Outer Limits – The Other Side (02/19/99)

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Adam is having flashbacks of a surviving a horrific car crash.  Suddenly, he sits upright in a hospital bed.  He pulls out his tubes and walks into the hallway.  The hellish lighting and rippling walls suggest he is still dreaming although the absence of topless nurses with white stilettos suggests otherwise.

He walks into a hallway where the floor is rather wetter than one would like to encounter in a hospital.  Then it gives way completely and he sinks as if in quicksand.  Suddenly the scene shifts to an operating room where two doctors are trying to revive him from a coma.  He is showing spikes in brain activity, like you might see from a dude in quicksand or a topless hospital, but is otherwise unresponsive.

But enough science fiction.  Let’s get to the melodrama.  Dr. Carter tells Dr. Neal Eberhardt that this research is going nowhere and he is going to take a teaching gig.  Turns out that Eberhardt’s benefactor at the hospital, Marty Kilgore, confesses that he suggested that that move to Carter, but is recruiting a new assistant for Eberhardt.  Coincidentally after their racquetball game, Everhardt sees his old girlfriend Janice in the park and hires her as his new assistant.  Say, that guy Kilgore really is a benefactor.

They waste no time and are in another patient’s room with her parents.  Eberhardt says, “We want to hook your daughter up.”  The girl’s mother is aghast and reminds him the girl is in a coma.   No, he says they want to hook Lisa up to his invention, the Neural Inter-Cortex Stimulation Array (NISA) to try to rewire the brain damage caused by an aneurysm.  He is honest in saying that there will probably be no improvement.  Kilgore jumps in and assures them her parents that the research will help others.

Eberhardt tells them when he was 8, his mother was in a coma like this.  Medical science gave up on her, but Eberhardt read her the funny papers, “strips like Dagwood and Blondie”.  When she had no reaction, he knew she could hear him.  It was then that he decided to devote his life to the advancement of coma treatment rather than, sadly, the advancement of cartooning.

Lisa’s parents are convinced.  Eberhardt and Janice hook her up to the NISA.  Then they hook Adam up again, and their brainwaves synch up.  They meet each other on this other plane.  He is out of the quicksand, but is still covered by it.  Soon, however, they discover a nice house and have a picnic.  They seem to be having such fun in there, that Eberhardt drugs himself into a coma and tries to join them.  He does go briefly to the titular Other Side, where he sees them smooching.  He is yanked back to This Side when Janice returns to the lab to ruin his fun.  No wonder he dumped her.

Kilgore angily demands that Eberhardt not use himself as a subject again, but easily rounds up more brain-dead saps from ____________________ campaign headquarters. [1]  Eberhardt’s plan is to channel other comatose patients to the Other Side.  The first result is horrific as another dude enters the Other Place with Adam and Lisa . . . well, horrific for Adam; the last thing the only guy on earth wants is another guy. [2]  The new guy is in a wheelchair, but finds here he can walk again.  Then another guy named Roger shows up.  WTF?

Eberhardt decides that since the people still have functioning brains and personalities, it might be possible for him to go the Other Place and bring them back.  Janice dopes him up and he is transported to the Other Place.  He tests his theory by dragging Roger through the portal.  Sure enough Roger wakes up.  Then has a heart attack and croaks.

Things go bad for Eberhardt.  Kilgore fires him, Janice breaks up with him, and he forgets to cancel his free XM Radio before the trial period ends.  When he gets in his car, I was sure he was going to be in a wreck and end up in the Other Place anyway (which would have been cheesy).  But no, he snuck back into the lab and doped himself up again.

The ending is not totally unexpected, but is a little unexpected.  Maybe just the right amount of unexpected.  Sick as I am of the happy endings on The Twilight Zone, a little sunshine here was welcome.  Part of the credit must go to Ralph Macchio as Neal Eberhardt.  Hey Hollywood, pull your head out of your ass for a change and give this guy more work!

