Twilight Zone – The Crossing (10/08/88)

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Following yesterday’s Tales of Tomorrow is like getting the slot after Spiderman at the dance contest.  Making the comparison even worse for TZ, this is a really mediocre episode.

Boring Father Mark Cassidy is working obsessively to raise funds for a new children’s hospital.  His boring assistant brings him some boring tea, but the coffee and cigarettes probably have him wired enough already.  Coming out of the rectory (hee hee), he sees an old family truckster passing by.  It disappears around the bend on a dirt road.  He hears a crash and runs down the road.  At the bottom of a hill, he sees the car in flames.  When his assistant arrives, she thinks he’s gone around the bend because she sees nothing.

As Cassidy is updating the fund-raising graph, Monsignor Perot [1] drops by.  He says, “I remember when that children’s wing was just a dream.”  That’s nothing, I remember 2 minutes ago when it was a whole hospital.

These are literally the most boring characters I have seen this year.  Both are soft spoken old white men.  The Monsignor is a geezer who, at least, is puffing on a meerschaum to give him a little character. [2]  Cassidy is just a tall, blonde, angular non-entity.  Both speak somberly and slowly as if to add some gravitas to the scene.  The new announcer ain’t working for me either, but that can come later.

During a class about Father Damien and the lepers, he spots the family truckster through the window.  He runs outside, and after the car.  It again goes around the bend just out of budget range, and he hears the sound of a crash.  His mob of students chase him down like they just found out he believes in the 1st amendment.  He looks down the hill and sees the car on fire again — this time with a woman he recognizes inside.  Again the kids see nothing.

That night, staring at a fire — a real one, in a fireplace — Cassidy looks through some pictures.  He and the woman are in the same car, surrounded by kids.  It is never made clear what their relationship is.  At first, I though it was his family, but the kids are never mentioned.  Maybe they were camp counselors.  They are wearing camp tee-shirts and Cassidy has a whistle among his keepsakes; there is a lanyard, but that is inconclusive as there is no clipboard.

The next day, the Monsignor announces that after Cassidy’s years of hard work raising $2 million, the children’s wing can be built.  Not only that, it will be named after Father Mark.  He takes this news very somberly.  Later the Monsignor tells him to take some time off, but he is worried about the clothing drive, the pageant, the operating costs.  He is clearly driven, but it is the dullest drive I have ever seen.  Worse than Alligator Alley.

Cassidy spills his guts in the confessional.  He describes the actual accident from his youth when he looked exactly as he does now.  He was able to hear the girl call him for help as she burned alive.  He asks why he was thrown from the car and not her.  He asks if all his works have not atoned for his cowardice at not fighting the flames to rescue her.  He begs forgiveness at leaving her to die while he lawyered up with the family fixers, and wearing a fake neck-brace to her funeral in a laughably transparent ploy for sympathy.  No, wait, that was Ted Kennedy.

The confessional is a great made-for-TV location for exposition.  However, isn’t there supposed to be someone listening?  I’m not up on the rules, but isn’t that the point?  Isn’t the priest supposed to absolve you of your sins?  Cassidy spends a couple of minutes talking to the screen partition — there is no one on the other side.  I guess you could argue that he was talking to God, but that could be done anywhere.

He later sees the car outside again.  This time, he gets into the car beside the woman and they drive around the bend.  The screen goes black and we hear the same crash again.  If this episode were not so deadly dull and dreary, I would have thought they were going for a joke.  Actually, it is a pretty good joke, though unintentional.

However, the real joke is on the viewer as the episode continues at the funeral of Father Cassidy.  As his casket passes by, the woman who had appeared burning in the car places a rose on it.  She watches it be loaded into the hearse, then walks away.  That’s it.  Seriously, that’s it.

The script was nonsensical on a Hitchhikerian level.  As a full stand-alone 30 minute episode, there was no excuse for this.  Was the original crash his fault?  Who was the woman?  What was their relationship?  Why was he confessing to an empty chair?  How did he die? [3] How was the dead woman able to attend his funeral?  She left a rose — does she forgive him?  Shouldn’t she have faded away as she walked down the road?  Or maybe at the end, they could have both driven safely around the bend?  My only explanation is that the pace is so lethargic that scenes had to be cut for time.

