card goes blank, which is an equivalent trick.

The kid finds himself at the bar, but doesn’t know how he got there.  He asks if the bartender knows a guy name Baxy, same as he asked the chef.  He doesn’t, but the waitress does.  She says, “Baxy can’t help anyone, not even himself.  He’s a major head case.”

The waitress disappears; suddenly there is an older woman sitting beside him and the bar is full of people.  She says the waitress doesn’t care about him, but that is also the kind of girl her son likes.  The kid sees the cop, and asks the woman to help him sneak out.  They go up to her room.  She asks him what happened and he says if he told her, she would hate him.  When she tries to kiss him, he freaks out.  There is a knock at the door and he sneaks out the open window.

Suddenly he appears in an elevator with Kirstie.  As going down goes, that’s better than going out the window.  But again he has no idea how he got there.  She says she is putting on a show tonight and if he comes with her, he will be history around here.  He sees the waitress walk by and follows her as she goes into a sauna.  We get a nice topless scene.  They begin kissing and she slides off his jacket.  His shirt has conveniently disappeared, but his gun has not.  She freaks out when she finds he is not “just glad to see me.”  He leaves and she says he will end up just like his pal Baxy.

Again, suddenly, he is a waiter at the Conference of American Cardiologists.  Again with the suddenly — all the diners become white-coated physicians.  He escapes, and Kirstie again appears.  She drags him before a cheering crowd.  At this point, it is pretty clear what is happening.

Unfortunately, we get an interminable scene — OK, 3 minutes — of Kirstie Alley grotesquely hamming it up in front of a crowd.  It finally ends to reveal the kid is a patient in an operating room — he is Baxy.  As the doctors finish up, they say he had attempted suicide, but will recover.  The surgeon, the same actor as the cop, goes downstairs to inform his family.  He approaches the older woman seen earlier and says, “Your son is going to be fine.”  The girl seen before as the waitress is with her.  I think the producers were worried that people — as I did — would think that was his sister and that he dreamed a topless make-out session with her.  There is a clunky “You must be his sister / No, his girlfriend” bit of dialogue inserted to make it less sexy creepy.

Most impractical operating room ever!

This one actually benefits from a second viewing.  I didn’t care for it on the first go-round.  The second time, however, I was able to see all the foreshadowing, and how an impressive number of lines of dialogue were parallel to what would be happening in the operating room.  Some of the scenes that seemed a little creepy, like his mother kissing him on the bed, could be interpreted as a caring mother, but more-so on a second viewing than relying on my memory.

I appreciated the visual style as it reflected the randomness of dreams.  The titular hitchhiker’s intro was a little off, though.  The kid hallucinates this crazy hospital with all the classic old cars out front.  And there is the hitchhiker right in the middle of it. Was he in the kid’s dreams?  I thought it was weird when he was in France.

No other episode has improved so much upon further reflection.  If not for that god-awful scene with Kirstie Alley near the end, it would have been a success.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Did they mean ONEIROMANCY?  Could this series really be that lame?
  • In Baxy’s imagination, the building sign said SAN MARINO HOSPITALITY INN.  Back in reality, it says SAN MARINO HOSPITAL with an IN sign beside it.  Pretty clever, but you really have to look for it.
  • The chef with the butcher knife was the surgeon’s assistant.  When the kid initially entered the kitchen, we saw him cutting into a fresh piece of meat — again pretty clever.
  • Given some of the bartender’s lines (kill the pain / pump the gas), it is clear that he was intended to be the anesthesiologist.  It is a major faux pas that the director did not get a shot of him in the operating room; at least not a shot without the surgical mask.
  • Why did he dream of a conference of cardiologists when he had a head wound?
  • Written by Marjorie David who also wrote The Legendary Billy B.  Maybe I should go back and watch that one again.  Not gonna happen.
  • The cop was also in the excellent Trial by Fire.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – No Pain (10/25/59)

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Millionaire Dave Rainey — make that Six Million Dollar Man, Dave Rainey — is stuck in an iron lung. He’s pretty insistent on making sure everyone knows he’s worth six million.  I don’t know if people still know what an iron lung is — kids today, with their science and progress!  Actually, I never knew what was going inside those contraptions until I just looked it up.

The body from the neck down is sealed into metal tube.  A ventilator creates an oscillating atmospheric pressure inside to facilitate breathing.  It doesn’t seem like it would work, but people were’t spending years confined in these things for their health. Well, I guess they were in them for their health, but it was no fun.