A fine episode.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Fill in as desired. Really, any answer will be correct.
  • Especially AOC.
  • [2] Your mileage may vary.
  • Around the 37:30 mark, Eberhardt wears a jacket that is way too big for him.  This seems to happen a lot in this series.

Science Fiction Theatre – Sound of Murder (01/07/56)

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“This is where our story begins, Washington DC, present day capital of the free world.  Here in the city that never sleeps, scientific decisions are being formulated that will affect not only our lives but our children and their children to come.”

Oh for the love of God, I have things to do today.  Can’t I get through five seconds of this show without pausing it?

  1. I’ll be charitable and assume that “present-day” crack was to establish the temporal setting of the episode (this is Sci-Fi, after all), and not giddy gleeful anticipation that the USA will not be #1 forever (this is Hollywood, after all).
  2. When was DC ever “the city that never sleeps”?  Sorry SFT, that’s New York City.
  3. “not only our lives but our children and their children to come“: “lives” is the subject, so “children” should have been possessive.  Or better, say “the lives of our children . . .” [1]

Dr. Joel Kerwin and Mrs. Dr. Joel Kerwin are getting into formal wear to attend a reception with the vice-president.  SFT, much like President Eisenhower, does not mention Nixon’s name.   Kerwin’s boss, Dr. Matthews, calls and asks Kerwin to come to Room 246 to discuss some problems with his new scientific formula.  He suggests their wives should go on ahead.

Dr. Matthews smokin’ hot wife Wilma stops by to pick up Mary.  She tells Wilma that her husband just called and said they should go ahead.  Mary asks, “Didn’t he tell you?”  Wilma says, “No, I haven’t seen him all day.  He’s all wrapped up in a new theory.”  So why did Wilma come to the Kerwins’ room alone?  And if Matthews is staying in Room 246, how did Wilma not see her husband?  Did she get dressed in the hall?

At 12:30, Mary Kerwin returns to their room alone after the reception.  The narrator says, “Mrs. Kerwin was no more than normally annoyed by the fact that her husband did not show up at all.”  Dr. Kerwin is also not in the room.  No wonder he’s avoiding her; the narrator seems to say she has a normal baseline of perpetual annoyance.  I feel your pain, doc.  She assumes the two scientists just lost track of time.

After 3 am, Mary begins to get worried.  She calls Room 246 but there is no answer.  Then she has the operator ring “Tom Matthews’ room.”  OK, so I guess 246 is just a workroom.  Wilma suggests having the house dick look for them.  Here’s an idea, you’re in 312; walk your ass down one floor and knock on the door.

A little later, Dr. Matthews finally comes home — hey, they are in 314, right next door to the Kerwins.  Seconds after he arrives, Agent Randall knocks on his door.  Dr. Kerwin was found murdered in Room 246.  Matthews says the last time he saw Kerwin was at lunch.  He claims he did not make the call that Mary received.

Well, that’s about the first 7 minutes.  The remainder is trying to figure out how various voices were electronically duplicated in phone calls.  Unfortunately, the murder mystery is hardly mind-blowing, and the tech is as about as futuristic as a Las Vegas lounge act.

Footnotes:

  • [1] In the light of day, this seems OK and less egregious than my use of the word egregious.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Party Line (05/29/60)

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Party Line:  A party line (multiparty line, shared service line, party wire) is a local loop telephone circuit that is shared by multiple telephone service subscribers.

Helen Parch is working on her preserves, eating what she can and canning what she can’t when the party line rings 3 times.  She surreptitiously picks up the receiver in the way the TV people always seem to think does not make a click on the other end.  Helen loves to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.

She overhears a scintillating conversation between Betty and Emma about the market’s egregious lack of nectarines, Bingo games, and the awful hat worn by that wet blanket Helen.  Hey, that’s her!  Betty says the older Helen gets, the worse she gets.  They describe Helen as being boring, telling the same stories over and over.  Helen is being set up as the bad gal here, but honestly was there ever a time when all three of these women would not have been considered dullards?