The performances were so flat as to be tiresome.  This includes the new announcer.  I had hoped the person following the avuncular Charles Aidman would have a little more menace in his voice.  Unfortunately, it sounds like they just went for a younger Aidman.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Also boring.
  • [2] OK, it’s just a boring regular pipe.
  • [3] When he got into the ghost car and rode away, his assistant should have seen him hovering down the road in a sitting position.  To be fair, I’m willing to accept that anything in the car moved to a different dimension.
  • Title Analysis:  No idea what they were going for.  Yeah, Cassidy crossed over at the end, but I don’t think that’s it.  The car accident was not at a railroad crossing.

Tales of Tomorrow – The Window (11/07/52)

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  • Question:  How is this episode of Tales of Tomorrow like Mother!?
  • Answer:  I liked it, but will never watch it again and will never recommend it to anyone.

I applaud Tales of Tomorrow for some major fourth wall breakage.  It might be giving them too much credit to point out the irony of breaking the fourth wall with a window, but I was just so happy to genuinely enjoy an episode that I’m feeling generous.

Something seemed immediately amiss when the announcer said, “Starring William Coburn and Merle Albertson.”  IMDb also lists Rod Steiger and Frank Maxwell — two much bigger names at the time — for the episode.  Kudos to the producers for completely subverting the form.  The episode, unbeknownst to the audience, began before it began.

Otherwise, the episode begins pretty typically with a white man working at a desk in an office and an overwrought score.  He brings Martha in and tells her, “At this time tomorrow, the earth will be one flaming white inferno.”  So maybe the score was appropriately wrought.  I would like to think this was a meta-gag based on how often the series destroyed the world.

That’s not the shocker, though.  Our picture goes all staticky, then shows a window in an apartment building.  We overhear the director say, “What happened?  That’s not our show.  Where’s the picture coming from?”

Two men (Steiger and Maxwell) and a woman are sitting in a Kramdenesque apartment swilling beer.  Al is warning Hank not to get married because all dames are like his wife.  Dude, she’s sitting right there!  I can certainly understand why she’s drinking.  He is upset because he just got out of the hospital and she wasn’t there to pick him up.  I must agree, that is pretty lousy.

Our screen goes hinky again and resolves to a PLEASE STAND BY title card.  We hear a crew-member say, “We were cut off.  That picture in the window is going out in place of our show.”

The cameras then show what is happening behind the scenes in the TV studio.  The actual Tales of Tomorrow director tells the actual stage manager — among the many people credited as “himself” on IMDb — he needs to make an announcement to the audience.  Fearing the Announcers Local 306 more than the possible alien invasion, he stalls until he sees the program’s actual announcer.  All he gets out is the standard “Due to circumstances beyond our control” before the screen goes crazy again.

Dude, I was going to sit there!

The POV switch between the TV studio and the apartment happens several times, but it would be tedious to document each instance.  The fascinating thing is how much is going on in this hitherto dimwitted series.  The breaking of the fourth wall had to be almost unknown to a 1952 audience.  Sure, Orson Welles did something similar with War of the Worlds, but that was just on radio and I’ve always suspected the effect was vastly overblown.  Comedians like George Burns might address the camera, but TV was still basically vaudeville at that point.

This could easily have been a mere stunt but for the story-telling.  The brief scenes in the apartment are often individually innocuous, but build to an inevitable conclusion that the observers race to prevent.  In the studio scenes, there is believable chaos in trying to figure out how this is happening.  At the same time, they logically work on a way to locate the apartment and prevent the crime.  We see everyone getting involved: the actors, the sponsor, the network, the crew.

  • The engineer gives his scientific theory on the air.  When someone brings two chairs out for him and the announcer, the engineer puts his foot up on one.  The announcer looks at the chair like “what the hell, dude?”  Very minor, but it adds to a great sense of unscripted chaos.
  • The actors walk in front of the camera and are hustled away before they can say how much they don’t Like Ike (elected 3 days before this aired).
  • During one interval when the studio is being received, they do a live commercial.  Priorities, ya know.  Kudos to them for suddenly cutting it off a few seconds early to have the apartment take over the transmission again.

