Tales of the Unexpected — Fat Chance (04/05/80)

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The episode opens oddly with several people leaving work.  Mavis leaves Burge Chemist, Dr. Applegate leaves his practice,  an unnamed woman leaves the Slimming Clinic, and Frances leaves Boyles & Sanders Solicitors.

Dr. Applegate goes to Burge Chemist.  John Burge has been skimming pills off other prescriptions to sell to Applegate.  This extra cash helps Burge finance his adulterous affair.  To be fair, he complains that his wife Mary has ballooned up to “11 Stone, 12 Pounds” (163 pounds).  So I guess that woman leaving the Slimming Clinic was not an employee.

Uh-oh, this just in from the CDC:

So this 1980 behemoth is still smaller than the average US woman today?  Yikes!  But who believes anything the CDC says anymore?

Burge meets up with his wife’s attractive best friend Frances.  She refers to Mary as a pig and Burge rebukes her.  He says, “Women are awful — men have some kind of loyalty” . . . before they start smooching in an alley.   Then Burge admits he does think of his wife as “a fat, fat, fat pig.”  They laugh when he describes her being weighed by hanging her from a crane like a sow.

While Mary is watching TV and eating bonbons at home, Frances suggests that Burge get a divorce.  They agree that Frances will later see if Mary had ever thought about it.  Mary says that her husband would not divorce her because she would take him for every penny pence.

The next night when Burge comes home, Mary is shaving her legs, propped up on the kitchen table, with his electric razor.  So weight isn’t the only problem.

This really is the simplest of stories.  It is loaded with details and characters that are unnecessary, yet everything works.  I could take a few paragraphs to go through the mechanics, or write one spoilerific sentence and be done for the month.  Hmmm, I know which I would choose.

Burge gives his wife a box of chocolates that he has poisoned, and she regifts them to Frances to eat on her plane trip to America.

I might sound dismissive, but this really is a great episode and a classic ending.  Yes, Burge has killed Frances but she might not even be dead yet; and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it because she is over the Atlantic.

Not only that, but Mary gave Frances the chocolates because she was committed to slimming down to save her marriage.  So he accidentally killed Frances and won’t even have the newly svelte Mary because the poison will be easily traceable to him.

But he will know nothing for sure until the plane lands in 6 hours . . . 5 with a tailwind.

Other Stuff:

After all the recent stories of Roald Dahl’s work being rewritten by censorious fascist do-gooders, here Dahl is cancelled completely.  In this case, he was replaced by an apparently woke writer who is best known for his novel about a transvestite.

OK, OK, the writer is the great Robert Bloch, and this was 43 years ago.  I had assumed that this series was based 100% on Dahl’s work as, up until now, it had been.  Maybe this is a good thing.  God knows Ray Bradbury Theatre could have used a little fresh DNA in the gene pool.

Science Fiction Theatre – Bolt of Lightning (02/01/57)

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Reverting back to SFT’s trope of never naming locations, Truman Bradley tells us “at a large eastern university, an explosion occurred recently in the laboratory of Dr. Edmond Blake.”  The army is impressed by this explosion that “generated millions of BTUs, enough to vaporize the entire building, including the steel girders.”  They have called in Dr. Sheldon Thorpe [1] to explain how steel melted, and the apparent controlled demolition of Dining Hall 7.

Hey, take off that hat!

As is frequently the case on SFT, the old/dead scientist has a hot daughter.  Sheldon visits Cynthia to discuss her father’s work.  As they talk, she casually feeds her father’s papers into the fireplace.  Hey wait, that last one said Epstein Flight Log!  Sheldon stops her, but she says there are some things people were not meant to know.

Cynthia admits she does not know what her father was working on, so even she does not know what people should not know.  Trivia:  She later becomes Director of COVID censorship at Twitter.  However, feeling overheated by the fire and seeing a chance to double his per diem, Sheldon recruits Cynthia to help him.

She first takes him to Madam DiCosa”s restaurant where Blake ate everyday.  Sheldon pronounces it Nicosa even though they are standing right in front of the freakin’ sign!  That’s OK, IMDb spells it DeCosa.    She says she saw a glowing ball land on Dr. Blake’s roof before it melted.  She believes it was punishment by the aliens for Dr. Blake making too many discoveries too quickly, but it could have been the union.

They next visit Blake’s chess partner Mr. Adams.   He says that Blake often discussed flying saucers.  Cynthia interrupts to say that her father might have been curious, but certainly did not believe in flying saucers.  Adam mansplains that Blake did take the flying saucers seriously, and was also interested in lightning.

They next go to the gym where Blake got a weekly rubdown for his arthritis.  The masseuse says Blake was not usually much of a talker, but he did say that flying saucers might be real.  I found this dialogue hilariously delivered:

Masseuse (who Sheldon has never met):  I was talking about my retiring to a chicken ranch.  You know, I’ve been studying up on the hatching of chickens.

Sheldon (in his stoic Gary Cooper voice): No, I didn’t know.

That reminds the masseuse that Blake did get excited one time.  Well, twice, but one time because their conversation gave him the idea for a new kind of chicken incubator using a magnetic field.

Sheldon continues his investigation at casa de Blake.  He finds some scribbling on a table and wants to take it to his lab.  Cynthia refuses.  She is worried all this talk of flying saucers and weekly male massages will tarnish his reputation.

Cynthia finally allows the table to be taken.  Sheldon examines it with “infra-red and x-ray film” even though the symbols are visible and a couple are just Lucky Charms.

After his analysis, he tells Cynthia not to worry about her father’s reputation.  “He never believed in flying saucers.  He undoubtedly questioned those crackpots [2] you saw him with to gather information.”  He continues, “Your father was trying to duplicate flying saucers under laboratory conditions.”  So, he wanted to duplicate something he believed did not exist?

Sheldon builds a device from Blake’s notes.  It causes a feed-back loop and explodes.  He is, however, able to see practical applications for a less explodey model.  Why, irrigation channels could be cut into the desert!  Canals could connect waterways to increase trade to poor landlocked countries!  But the army general really only gets hard when the beam blows up a 10 cent model jet airplane.

One more episode left.  At this rate, I will need a new series in about a year.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Portrayed by discount Gary Cooper, Bruce Bennett.
  • [2]  Who are these “crackpots”?  1)  An immigrant who opened her own restaurant, 2)  Blake’s well-dressed chess opponent, and 3)  a entrepreneur who is planning a career in chicken farming.
  • Proximity Alert:  Bruce Bennett’s 4th appearance this season.  Give someone else a chance!