Stephen Baldwin is getting the crap beat out of him. Shockingly, it is not by his brother Alec. He owes money to some bad eggs who think nothing of taking a Louisville Slugger to his gut and standing on his guitar hand. He is able to brain the guy with a liquor bottle and make a run for it.
Brief aside: Next time you get your hands on a liquor bottle — i.e. now, for me — note how thick they are. It is really possible to break one over a person’s head and not kill them? The windows at the White House are not as thick as a bottle of Gentleman Jack.
He carjacks Amanda who is driving though an insanely dangerous part of town. She is a veterinarian, but still agrees to stitch up Baldwin’s wounds. Did they learn nothing from Tea-Bag? No, the one in Prisonbreak — wow, there’s a word you don’t want to Google too deeply [1]. Naturally, she takes the beaten, bloody stranger back to her house; then invites him to spend the night on the sofa. The next morning, before he wakes up, she has gone to the pawn shop and rescued his guitar with the ticket she found in his pocket. I don’t get treated this nice at family reunions.
That night, the guy with the bat comes up in rotation again. When he lets himself in Amanda’s window, Baldwin sics her two dobermans on him. Amanda comes downstairs to see what the racket is and Baldwin tells her the dogs killed the man. “Good dogs,” she says.
Amanda takes charge, burying the man. Even Baldwin thinks this is a little extreme. He goes upstairs to get his guitar. When he is at the top of the stairs, one of the dogs goes up on his hind legs and shoves Baldwin down the stairs. He wakes up in Amanda’s bed with a broken ankle. She has set the break using her mad vet skillz. She must also have some mad weight-lifting skillz as he is, for some reason, now upstairs again.
He limps downstairs and tries to use the phone, but one of the dogs is guarding it. When he finds another phone, the other dog yanks the cord out of the wall. The dogs then block him from the exits. He cleverly drugs the dogs with the pills Amanda had given him, but passes out. When he awakens, the dogs are gone. He begin walking out and slips on some brown chunky material which, thankfully, he identifies as dog food. They trap him in the bathroom, even turning the knob to come in after him.
Amanda shows up and literally calls off the dogs. On the other hand, she does plunge a syringe into him. He awakens in the basement chained to the wall. Blah, blah, blah . . . she is treating him like a dog.
All this is fine as far as it went, but it seems to be missing a final act or twist. There are a couple of red herrings that seem more like sloppiness than misdirection.
Amanda’s dogs seem to be far more intelligent than normal dogs; they seem more intelligent than the dog in Watchers. They shove Baldwin down the stairs, yank phone lines from the wall, and open doors as if they had once been human, but are now stuck in the bodies of dogs. Hmmmmm, but that goes nowhere.
Amanda asks Baldwin to play her a tune on his guitar which she got out of hock for him. He refuses in a way that sounds suspiciously like he doesn’t know how to play. This also goes nowhere.
Finally, Baldwin ends up chained to the basement wall. I guess that is OK, I was just expecting something more — maybe she would use her vet skillz to transform him into a dog, like the walrus in Tusk.[2] Amanda tells him he will have to learn to behave, unlike her previous victim. OK, what then? What is the end game here? What happened to the previous victim?
Post-Post:
- [1] Although, it seemed to work out for Mike Ehrmentraut who got a bullet wound sewn up, a job offer and a snausage.
- [2] Or the snake in Sssssss.
- The only TV episode directed by JoBeth Williams.
- The last of many TV episodes written by Earl Hamner, Jr.
- In no way relevant, but this episode aired 12 days before 9/11.
A police lieutenant comes into Cyril Jones’ gun shop and asks when is the last time Jones sold a gun to Dan Foley. Without asking for a warrant or subpoena, Jones sings like a canary showing the officer that he sold Foley a gun in January.
Rather than go home, he gets a hotel room “with a view” for $3.50 ($75 if he uses the mini-bar). The next morning, he has a clear view of Foley & Felix across the street. He loads up his rifle and takes aim at the two pin-striped bastards.
We open in Ferguson’s Wax Museum. Do these things even exist anymore? [1] Mr. Ferguson himself is leading a tour which includes two sailors on the tamest furlough since Gomer Pyle went back to Mayberry. After checking out waxy Marie Antoinette [2] (who is sadly not topless in either sense of the word), they move on to waxy Cleopatra. This place ought to be called the Museum of Murdered Women.[3]
Senescu asks to buy the wax figures as he can’t bear to see them destroyed; although, he doesn’t seem to care much for Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette. Movers deliver the figures to Senescu’s house. He installs the exhibit in the basement which he has rigged up with a new industrial strength 
Ferguson stops by and tells Senescu that a museum in Brussels wants to buy the figures. While Ferguson is measuring them for shipment, Landru garrotes him. When Senescu sees another dead body, he chews the wax figures out for betraying him. He grabs a crow bar to destroy them, but they become animated. They stiffly move toward Senescu claiming that he committed the murders, and fall on top of him.
When the wax figures advance on Senescu, how does he die? He is portrayed as a murderer in the titular new exhibit, so it must have been a heart attack. If he had been axed, suffocated, slashed or strangled, he would have been considered just another victim.
Police Officer Harry Siegel is appropriately interrogating a low-life about a missing boy. And by “appropriately,” I mean he ties him up, pounds him in the face and threatens to cut out an eyeball if he doesn’t talk. The scumbag gives up the boy’s location — uh, upstairs. Really, you couldn’t even search the house before going all Jack Bauer on him? The pervert plans on inflicting a little off-book punishment of his own. Just before saving the taxpayers a million bucks, he tells Siegel that he will never let him forget this night.
The next day, he meets with Meredith Kane. She is another woman suspecting her husband of having an affair. She wants Siegel to get the evidence “to make him pay.” She says there is a run-down house conveniently across the street from their home where Siegel can set up his surveillance equipment.
He sees a lot of other crazy shit in the house. Finding himself locked in, he turns and sees dead Rory Bemell standing there with a knife. He says, “I didn’t deserve this, Harry.” He tells Siegel that a girl Siegel burned was innocent and now lives in pain. And a kid he kicked senseless turned out to be a witness.
This is the first episode on the disc, but the second episode to air. It makes me suspect that this was to be the premiere, but 
Tim Hathaway is knocking back the hooch. This show is so old, you could only get 3-year old scotch back then. Heyoooo, I’ll be here all weekend! I mean right here, on the couch.
Tim confronts Joanne about the mysteries and she admits that she has changed. She has also discovered that she can control objects with her mind. As proof she makes a statue topple over and shatter — pretty racy for 1951 TV, the statue was topless. She believes she is evolving to “a brand new kind of human being.” Her night table now groans under the weight of thick books on physics. Say, a woman reading science books — that is crazy!
In the Berkeley Electronic Lab, Tim begs her to come back to him. She says she is the first of a new race, a new kind of being. In a nifty scene, she goes through a door to get her coat. A few seconds later, Jim checks the door and sees that it is just a broom closet and Joanne has disappeared.
A great deal of potential was squandered in this episode. The idea of the woman evolving was a great concept. In fact, it was so great that they used it again in another