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 If She Dies and Ye Gods. And yet . . .
In 1700, Farmer Hoggett is worried about his daughter Charity who is sick with fever. The doctor in this small Pilgrim community seems to double as the veterinarian. Hoggett says, “Master Towbridge is more experienced at delivering lambs and foals than treating human maladies.”
In her fever, Charity hears the roar of some great beast which turns out to be a car — even worse, it is a car on a TV. In the present, teenager Peter Wood [1] is also laid up with a fever, watching TV. He is getting chilled orange juice and Advil, not so much with the bark and leaches.
He too gets a glimpse across time as he sees a pilgrim woman in his bedroom. As the woman puts a damp cloth on Charity’s forehead, Peter feels the relief. As Charity brushes her hand across a burlap blanket, she says it feels like a soft quilt. There is a strange close up shot of Peter’s hand brushing over his soft quilt. It is just a couple of seconds and too close to see the context — but was he copping a feel?
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!
They are also able to see through each other’s eyes. Peter looks at an airplane flying above to prove he is in the future. She is still skeptical until Peter takes a drink of orange juice, now with 90% less scurvy. He begins chowing down on all kinds of junk food to show her you how modern Americans eat. Sadly, we do not get to see him vicariously enjoying Charity’s dinner of souse, scrapple and fetid water.
She asks him to look in a mirror so she can see what he looks like. He asks her to look look into the brook so he can see her reflection. It is love at second-sight. Charity tells her friend Ursula of the miraculous things she has seen through Peter’s eyes — horseless carriages, boxes with likenesses of people many leagues [2] distant, men walking on the moon, and cheese in aerosol cans.
He shows her a library, takes a trip on an airplane, gives her a tour of Washington DC, and tells her of the Revolution (the one in her future, not the inevitable one in his future). For some reason, Peter’s father gives him a glass of wine, so Charity gets her first taste of alcohol. Hoggett doesn’t cotton to her jocularity and thinks she is still not over her fever. Ursula attributes Charity’s recent shenanigans to her being a witch.
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.
She asks Peter to research whatever became of her. He finds nothing about Charity being on trial for witchcraft, but does dig up some dirt on Squire Hacker. She is able to leverage this into a not-guilty verdict. Charity ends their communication but leaves him a message which he finds 285 years later — their initials carved into a rock which miraculously is not underneath an 7-11.
For a not-your-father’s-Twilight Zone [3], this was a pretty great segment. I completely bought into the design which felt like 1700. The performances seemed perfectly suited to the era. James Cromwell (Hoggett — OK, Obediah) only had a few scenes, but was convincing. However, the episode was really carried by Kelly Noonan (Charity). She seemed perfectly of that era in her accent and movement. Robert Duncan McNeill (Peter) had a thankless job of having no one to play off of in almost every scene; also wearing giant 1980s glasses. He did it about as well as possible, though.
I give it 1600 out of 1700.
Post-Post:
- [1] The previous segment had a kid named Dickie and this one has a kid named Peter from the Wood family. What the hell?
- [2] I did not realize a league was a unit of distance other than under the sea. On land, it is the distance one can walk in an hour, which seems pretty subjective for a unit of measurement.
- [3] Although airing in 1985, maybe now it is your father’s Twilight Zone.
- Peter and Charity were 16 and 11 in the short story. Good move, upping her age.
- Cromwell and McNeill went on to be big shots in the Star Trek world. Sadly, the best of the lot, Kerry Noonan seems to have given up acting. Maybe some scuzzy producer wanted to search her for actressmarks.
- Classic TZ Legacy: Michael (not J.) Fox was in 3 episodes of the 1960s series.
- Available on YouTube.
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.
John Haney is sick in bed. His son John Jr. answers the door and greets his brother Jamie. There is also a Jonas and a Judge in the episode — this won’t get confusing. OK, I’m going with 
Sure enough, the old man croaks. When the family gets back from the funeral, Junior gives the old man’s will to their lawyer Jonas Atterbury (Karloff). As Junior said, he inherits everything. Jamie has an ace up his sleeve, though. And by ace I mean alternate will, and by sleeve I mean coat pocket. He hands it to Jonas who sees that it proclaims Jamie as the sole heir, and is dated later than the first will.
Back in court, Junior asks his mother if maybe there is another bible laying around the farm. Jamie has the same idea and finds another bible in the attic. Yet another will is inserted in the book at Genesis 27. Junior is again named the sole heir.