Elliot and Arianne are walking through the cemetery. Elliott has a contraption that he wants to hook up to a dead brain. Dude, Arianne is right there; and she’s no rocket scientist! Quite the opposite, she ridicules his narrow focus on “physics” and “facts”. She believes metaphysics has the answers.
They enter a mausoleum which holds the body of Valdemar Tymrak. Elliott says he is #13 in the World Class Psychos Trading Card set. Literally — Elliot pulls out the rookie card with his name on it. He reads, “26 certified kills, 19 women, 7 men. Tymrak was a renowned mesmerist who apparently hypnotized his victims with a single stare. Under his control, they were made to commit terrible and depraved acts before he murdered them and bathed in their blood.” Elliott believes Tymrak’s powerful brain makes him a good candidate to hook up to his device. Some people might have preferred final revelations from Gandhi or Hawking or Einstein or Jeffrey Epstein, but they didn’t have no trading cards.
Elliott opens the tomb and Arianne winces at the smell. Elliott explains that the smell is formaldehyde. Well, wouldn’t it have smelled worse without formaldehyde? For any trip to a exhumation, a COVID-19 N95 mask dipped in camphor or catshit would probably be a good idea. Anyhoo, I happily suspend disbelief and accept that this guy’s machine can read a dead man’s thoughts. But after being embalmed? C’mon, man!
The whole time, Elliott has been a little snippy because he suspects Arianne stole some research papers from him. Arianne says she has no interest in such things. She uses a red marker to draw a heart on the palm of his hand and says, “You’ll always have my heart in your hands.” In a good episode of TFTC, that would literally have come true.
He hooks Tymrak up to the device. While adjusting the settings, he sees his stolen research papers spill out of Arianne’s bag. Fortuitously, she happens to be putting the other headset on her own noggin. He angrily cranks up the volume causing her to scream. Once she starts shrieking, he suddenly becomes very concerned. Well, what did he expect? He pulls the headset off of her and she stops screaming, but I suspect that heart drawn in his palm will be smudged in the morning.
Oh, Arianne was killed. Elliott wakes up in an asylum due to his guilt — especially after he learns Arianne only took his papers to submit for an award for him. He dreams of Arianne and 2 other topless women, but seems to have actually awakened before flies land on his window and assemble in the shape of a new circuit. Elliott uses this new circuit to upgrade his device. Like every WordPress / Excel / Adobe upgrade in the past 5 years, it is a disaster.
Maybe I fell asleep and missed something — I admit to the falling asleep part — but nothing after this point makes any sense. He, of course, decides to use his new device to resurrect Arianne. He appears to have procured 3 dead women for the process, none of them Arianne as far as I can tell. What are the 3 women for? Was it just because he dreamed of them? I dream of topless women all the time, but they don’t show up at my job. He turns on the device and papers start swirling around the lab like Nakatomi Plaza.
Arianne appears in a ghostly form, then hardens just like Elliott. That is not the way I expected her to return. He was working on a scientific approach, not supernatural. He is OK with it, apparently, as within minutes he is banging her.
Unfortunately, the device must remain on, and Tymrak returns through the same gateway. Although, he seemed to take a different off-ramp. Arianne and Elliott are in the bedroom when they hear Tymrak tearing things up. They rush back to the lab, and Tymrak breaks down the lab door to kill them. Well, wait — wouldn’t he have also materialized in the lab? Where did he go? There was no English bird waiting to have sex with him — he killed them all. It’s just that lack of foresight that kept him out of the Top 10.
Anyway, Elliott has to shut down the machine to get rid of Tymrak, and Arianne is lost in the process. A few days later, Elliott is found to have committed suicide. He is bloody in the tub, probably from trying to scrub the smell of formaldehyde off his wiener. I guess we are to assume that he was distraught after killing Arianne twice, something not even Tymrak ever pulled off. Or maybe this was his attempt to join her in the after-life.
However, we also see a sign that she returned to him. The police notice a heart drawn on the window, but I still can’t figure out what they are getting at. An officer says to a detective, “It’s on the window sir. There’s something written in the dew.” Well, drawn not written — there is a heart. The officer seems to think it is strange that it is on the outside, and that all the windows are painted shut. I get the callback to the heart she drew on his palm, but what is the big deal about the dew being outside and the window painted shut?
Of course we are meant to assume Arianne came back and drew the heart, but how? There was no fore-shadowing of an ability to come back yet again. Why can’t Tymrak come back? OK, Elliott was reading a book about talking to the dead, so did he actually find a way bring her back without the device? Why did he bring her back outside? Was she floating outside his 2nd floor window? Can she fly?
Another missed opportunity. The pacing is humorless and plodding; however, the actors are great in their roles. Tymrak’s make-up looks like a drunk 3rd grader put it on in the car; however, when combined with the editing, it is surprisingly effective. The episode is done in by the complete lack of self-awareness, irony, campiness or gore that is supposed to be the sine qua non of the series.