OK, maybe the Far Side style glasses were stylish at the time.  And I’m sure women then were often trapped in lives that were not so exciting.  But these ladies make The View look like the Algonquin Roundtable.  The scary part is that these old bitties average under 50 years old which is seeming younger and younger to me.  And where are the men?  Helen is described as a spinster, [1] but I assume the other two buried their husbands.

Detective Atkins drops by to ask if Helen remembers a man named Heywood Miller.  Curiously she does not ask how he ended up with two such lumbercentric names — no wonder she’s a spinster.  Why yes, she does recall him as “That awful man . . . a fool, a gambler, and heaven knows what else.”  She thinks back 8 or 9 years to just after he and Mrs. Miller moved to the community . . . . . .

Helen and Gertrude, who Helen apparently talked to death in the intervening years, are yakking on the party line.  And Helen is using the exact same phone in 1951.  Yeah, they were attached to the wall, but you didn’t have to buy a new one every three years and they would survive a nuclear blast.  When the topic turns to how many eggs to use in a cake, a man interrupts, “For Pete’s sake, are you two still on the phone?”  He chews them out for monopolizing the line for hours while he has an important business call to make.

Helen tells him patience is a virtue.  She gets pouty and grudgingly tells Gertrude that she will call her back later.  She hangs up the phone, but just has to pick it up again to snoop on Miller’s call.  She overhears him placing bets with his bookie.

In the grocery store the next day, Helen overhears the clerk address Mr. Miller.  She confronts him about interrupting her conversation yesterday.  She smirks and tells him she hopes his horses won.  He tells her to mind her own business.

Later, while telling the famous story of her back-to-back Bingo wins that would be in her repertoire’s rotation for the next 9 years, Miller interrupts them again.  This time he says he needs to call a doctor for his wife.  Helen tells Gertrude to stay on the line, that they are wise to his tricks.  Naturally, his wife dies.

Detective Atkins says Miller moved back to the city.  He returned to a life of crime and ended up in jail.  And he has just escaped.  He says Miller “might be heading this way.  To kill you, Mrs. Parch.”  That finally gets the old shrew’s attention.

The story has set us up to root for the killer.  Psycho, which would be released the same year, manipulated us to empathize with killer Norman Bates.  This episode takes the opposite approach, and conditions us to dislike the victim.  Helen is just a loathsome, self-absorbed nothing who caused a woman’s death.  It is understandable that she does not rate much sympathy.

But we are expected to care enough about her for the lengthy scene of her securing her home to be suspenseful.  Any other show, I would think it was just sloppy to have her be so unsympathetic, but they count on our concern to create suspense.

Either by design or by their usual professionalism, they pull it off.  We might be worried that Miller will get in, but I think we are also a little bit happy that he does.

Two motifs help contribute to the excellence of the episode.  First, the images of the ladies on the phone are fantastic.  As Helen eavesdrops or Miller interrupts, they are effectively pasted between the callers.  Second, the scenes of Helen securing the house are more suspenseful than they have a right to be.  This is because — and this is news to just about anyone in Hollywood — it is engrossing to watch someone do something competently on TV.  Maybe because we encounter it so infrequently in real life.  Whether it is Hannibel Lector, Walter White, or a chef chopping onions, we love to see people who are proficient at their task.

Maybe that’s makes AHP so consistently great.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I always thought this meant a woman who had never married.  Apparently it just means currently unmarried and of a certain age.  Helen actually refers to her husband Fred who is either dead or hiding.
  • AHP Deathwatch: Not surprisingly, no survivors.  BTW, Gertrude was born in 1884.
  • As usual, bare*bones e-zine got there first and has a lot of great info on the production and source material.

Twilight Zone – A Game of Pool (02/04/89)

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OK, Esai Morales playing Jessie is no Jack Klugman.

And Maury Chaykin playing Fats is no Jonathan Winters.

And writer George Clayton Johnson is no George Clayton Johnson.

