Newlywed Helen wakes up and reaches over for her new husband Phil. He is not in bed, which I guess accounts for them sharing a bed. On 1950’s TV, if he were still in bed, they would have had twin beds. That’s some catch, that Catch-22. She leaves her room, stares at the bedroom door of her mother-in-law who she has somehow never met.
Helen thinks back to five years ago when she had dinner with her mother-in-law — well, almost. As she is preparing, she gets a visit from her roommate Pat [1]. And, thank God too, because Helen had neglected to put her shoes on yet. This is treated as catastrophic, “To meet Mrs. Pryor without my shoes on? I would have just died.” Pat says she will slip out the back door.
Phil arrives without his mother. It just so happened that he got his orders to ship out to Korea that night, so the little hootenanny was cancelled. With Helen’s roommate gone, Phil’s mother absent, candles lit, his gal dolled up with shoes and everything, him shipping out to Korea . . . he gives her a kiss on the forehead and leaves.
Seconds after the door shuts — there is not even an edit — Pat returns and says, “Helen, I’m sorry.” There is just no way she could have known what just happened unless she was spying on them, hoping to witness some hot shipping-out-tomorrow sex.
Helen flashforwards, but not yet to present day. She recalls when Phil returned after the Korean War was cancelled [2]. They meet on a park bench and Studly asks if she is proud of him, “I feel like a kid with a good report card. I want my head patted.” He talks about his job and his mother. He still hasn’t gotten around to telling Mom that he and Helen are a couple, though. He has to run back to work, but promises to inform his mother in a month or two.
Flashing a little further forward, Helen decides to go see Phil’s mother on her own. As she approaches the house, she sees a woman rushing away. She calls out to her, but the woman shouts back, “There’s no one here! No one at all!”
Later, at a restaurant, Phil gives Helen a present from his mother — David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Psycho by Robert Bloch would have been a better choice, and was published the same year this episode aired. He tells Helen that the woman at the house couldn’t have been his mother because she is practically bed-ridden. He suggests that it must have been Mrs. Beasely, the cleaning woman — a yuge flaw in the screenplay. [3]
Helen tells Phil that she is dumping him. He asks her to marry him immediately, so all is peachy again. They get hitched that night and return to the house he shares with his mother.
Back in the present, Helen goes to Mrs. Pryor’s room. In the empty room, she finds an obituary for Mrs. Pryor which is ten years old. Phil appears in the doorway and Helen says, “I don’t understand. She’s been dead for seven years.” So I guess reports of her death were widely exaggerated for 3 years. Phil gets a shawl from the closet and says, “You never remember to keep warm, mother. You’ll get another chill if I don’t watch over you every minute.” Yuge flaw #2. [4]
Helen, horrified: “Oh, no no no.”
Post-Post:
- [1] Pat Hitchcock, making her 8th appearance on the show. In a departure, her average looks are not used against her. Despite being the boss’s daughter, she is usually cast as the schoolmarm, a maid, or as the office nottie for a cheap joke. I do find it amusing that a review at IMDb still refers to her as a maid even though she is clearly a roommate. But who says maids can’t be hot?
- [2] Which lasted 11 years as we public school graduates know.
- [3] Not so much a flaw as a missed opportunity. I would rather it had been Phil in his mother’s clothes being caught. I guess that would have been a little crazy for TV in 1959.
- [4] The direction here — by a good director — baffles me. Phil gets a shawl from the closet, then drapes it over . . . what? The camera never drops below his chest. Did it fall to the floor? Was there an empty chair that Mom used to sit in?
- Then Phil bizarrely bugs his eyes out as he looks where his imaginary mother is imaginarily sitting. Then he scans across, directly into the camera for just a second. Then his eyes meet Helen’s. He raises his eyebrows slightly as if to say, “Well, what do you think?” I am baffled. If he knows this is a sham, why the funny faces. Or if he truly believes his mother is sitting there, why the funny faces?
- Barbara Bel Geddes (Helen) is best remembered as Miss Ellie on Dallas.
- AHP Deathwatch: Pat Hitchcock still hanging in there.
- Hulu still sucks.
There are multiple reasons for me to not like this. 1) After getting off easy with a 10-minute segment yesterday, I’m left with a 37-minute chore. 2) It stars an uninteresting actor from a so-so Star Trek series . . . as a kid. 3) It is the kindler / gentler Twilight Zone as seen in 
The next day as Charity and Peter are each outdoors recuperating, they are able to communicate. They learn that they both live close to Bear Rock near Harmon Brook in Massachusetts. However, one lives there in a dark time when there is a dull uniformity of thought, great oppression, taxation without representation, and a ruling puritanical elite which gets the vapors if thou expresseth any perceived heresy; and Charity lives in 1700. Heyooooo!
This is scientifically confirmed when one of the neighbors has a calf born with “a pinched up face and a third eye.” Squire Hacker tells her he must search her whole teenage body for witchmarks, and “the search must be thorough for the devil’s ways are cunning.” Charity belts him and runs as fast as her little buckled shoes will carry her.
Normally I don’t write about the 10-minute segments as they are filler between two longer-form segments. In this case it is filler for only one longer-form segment, so I feel duty-bound to post (i.e. it is a chance to quickly burn off one day’s posting requirement).
I loves me a good twist, and I hates me some big government, but this is just crap. Nothing here makes any sense. It is a complete fabrication to set up the utterly predictable surprise ending.
His parents seem reasonably intelligent. Were they ever tested? [1]
Two little girls are trick-or-treating. At their last house — although that might not have been the original plan — they are taken inside where they see a coven of women chanting and writing in a book using their own blood as ink. The blonde says, “Tonight we settle the score . . . . he chose a life with her over life with me.” She puts a dot of blood on each little girl’s forehead, then hands them the book. The girls are then engulfed in, what appears to be, swirling black liquorice. [1] They scream in horror because what they really had a strange sudden craving for was curry. Because of the dot. See. Hmmmm. Moving on . . .
This seems to be an intervention for Brian who’s first book Blood Thirsty sold 5,000,000 copies in a year [3]. His agent and publisher want to know when the next book will be ready. They are interrupted by another knock at the door. It is the newly-dotted little girls who hand over the book from the coven and disappear.
To find out what will happen next, Lisa continues reading. The book predicted that “the editor” would be the first to die, although George was his publisher, not editor. Confusing matters, Brian says this killer darkness was a character in his first novel Blood Thirsty. It attacked a small town in Maine, kind of a more opaque 
Time unwinds so that we are back at the point where the girls knock on the door. Brian is cursed to relive this night for eternity. Is that a reasonable punishment for dumping that psycho witch? And why did Robbie choose a punishment doomed other innocent people, including the two little girls, to the same purgatory?
Bruce recognizes that this is too good to be true. After all, this is $2.2M in 2016 dollars and $5B in 2017 dollars. He is also concerned that Johnson seems to have a zuckerbergian knowledge of every detail of his life, and was even expecting his application for the job. Somehow, they even got a blood sample and determined he was perfect for this project. They even had him fired from his old job just so he would be available.
The agency wants Bruce to go to this planet and destroy it before they can destroy us. Can anyone see the problem here? Anyone? Hands? 
He realizes that he just drank the scotch which his duplicate poisoned. He freaks out and tears up the checks. That’s not too nice for his wife, but she wasn’t worthy anyway. In a nicely symbolic but meaningless gesture, he breaks a mirror. Now he will have 7 seconds of bad luck before croaking.