The ending is a little anti-climactic, but I’m not going to let that ruin a great experience.  In truth, there wasn’t anything Tomorrowy about the Tale.  It would have made a kick-ass Twilight Zone in a few years, though.  Maybe I was too harsh in the first two lines of this post.  I’m sure part of my appreciation of this episode is due to low expectations, but there is no denying this is something special for 1952 TV.

Great credit goes to writer Frank De Felitta, but greater credit goes to whoever approved this crazy script to air in 1952.   Easily the best of the series (sadly, I doubt I need to add “so far”).

Available on You Tube.

Other Stuff:

  • Both IMDb and the DVD case mention an alternate title of The Lost Planet.  I have no idea how that could possibly fit this episode.

Outer Limits – The Joining (04/17/98)

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The title card tells us we are on the USAS [1] outpost in the Aphrodite Highlands on Venus.  I think it is on Cytherea Lane, across from the Cypris Mall.  Jeez, Goddess of Love, get over yourself — you’re worse than Robert Byrd.

The structure has been compromised, and a team is checking it out.  They find Captain Miles Davidow still alive.  When no one is looking, a pot-sticker wriggles down his leg [2] and slinks away, but that real-fast slinking.  The search party takes him back to the ship, and seven months later, he is debriefed (hee-hee) on the crash of Highlander.

Mile was a no-air traffic controller bringing her in.  They replay a tape from Highlander’s black box.  The ship disintegrated 1,000 feet above the surface, and the debris badly damaged the outpost and its antenna.  Dr. Hughes was killed, but Miles evacuated to the Lab Module with Major Braithwaite.  They only had a 3-month supply of oxygen — if there were two people and they both breathe.  However, the party found Braithwaite with a gunshot wound in the melon.  Awkward.

Miles’ telling of Braithwaite’s death contains a brutally hackneyed trope.  They know there is not enough oxygen for two people.  Braithwaite pulls a gun on Miles and yells at him about the oxygen crisis.  He seems crazy and is very menacing pointing the shaking gun at Miles.  As Miles cowers, Braithwaite says, “Forgive me”.  Then he suddenly swings the gun back at his own head and fires.  Yeah, you get a few seconds of suspense out of it, but it bugs me.  Why point the gun at Miles?

Miles says he injected himself with Cryotol to slow his breathing.  Thus he could make the now-six month supply of fresh air last seven months; eight if he didn’t eat the freeze-dried burritos.  They accept his explanation and ask about Dr. Hughes’ encrypted files about the fossil microorganisms.  He says unfortunately the password died with her.

Later, Commander Kate Girard of the rescue party — his fiancee — comments how pale he looks.  Miles says, “I have the resistance and metabolism of a chemo patient.  I keep losing weight.”  Kate says “You must have been breathing like a yoga master to survive on air that thin.  I don’t know how you did it, Miles.”  It’s the Cryotol, baby — you were in the debriefing!

Dr. Perkins has a theory that putting him a contraption that simulates Venus might help, as sulfuric acid always does.  The device is pretty impressive though.  To be honest, this episode was a slog until now.  After Miles gets out of the machine, his arm begins pulsating.  There is something under the skin which it bursts out like an alien Alien.  It is just a glob of tissue though.  Dr. Perkins later says it appeared to be in the early stages of becoming a hand.  Good stuff.  Amazingly the wound heals almost immediately.

While locked up in quarantine, Miles asks Kate to marry him the next day.  During the ceremony, Miles has a flashback to the thing bursting out of his arm which can’t be a good sign.  I must say, though, the USAS dress uniform is pretty snappy with the white band collar shirt.  I could totally see that in the future.

During Miles’ next treatment, he gets a literal chest-burster as a huge mass of tissue bursts through his chest.  This glob is like an unformed rib-cage leading the doctors to theorize that it mimics the part of the body that expelled it.

A few days later, Dr. Perkins is called because Miles is in great pain.  When he arrives, Miles has already expelled another glob of tissue, this one almost the size and shape of a human.  OK, where was this one expelled from?  I was able to overlook the arm expulsion and the 20 pound chest expulsion, but this is the size of a human.  WTF is all this mass coming from?  Is Miles hollow inside now?