Oh, wait, actually he is!  Johnson’s original screenplay was used for this remake.  That is very cool.  But the fact that they used Johnson’s original discarded ending just makes it even more special.  A wonderful mixture of the old with the new with the old, showing what could have been 25 years earlier.

I wasn’t even that thrilled with the original.  Maybe that’s why I am so content with the remake.  Reviews online are pretty mixed, so I guess my lowered expectations fit the bill.

It’s hardly worth writing up.  Two guys play pool and talk.  But it kept me engrossed the whole time.  A worthy remake.

Other Stuff:

  • Classic TZ connection:  Duh.

Tales from the Crypt – Revenge is the Nuts (11/16/94)

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I kept waiting for it to begin; then I kept waiting for it to end.

Samuel is tapping his cane along a hallway in a group home for the blind to find the bathroom, or so the other residents hope.  It sounds a little funny to him, so he feels around and realizes the doorway has been bricked over.  “He’s bricked up the goddamn bathroom again!  Son of a bitch!”  Think about that.  OK, I guess manager Arnie Grunwald is a cheap nogoodnik, but what is the end-game here?

  • Was this somehow saving money?
  • Things are going to get nasty without a bathroom.
  • How was this done without the blind residents knowing?  What happened to that super-hearing?
  • And we are told he did this again.  So did he brick it over before, unbrick it, and just rebrick it?

For more laughs, Grunwald rolls a bucket of marbles down the hallway.  The elderly blind man falls and Grunwald howls with laughter.  That’s just not funny . . . although it might have been if the freakin’ director had only pointed the camera that way.  At least Benny the janitor is sympathetic; to Grunwald’s disgust.

The home receives a new resident, a young blonde woman named Sheila.  Grunwald says the county has placed her there for six months.  He tells her if she knows what’s good for her, she will do things his way.  Benny takes her to the group bedroom which is dark and filthy.

She feels around for a window to sneak out of, but they are boarded up.  Samuel says Mr. Grunwald figures blind people don’t need light.  Their only DVD is, cruelly, The Quiet Place.  Then a train goes by which creates a deafening noise, shakes the room, and for some reason causes the lights to briefly flicker on and off.

Grunwald offers Sheila a way out if she will provide him a girlfriend experience.  She spits in his face, which is ala carte unless you purchase the premium package.  He has Benny escort Sheila back to the sleeping quarters.  She reveals to Samuel and a woman named Armelia that she lifted a pocket-knife off of Benny.  They escape their quarters along with a man who was attacked by Grunwald’s dog.

Another distraction: Why are they wearing sunglasses?  I know blind people wear dark glasses, but the usual reasons don’t apply here.  They are trapped inside, so inadvertently staring into the sun isn’t an issue. [1]  And there is no one else around but blind people, who is going to see them?  Grunwald and Benny, but they aren’t too concerned about looking good for those two idiots.  Although Sheila does keep wearing that snappy beret.

Of course, the escape attempt does not work, but the episode is too blah to continue.  It just doesn’t work that 90% of the episode is so dark.  I get the reason, but the way it was shot was not handled well.  Properly done, it would have been effectively contrasted with Grunwald’s lighted areas, and given some greater meaning.  Here, there was nothing beyond him having lights and them not.

The ending should have been fantastic with angry blind people getting revenge, a starving attack dog, walls lined with razor blades, and a girl in a beret.  Sadly, the look and the score just didn’t support the concept.

The same story was done much better in the 1972 Tales from the Crypt movie.  I actually gasped at the movie’s ending with the dog and the razor blades.  Watching that scene in both productions is a great illustration of what a little artistry can do.

Other Stuff:

  • Title Analysis:  Hunh?  Revenge is the Nuts?  Was “the nuts” a thing in the 90’s like “the shit”?  It might have been worth this tedious episode if the killer dog had gone right for his nuts at the end.  If he had done it at the beginning, it would have been even better.
  • [1] Is that even an actual reason for wearing the glasses?  They’re blind, not stupid.