Dave has a mirror angled over his face so he can see something other than the ceiling. His wife Cindy enters in a striped shirt over a bathing suit and a snazzy yachting hat. Their handsome pal Arnold has invited Cindy out on his boat.  In a brilliantly callous bit, Cindy uses Dave’s mirror — his sole lifeline to the horizontal world — to check her hair before boating off with another man.

While Cindy is gone, Nurse Collins turns the iron lung so Dave can see the ocean out their window just in time to see Arnold’s boat go by.  The nurse suggests that Dave should get out of the iron lung for 8 – 9 minutes as his doctor recommended.  Dave says he would rather just watch the boats. Although, really, who knows what he’s doing with his hands inside that thing.[1]

Dave flashes back to his days before the iron lung.  He and Cindy were having fun on the beach.  He tells her he’s “seen more cover on a loaf of bread” which I can make no sense of.  They start making out and Dave asks Cindy to marry him.  He admits he was a mug 5 years ago, but having six million in the bank has changed him.

At Dave’s invitation, Arnold sticks around for dinner after the cruise with Cindy.  When he drives the nurse to the bus station, Cindy and Dave are left alone.  After a few drinks, Cindy, the director, and the composer take a long look at the electrical cord that poweers Dave’s iron lung.  Dave says, “I hope it will be painless . . . however you planned it for tonight.  The killing, I mean.”  She asks when he first suspected.  She does unplug the ventilator, but she is just doing as the doctor prescribed.  She slides him out a few inches like a file cabinet.

While she pours herself a drink, she compliments Dave on how well he is taking the news that she is going to murder him.  She admits they had a few good years before his disability.  She tells him that now he is more dead than alive and, “You know me.  I was never meant for those nobler forms of solitaire.”  What the — is she talking about masturbation on TV in 1959?  After the almost-incest of Touché and the almost-cannibalism of Arthur, AHP’s slide into depravity is getting more explicit.  Well, the 1960s are just a couple of months away.

Cindy says seeing him in this condition, she almost thinks he wants to die.  He says, “I haven’t figured out yet why a man with six-million dollars would want to die.”  He was already worth six-million a few years ago before they got married.  What, is he keeping it buried in the back yard?  Make it work for you, dude!  She says, “I wonder if you know how unfair this whole thing is to me.”

Sadly, despite this intriguing premise, there is a huge lull in the middle of the episode.  Brian Keith has never been the most expressive actor other than conveying a coiled spring of rage.  He is just a strange choice to play the helpless Dave.  I guess it was to contrast his former virility with his current condition, but it doesn’t work.  This scene we are observing should be more about the mind than the physical body.

Joanna Moore’s low key performance does not help. Cindy had 5 drinks on the boat and 3 more after they returned.  Played slightly inebriated, this just drags the episode down even more.  I can imagine this scenario being suspensefully played out with a more intelligent, manipulative Dave, and Cindy arrogantly thinking she is in charge while he works her strings. Unfortunately, these two and the script just aren’t up to it.

There is a twist, but even that is kind of hum-drum.  There was just a lot of potential in this one that did not get exploited.  Of course, this still might be the best episode I watch this week.  The AHP bar is pretty high.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Upon further research, I see that he is probably paralyzed . . . I feel terrible.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.  However, if IMDb is to be believed, director Norman Lloyd, will be 103 in November and is still working. He was in Trainwreck with the odious Amy Schumer in 2015, and optimistically — dare I say quixotically — has a new series in development for 2018.
  • Joanna Moore (Cindy) was the mother of Tatum O’Neal.

Twilight Zone – The Storyteller (10/11/86)

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Dorothy Livingston and her daughter are coming out of the Robert Byrd Library.  The sign tells us the hours are 9 to 5 thus guaranteeing no students or working people will ever soil its stacks.  Dorothy recognizes a man getting into a cab.  She drags her perplexed daughter into the next car and says, “Follow that cab!” although figuratively, not literally.

She believes she knew the man 50 years ago when he was a kid and she was the new school teacher.  She flashes back to 1933 West Virginia where she arrove on the Robert Byrd Bus Line with a suitcase full of books.  She passes the former teacher as she leaves on the same bus,  As the bus pulls away, she yells out the window that Dorothy must be sure Micah Frost has full access to the library.