Miles admits he injected himself with DNA from a Venusian creature in order to extend his life support supplies.  He has another attack.  This time, through his gut, he gives birth to a full grown human that seems to be even bigger than he is.  Again, WTF is all this meat coming from?  It attacks Dr. Perkins and Kate, but she stabs it.    In seconds, Miles Prime is back on his feet and Miles Prime Rib is dead.

The USAS decides Miles must be killed.  Kate comes up with an alternate plan.  Miles is sent back to Venus where the outpost is now staffed by a multitude of Miles looking like the worst 1980s movie ever.

This story was a little tedious until we got a boost from the production.  I never got a decent shot of the device Miles was treated in.  The lights and spinning horseshoe arms on each end were just great.  The meat Miles ejected was nothing special, but the idea of it getting closer to human each time was interesting (physics be damned).  C. Thomas Howell, frankly, was not great as Miles.  I must say, though, the more he had to endure, the better he got.  I could feel the pain as he was birthing these things.

But mostly that band collar.  Must buy band collar shirt.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  I would like to know what USAS stands for.
  • [2] That is ridiculous.  Upon closer examination, it could be a pasta shell.

The Hitchhiker – Riding the Nightmare (10/05/90)

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Teleplay by the writer of the incoherent A Whole New You, and the even more incoherenter The Miracle of Alice Ames.  It’s going to be a long night.

We get a shot of a castle with arches.  Wait they don’t have roman columns on castles, do they?  Maybe a mausoleum?  We see a white horse running through the woods at night, but just barely.  Then a shot of some kind of optical effect, a light?  Another shot of the horse.  The light seems to be some sort of rotating cube.  I have replayed this 10 f***ing times and I still have no idea what it is.  It scares the horse, but just pisses me off. [1]

The phone wakes Tess up just as I’m dozing off.  She has broken a sweat sleeping at her desk.  She tells her secretary to show her visitors in.  Her publisher Jim and reporter Dorothy enter to discuss the Davidson article.  Dorothy wants to use photographs in the article, but Tess wants to use the Clemente List.  This second scene was the first sign of trouble except for the entire first scene.  WTF is a Clemente List?  How is it an alternative to photographs?  I played this scene over and over and could not understand what she was saying.  I got Clemente List from the closed caption, but I guess I need footnotes in addition to subtitles.

Jim wants to see Tess’s version, but it will take her a couple of hours to put together.  Dorothy says, “The deadline is 2:00.  I’d say any pictures are better than nothing.”  However, Tess quotes Jim who always says, “Better nothing than anything but the best.”  Tess promises to have the articles and illustrations on Jim’s desk by 2:00.

She scrambles to meet the deadline, but for some reason her sister Jude is there.  Despite the time crunch, there is plenty of time to talk about Jude’s problems with her husband Gordon.  Jude wonders where he is all those late nights, but Tess assures her Gordon would never cheat on her.

In the next shot, Tess is in bed with Gordon.

She gets out of bed when she hears her daughter Karen arrive home.  She has been made editor of the school paper, just like Mommy, except without the whoring.  Tess says they’ll talk about it later and returns to Gordon.  He says he has to go, and I guess Karen doesn’t wonder why her sweaty uncle is leaving her robed Mommy’s bedroom in the afternoon.

That night, Tess again dreams of the horse and the mausoleum.  This time, she gets on the horse and rides it toward the light.  The director seems to think it is important that we see a necklace with a T on it around her neck . . . but not important enough to give us a decent shot.  The horse jumps through the light which seems to be a portal, arriving on the lawn of a large house, but without Tess.  When the horse stops, the T necklace is around the horses neck.  Jude is standing in front of the horse and sees blood near the T necklace.

Tess again wakes up screaming.  Karen comes to the room after hearing Tess screaming which I guess is why she bangs Gordon while Karen is in school.  But wait, Jude says he has been going out at night.  Tess looks at the T necklace she wore to bed and sees there is blood on it.  WTF?  Is she the horse?  Then who was the horse she was riding?

The next day, Gordon meets Tess on the street in front of her office.  Gordon has bad news — his wife Jude is pregnant.  Tess thinks that is great and sees no reason for their arrangement to change (i.e. she can go on humping her pregnant sister’s husband — who are these people?).  Gordon, however, wants to be faithful to Jude now.  And by now, I mean right now — he still proposes they go away together in a couple of weeks.