Other Stuff:
- Title Analysis: Hunh? There is a grave — or at least a mausoleum — but no report is filed from it.
- Great comment on the You Tube version: Any less pixels ……………….. would make this radio.
- The awful screen-caps above are from the DVD. I mucked up the color somehow.
Spencer goes undercover to the doctor for a physical. In the waiting room, he observes on the doctor’s diploma that he graduated in 1907. He exclaims to the nurse, “That would make him at least 70!” Well, yeah, if he graduated from medical school at age 21 it would. Maybe there was less to learn then. They were only up to COVID-3.
Sweet Jesus, this thing is only half way through! Dull story short, Dr. Dove has discovered a serum which will add 50 years to the average human life. But the real stunner is that SFT actually came up with an interesting twist. If life expectancy increased that dramatically, then the population would quickly increase, leading to mass starvation as the lines at Cracker Barrel grow to a mile long. 
Executive James Barrett barks at his secretary to book him a flight to Toronto. He is leaving the Muldoon merger in the hands of young Philip Weaver. After handing off the file, Barrett calls his dimwit, baby-talking, still-in-bed trophy wife who thinks Canada is overseas. What could such a mature, educated titan of industry see in this numbskull? Oh, she’s 29 years younger than him. Not quite the 37 year difference we saw in yesterday’s 
The next morning, the doorman comes up to their apartment to drop off the mail and pick up Mr. Barrett’s luggage. After her husband leaves for the airport, Mrs. Barrett rifles through the mail until she finds Phillip’s letter. She reads, “By this time, my sweet, your adoring husband is on his way to the airport.” Phillip is pretty trusting that the USPS would get that letter there on the right day. Even more-so that it would be only be delivered after Barrett left, although he did improve his odds by mailing it the same day as the Monkey Ward catalog.
Mrs. Barrett . . . she doesn’t seem to have a first name. Let’s just call this treacherous, cheating ninny Helen. No reason at all. Just seems like a Helen.[1] So Helen immediately addresses an envelope to her husband’s hotel in Canada. After getting stuck because she doesn’t know what “smarmy” means — no, seriously — she pulls a picture of Phillip out of the desk drawer for inspiration. Wait a minute — she keeps a photo of the guy she is cheating with in her desk at home? And this is not a wallet size photo, this is an 8 x 10 glamour shot. It is even framed! These are the dumbest criminals ever.
Back in her apartment, she is mortified. I really felt for her, sitting on the sofa, almost catatonic with anxiety. Although in my case, it would have been because I had to attend a cocktail party. On the other hand, she does look pretty snappy in her little black cocktail dress. Gladys suggests that she go to the Post Office and see if she can retrieve the letter. She does, but again just misses the letter as it is sent out.
OSB once again, to great effect, uses historical and stock footage to add depth to a story which is just not that interesting. We open with several shots of WWII Dunkirk and London in 1940 before we arrive at a bunker where a group of men cheer Winston Churchill’s rousing “finest hour” speech on the radio:
This is an odd assortment of a farmer, a coal miner, a chaplain, a bank teller, a chemist, a grocer, a retired one-armed WWI hero, a young volunteer, and the headmaster of a girl’s school. It is a different time when this group of patriotic civilians would prefer to defend their country rather than going to work in their own jobs every day (well, except the headmaster, I imagine).
The elderly Blakely takes the first watch. Nazis row the boat ashore, hallelujha — wait, that’s not how that goes! But he has already dozed off. He dreams of his wife Ethel, as well he might — she is only 35 years old! Uh, wait a minute, Charlie said they had been married 20 years. Oh well, it was the olden days, I guess.[2] He dreams of Ethel at home asleep in their bed as bombers release their load, which is more than he’s done lately. The old guy is awakened by the whistling of the bombs, the explosions, and his enlarged prostate. Good thing, too, because at that very second, a Nazi is peeking into their bunker.
Another not particularly interesting — not even really a twist — but more of a gimmick or hook this week. It really is a mixed bag though, with some great elements. The episode had great potential with an large cast of defined characters, but didn’t know what to do with them. Too many people were thrown at the viewer at once, and arcs were hinted at but never paid off. The shaky kid did kill a Nazi, but that wasn’t really a satisfactory resolution. Well, not for the kid.
On the other hand, OSB continues to astound with its production design. It might start out in a one-room bunker, but it eventually moves outdoors (even if it was on a set) to show some effective fighting with the Nazis. The devastated town that Blakely walks through is utterly convincing. That and the bombed out home are worthy of a movie in that era. Much as I love The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, they never matched the visuals on this series. If it had not been so committed to such a narrow genre, this series might have been remembered as the equal of those classics.
