After two Twilight Zones that weren’t very Twilight Zoney, we have an Alfred Hitchcock Presents that isn’t very Alfred Hitchcock Presentable. It’s more like Trans-Atlantic Tunnel with Richard Dix or The Naked Jungle with Charlton Heston. Or maybe it’s nothing like them since I’ve seen neither. What it ain’t is AHP.
South of the Border, down Mexico way, Joe Philips is digging a tunnel for Rodriguez Construction. We open with an odd but nice first-person-minecar shot of the mine [1]. Philips is trying to shore up the ceiling, but dirt begins falling. His crew flees like tunnel-rats from a sinking ship. They have dug 82 feet in six days, but just lost 20 to the cave-in.
Rodriguez visits the camp and brings Bret Johnson to assist Philips. He is ready to bail out and let Johnson do the job. While Philips is packing, Johnson convinces him to stay. Rodriguez just took off in his plane, and there is no other way to the city.
They continue the job together and make good progress the first day. There is a fiesta that night with the camp’s only guitar and the camp’s only senorita.
That night, Philips hears about a manhunt in Mexico for the murder of an engineer in Colorado over a dispute of safety regulations. Philips searches Johnson’s bunk and finds a pistol. Johnson enters and has the gun in his hand.
Philips says he knew the murdered man but that the man cared more about making a buck than about the lives of his men. And that he deserved what he got, and it would suit him fine if they never caught the killer.
The men are stuck with each other for another five weeks, so they decide to work together on the tunnel. They get lucky and hit an deposit of rock. Apparently that is better news than it sounds in tunneling as it enables them to blast.
The next day a boulder falls on a worker. While Philips helps him, Johnson single-handedly shores another another boulder from falling. It seems the job is not impossible to complete on schedule. The men have a respect for each other, though, and decide to give it a try.
Four days later, they decide to blast through the last remaining rock. It is a success and they prepare to leave the camp the next day.
Philips pulls his gun on Johnson. Turns out Johnson is a cop. He made a deal with Rodriguez to get the tunnel finished before hauling Philips in. I think it was supposed to be a big reversal that Philips was the murderer and not Johnson. Unfortunately, the episode did not go far enough in making us believe Johnson was the murderer, so the ending was a failure.
Except for the way in which it was awesome. Joe Maross (Philips) and Wayne Morris (Johnson) were amazing in this episode. Both were strong, smart, industrious, confident men of the type you don’t see on TV anymore. They had a job to do and weren’t going to let little things like cave-ins or a murder charge stop them.
Even as each had reason to believe the other might kill him, they worked together to complete that tunnel. Like Colonel Nicholson working with the Japanese[2] or Johnny Utah working with the Ex-Presidents[3], it makes no sense. But there is such a drive for accomplishment in the men that they will do anything to build that bridge or rob that bank or dig that tunnel.
Maybe it is that same logic-free drive for accomplishment that drove otherwise sane people to remake Point Break. Or The In-Laws, which is kind of a non-sequitur here but still offends me.
At the end, there is a mutual respect. Philips says he was justified in the killing. Johnson says optimistically maybe they can get a jury to believe that too.
Post-Post:
- [1] Meaning the camera is affixed to the mine-car as it goes down the tracks.
- [2] Although less treasony.
- [3] Although less felony.
- AHP Deathwatch: No survivors.
- Title Analysis: No idea what they were going for.
I have said before that if you stick a couple of guys in space suits, and I’m on board for just about anything. 
After the shuttle is back on the ground and up on the rack, the technicians start tearing it apart. Camera #2 seems to have had a problem, going haywire just like 
Simmons demands to be let out. Director Heilman shows up and begins questioning him. Soon, Simmons disappears and it is Simmons’ wife in the isolation room. When Simmons reappears, he gets even more belligerent, destroying equipment in the room. When he passes out, Heilman goes in with a gas-mask. Turns out he was only playing possum. He grabs Heilman and turns blue again. This time both men disappear and an atomic bomb appears in the room. Its countdown clock is at 2 minutes.
Well, this was like finding out 
Comedian’s comedian [1] Robert Klein is trying to learn about his company’s 67 new products in one week. To be fair, one of the new medical products is a sphyg-momanometer. OK, that’s a mouthful, but are they saying that a medical equipment vendor did not already sell sphygmomanometers? That and malpractice insurance would seem to be the first two items on a doctor’s shopping list. OK, it really is too perfect a word not to be used in the script.
At the office, a few individual words are randomly replaced with other unrelated words. Experience becomes mayonnaise, anniversary becomes throw-rug, lunch becomes dinosaur. He goes home for dinosaur and his wife asks him to look in on their son whose cold is getting worse. She then actually says dinosaur and Klein accuses her of being in cahoots with people from the office. He presses her to define lunch. She is getting concerned, but tells him that lunch is a color — sort of light red.
At home, his wife is very upset but her husband can’t understand what she is saying, just like men everywhere.[3] Upstairs, he finds his son is very sick, so they rush him to the hospital. The emergency room has no idea what he is saying, but his wife is able to get help for the boy. Klein feels helpless as he awaits an update. He couldn’t help his son, now he can’t comfort his wife. The doctor comes back with good news — at least judging by his wife’s reaction.
So, there really was no irony, nothing learned, no twist, no comeuppance, no cruel fate. I really enjoyed the episode, but if they have dumped most of the original series’s tropes by the 2nd episode, it does not bode well for the future.
The Shallows almost immediately lost me when the main character apologized for being an American. It remained iffy with some out-of-place choppy editing (intermittent slo-mo) in an early surfing sequence — just jarringly awful. However, the film quickly recomposed itself to be visually stunning and suspenseful.
Veterinarian Wilbur Orwell is watching a news report about the parking garage murder that opened the show. He is oblivious to the goop squishing out of the donut [1] onto his white shirt. Should it concern me that there is a nice white bakery carton of pastries on the table? It is breakfast — did someone go all the way to the bakery and bring them home that morning? [2]
The trucker thinks it is a bear. But then 
That night, he checks his arm and finds that the bite has healed already. He then goes into convulsions and turns into a . . . ohhh, I guess it was a werewolf after all. The next morning, the TV news is covering another murder. Well, that seems to be a nightly occurrence, but this time Orwell’s bedroom window is open and he has tracked muddy prints back to his bead. And his wife says he was a “beast” last night.
After his cute assistant Mikayla is attacked, Orwell’s new mad olfactory skillz lead him to the real killer. It is a creative sideways turn, going the extra mile that most TV shows can’t be bothered with. Aided by an excellent set of performances, this turned out to be a great episode. The fact that it is rated 8th out of 13 in the IMDb ratings just further taints the credibility of that list.