That night, Tess dreams of the horse again.  Picking up from the previous cliff-hanger, Jude is still fingering the bloody T around the horse’s neck.  OK, now Jude is riding the horse through the woods.  She gets clotheslined by a low branch and is knocked off the horse.  Somehow this causes real Jude, in the hospital, to sit bolt upright as we all do after a nightmare.  Wait, in the hospital?  Is this 9 months later?

Jude gives us a little exposition that “I lost my baby, didn’t I?”  She blames Tess.  Gordon asks if she spoke to Tess, which makes no sense.  Jude says, “I don’t have to.  I saw.  I know.”  Risking his nomination for husband-of-the-year, Gordon decides that this is the best time to tell his wife — in the hospital with a miscarriage — that he was banging her sister.  Jude quite appropriately tells him to beat it.

He goes back to Tess’s place.  He tells her “she acted like she knew.”  He says he is sorry over and over.

We cut to a nice sunny day.  Gordon is in Tess’s kitchen wearing a nice dress shirt and tie, and calls Karen to get the lunch he packed for her to take to school.  Tess comes in and they are all joshing like Ozzie and Harriett.  After Karen leaves, Tess says “I think we’ve done a pretty good job as parents.”  So I guess Tess’s fling with Gordon has been going on for 15 years.  And he might be the biological father, but exactly what parenting did he contribute as Uncle Gordon?

Tess suggests they deserve a reward for being such good parents.  She wants to go away to a cabin in the woods for the weekend.  “Without Karen?” Gordon asks.  So, is Jude dead?  What happened to Jude?  And she is thinking Karen should know of their weekend getaway?  She knows Mommy is banging Uncle Gordon?

Tess, for some reason, meets Gordon out on the same street she met him when they were sneaking around behind the aching back of his pregnant wife.  She sees that he has brought Karen.  He says he didn’t have the heart to leave her by herself.

At the cabin, there is an argument about bedtime.  Gordon takes Karen’s side and Karen calls Tess a witch before running to her room.  In bed, Gordon and Tess are sleeping back to back.  Tess dreams about that goddam horse again.  Now Tess is the rider again.  She is wearing the T necklace, and this time the horse seems to have not accessorized.  The horse jumps through the light again and Tess falls to the ground.  We now see the horse is wearing a necklace with a K on it.

We cut to another nice sunny day.  Gordon and Karen are at Tess’s funeral.  Karen asks if he is going to leave.  He says, “I’ll take good care of you, I promise.”  And continues, “Do you promise to take good care of me?”  She smiles and we see she is wearing a necklace with a K on it.

Lauren Hutton (Tess) is literally the only person to give a reasonable performance.  The men are especially egregious.  Jim doesn’t have much to do but plays it so pointlessly humorless and aloof that it is laughably distracting.  Gordon has long moments of absolute blankness.  At times, he is still and emotionless, not giving a hint of what he is thinking or of his motivation (see the pictures above).  Tess’s sister is similarly a tree stump with awful 1980s hair.  Karen is very cute; almost too cute.  She also has a strange acting style where fear is pretty close to laughter.

Once again, this series has put me in a position where I feel I must be missing something obvious.  These aren’t stupid people.  Nothing as incoherent as this seems could have made it through the production process.  Just about nothing about it makes sense to me.

What is the horse?  Did Jude die?  How did Gordon become man of the house?  Seriously, that kitchen scene is such a non-sequitur and so tonally different from the previous scene that it suggests a time leap or even a different reality.  And let’s consider Karen.

At times the 14 year old actress shows a strange maturity, and at other times is just a kid.  Gordon seems to have a creepy relationship with her.  He brings her along on a romantic weekend with Tess, takes her side in childish arguments.  Is he a pedophile?  She seems to be cool with that, egging him on at the end.  And would the state really allow the single non-biological uncle with tinted sunglasses to adopt this Lolita?  I guess he could show a relationship by showing he was banging her dead mother’s dead sister, but would that help his case?  Something is going on there that they were either too dense to see, or too scared to commit to.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] After a couple more tries, I realized it was rectangular light.  A tree bisected it so it appeared to be a dash and a dot, then gave the illusion of rotating.  Filmed competently, it could have been pretty cool.
  • I read the original short story.  Not really my thing, but it didn’t shed much light on the episode.  There was no Karen, and Jude was OK with her sister humping Gordon.
  • Mostly it made me wonder how Google Books can just put it online for free.  Sure there were a few pages missing, but is anyone thinking, “I liked those seventeen pages, I think I’ll buy the book to see the other two”?  Readers of this blog are paying customers, although the currency is mostly disappointment and wasted time.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Man from the South (01/03/60)

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The first AHP of the 1960s!