The next morning at Robert Byrd Elementary School, she faces her rowdy class full of flannel, bib-overalls, suspenders, and small humans.  As she begins her first history lesson, she notices Micah is not paying attention to her.  He is writing furiously in his notebook, although I’m not sure how she knew he wasn’t just aggressively taking notes.

Like all government employees, Dorothy works late her first day.  Micah also stays, looking at some books in the classroom bookcase which, I guess, is what represents a library in West Virginia.

As she is walking home, she passes Micah’s house.  Through the window, she can see him reading from his notebook to an old man.  The next day, Dorothy asks Micah if she can set up a parent-teacher conference.  He says his parents are dead and he lives with his grandfather.  When Dorothy suggests a grandparent-teacher conference, Micah gets very upset and runs away.

Despite Micah’s insistence that she stay away, Dorothy goes to his house that night.  Through a window, she hears Micah again reading the old man a story.  When Micah catches her, she asks him what is going on.  He says the old man is actually his great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1793.  Micah keeps him alive like his father before him, by reading him a story every night with a cliffhanger.  He would stop each night before the end, so the old man had to stay alive to hear the resolution.

The next day, Micah falls out of a tree and breaks his arm.  The doctor keeps Micah overnight, so Dorothy goes to his house.  She lets herself in, lights a lamp in the old man’s room, and gives him something to live for.

The next morning, Micah returns home and is happy to see his GGGGF still alive.  He doesn’t understand how he survived without hearing a story.  He turns and sees Dorothy is there — she read him a story from Micah’s notebook.  Presumably with no spoilers as they would kill him.

Back in the present, Dorothy tells her daughter that she thinks the man they are following is Micah.  She always wondered what happened to him, and if the old man is still alive, approaching his bi-centennial.  Or, at her age, maybe she wants him to read her a story.  They follow the man into a building, then to his apartment.

Strangely, the version posted on You Tube stops there, before the twist.  Being a good citizen, I have the DVDs.  Turns out this episode was just a story being told by Dorothy to keep her mother alive.

Despite TZ’s usual efforts to undermine the episode —  Charles Aidman’s terrible narration, the insipid score, the maudlin tone, the complete lack of any edge — there is a lot to like here.  Glynnis O’Connor is excellent as the new teacher.  The script didn’t give her much room to exercise the skepticism I would hope for from a teacher, but she transcended the words.

It also introduced a moral dilemma, although it spent about 5 seconds on it.  Not much, you say, but dang near a record for network TV.  Why is the old man being kept alive?  Is it enough just to breathe?  He seems to have no quality of life.  He never leaves his bed, has no friends, has a scraggly beard and is — just a hunch — not a regular bather.  Maybe Micah is keeping him alive as a guardian since his parents were killed.  But why did his father take on this task?  What happened to Micah’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather?  And sorry ladies, men-only.

The ending is kind of beautiful.  The reveal that this has been a story told by Dorothy is well played as opening a door into a room which fades to white.  When cut to Dorothy and her mother, it is intriguing beyond the simple twist.  Was there actually a Micah from whom she learned this cliffhanger technique?  Why did she let her mother get to be 90 years old before she began practicing it?

But most of all, is the old man — real or fictional — still alive and pushing 200?  Even after watching the episode and writing this, my mind keeps snapping back to that question.  They have physically involved me in the mechanics of the story in a way that has very rarely happened to me before from TV or a movie.  Yeah, I want to live to see what happened.

Other Stuff:

  • Classic TZ Legacy:  Nothing really, it was a pretty original premise.  It did remind me of One for the Angels.  Ed Wynn had to filibuster a sales pitch to keep Mr. Death from taking a little girl.
  • Dorothy is said to be 22, but Glynnis O’Conner was 31 at the time.  F’ing actors, man!
  • Directed by the ubiquitous Paul Lynch (Prom Night, Ray Bradbury Theater, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits).
  • Micah was played by an unrecognizably young Bud Bundy.
  • Skipped Segment:  Nightsong.  Unwatchable, Lifetime movie caliber.  It has the standard TZ shortcomings discussed above, but with no redeeming features.  I thought the lead actor was a dick when he had 4 shirt buttons open, then he later came back with 5 unbuttoned.  Actually, there is one well-done aspect to the episode.  I have often commented how awful DJs are on TV.  Here, Lisa Eilbacher and Kip Gilman both struck me as pretty authentic.