Jeck Henries is changing a tire on a dirt road in Loma. The most interesting thing we will get out of him is that someone took the trouble to make up the name Jeck for a character that will disappear in less than 2 minutes. His similarly over-monikered neighbor Wiley Whitlow suddenly appears. Wiley whispers something in Jeck’s ear and Jeck suddenly starts screaming. It is a good opening, but the effect is blunted because it’s just not a very good scream. Is it fear, is it pain, is it a scream of insanity?
The government sends Edward Sayers (William Peterson, CSI: Twilight Zone) to investigate. He is met by Amanda Strickland. She had called her senator, but apparently only ponied up a big enough campaign contribution for one investigator to be sent out despite 25 people being effected, including her father. She takes Sayers to see him at the local nut mental hut health facility. After some creepy chit-chat, old man Strickland begins screaming his head off.
Then they go to the Hotchkiss house. She had stopped by to see Mr. Strickland earlier that day. The elderly woman serves them fresh bread and tea. All is fine until she tries to stab them.
Sayers goes to work in the high school science lab. He has deter-mined that the craziness is not caused by anything breathed or consumed. Amanda has an idea that it is a contagious disease and describes the connections that caused it to spread. I hope it isn’t sexually transmitted because every resident in this town seems to be 80 years old.
Sayers calls his boss in Washington, DC to see if they can set up a quarantine to contain the lunatics so they don’t do any more damage. Sadly, his boss refuses to build a fence around DC, but promises to send troops to Loma.
Amanda has found hayseed-zero in Andrew Potts who is appropriately-monikered as she describes him a “local crackpot.” He has gone crazy, but his brother Jeffrey — a professor of Far Eastern studies — still lives in town. Sayers finds him at home. With a degree in Far Eastern studies in this farm community, where else would he be during the day? He says on his last trip to The Orient, he learned “the meaning of everything. Man’s purpose and destiny. Life after death. God. Devil. Existence. Everything.” He leans in to whisper it to Sayers, but he recoils. No matter, Jeffrey is going to broadcast the secret over the radio. He brains Sayers with a vase and heads for the radio station.
Sayers races back to Amanda’s house. As Jeffrey is about to give away the big secret, he rushes into her house yelling, “Turn off the radio!” even though he hypocritically left the radio in the Jeep on.
She whispers in his ear and he looks into the camera. Over an exterior shot of the house, we hear his scream.
The randomly triggered violence reminded me of The Crazies and The Happening. The mind-blowing revelation reminded me of Monty Python’s Killer Joke. The whisper reminded me of Scarlett Johannson. That’s OK, I like all of them. I don’t even remember The Happening being as bad as everyone claims.
This is just the kind of story I like, and kudos to TZ for choosing the dark side once in a while. However, a couple of things were problematic. The screams were just not well-done at all. A recurring problem is Charles Aidman’s narration. It is becoming just as much of a buzz-kill as the scores. TZ made a great choice having Sayers look directly at the camera after the whisper, however, the lackluster scream followed by Aidman’s raspy avuncular voice just drained the menace from the ending.
Still, there was a lot to like.
Post-Post:
- Amanda was played by Frances McDormand.
- Skipped Segment: Need to Know was less than 20 minutes and the balance of the episode was a very good segment, Red Snow. There was a 30 Days of Night vibe, but this 26 minute segment had more meat than that movie. The main similarity was vampires above the arctic rim and extended “nights”. However, Red Snow had the additional elements of a cold war gulag and the vampires’ adversarial / symbiotic relationship with werewolves. A great movie could be made from this premise.
They almost got me on this one. Each week host Truman Bradley performs a scientific experiment relevant to the story. Usually they are so dull and the music so overwrought that I power right through them. This time, however, he brings out a tuning fork which always intrigued me.
Dr. Otis’s’s’s’ daughter Linda says this is ridiculous. Nevertheless, Masters says he is going to live in the house with them until this security breach is resolved or until someone remembers the Third and Forth Amendments.
To demonstrate, Masters grabs an LP (Long Playing 33 1/3 vinyl disc containing recorded music or rap). He smashes it, holds up a shard and asks, “Would you say that was a recording of sound?” Otis says the grooves are still there, which is not true — most of them are on the ground. Masters says, “Nothing has actually changed except the method of reproducing that sound.” This proves nothing — the issue is whether it is possible for the the crystal to record, not if it is possible to play it back. Anyhoo . . .
Next they test the crystal that was found in the ant poison. Sure enough, it is a recording of every-thing said in the room that day. Masters reasons that the ant poison must replaced every day. That night, he catches the handyman switching the bottles. Despite dressing like The Scarecrow, he is not the brains of the operation.
College student Devon Taylor is listening to space. He thinks he can detect a pattern coming from 
Joyce and the other teenagers are taken to the hospital. All of them are getting the same metallic plating on their skin even though soap and water would take care of most of it. Devon looks in Joyce’s eye with one of those lighted doctor doohickeys and says, “Her iris is changing.” No, Mr. Know-It-All, her pupil is changing, not her iris. Seriously, does anyone in TV finish the sixth grade?
The CDC agrees and the government starts broadcasting the signal, finally using that goofy 
play a similar brainiac on 
Wise Man and Fool follow Rat to her, by definition, Rat-infested home. They peek in the window and see that within seconds she has already thinned the herd by overdosing on the coke.
Wise Man goes to see The Chemist (played perfectly by Joe Flaherty). Whether it was intentional or not, his ditsy blonde assistant Orchid gets a laugh from me by calling him Wiseman [2] as if it were his name. While Chemist and Wise Man are weighing the cocaine, Orchid pours some champagne — hey, there’s a brick of coke right there! [3] We are tipped off that Orchid has slipped poison into one of the glasses. Son-of-a-bitch if I wasn’t fooled again! She killed The Chemist and she and Wise Man end up in the sack.
A reel-to-reel tape tells us, “The following is a true and full account and hereby sworn by me, Paul Brett, Attorney at Law.” Dang, you had me right up til that last part. The tape continues on, leading into a flashback . . .
Once back from the honeymoon, she feels Mr. Hughes has become “distant, hard to reach”, perhaps fearing another room needs painting. He refuses to let her see her old friends.
One night after they are married, his wife is having a nightmare. She says, “Drink this, Mrs. Hughes. Have another dose. Mrs. Hughes, I know you took some earlier, but you have to have another dose. Drink it.”