However progressive this sounds, the first shot is decidedly retro.  We see the old Las Vegas strip — The Golden Nugget, the giant mechanical cowboy.  It is all very gritty, with steel and bolts compared to the smooth, mirrored high-rises built today.

Neile Adams (no character name, so just call her Neile) has just bought a Brandy for $.45.  She is sitting at the bar dangling a shoe in the way only a pretty girl can without looking like trash.  When her shoe drops to the floor, Steve McQueen slips it back on her foot in the only way a guy can without getting kicked in the f***ing head — by being Steve McQueen.

After her brandy, they get a table for a more nutritious breakfast of coffee and cigarettes.  As cool Steve McQueen lights the exotically beautiful Neile’s cigarette, then moves to light his own, it is comical when Peter Lorre leans into the shot for a light.  Not only is he crassly intruding on their flirtations, compared to these two uber-specimens, he looks positively otherworldly.

Lorre takes a couple of puffs, then purposely breaks his cigarette.  He bums a new smoke from Neile, then compliments McQueen’s lighter as he lights it for him.  McQueen says, “I don’t wear it as a badge.  It’s a good lighter and it works.”  Then he makes a click noise.  I think he made that same click in The Great Escape.  Did I discover the secret of his cool?  Was it the click?  I’ll have to rewatch Papillon:  “We’re something, aren’t we? The only animals that shove things up their ass for survival . . . click.”  No, not very cool.

Lorre says he is a very rich man, and a sporting man.  He wonders if McQueen would like to make a wager on the reliability of the lighter.  If McQueen can make his lighter fire 10 times in a row, Lorre will give him a convertible.  If the lighter fails even once, McQueen will get a finger chopped off.  But just the little one.  And on off the left hand.

McQueen eventually accepts the bet.  After checking out the convertible, they go to Lorre’s room #12 — so the rich sporting man has a first floor room?  We don’t get to see the car inspection.  I’m sure it was the standard kicking of tires, making the roof go up and down, making sure there is 750 pounds of chrome, and checking the registration for Lorre’s name.

When they enter the room, Lorre removes some women’s lingerie that is lying around.  This is never explained, but suggests a scene more blood-curdling than anything that will follow here.

Two set pieces follow.  First is the preparation for the game.  Second is the contest itself.  The contest is what everyone remembers from this episode, but credit is also due to the prep-work.  Realistically showing something being built or prepared is always fascinating.  Lorre has a bellhop get some supplies, and he constructs a device to secure McQueen’s hand.  It gets the suspense ramping up early as you see that Lorre is serious — thought has actually gone into this.  It also increases the stakes.  If McQueen loses, he isn’t going to just be able run out.

There is no way to do justice to the contest.  I can’t believe Hitchcock didn’t grab this script for himself.  It is just a masterclass in suspense.

SPOILERS:

After 7 successful flicks of the non-Bic, a woman bursts into the room.  She takes the butcher knife away from Lorre and chews him out.  Lorre is a fraud.  He doesn’t even own the convertible.  Over the years, he lost 11 convertibles and picked up 47 fingers from other rubes.  She says over the years, she was able to win all his possessions from him, so he has nothing to bet with.  As proof, she reveals her left hand which now has only a thumb and little finger left.  Although how she drives without a middle finger is not explained.

Three talented, charismatic performers and a great script with a classic suspense scene come together to make this the best episode of a very good series.

Other Stuff:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  Steve McQueen died at 50 years old, but Neile Adams is still with us.  Director Norman Lloyd . . . I’m double-checking at 11:18 PM — yes still around at 103.
  • How did Norman LLoyd not have a massive career directing theatrical movies?
  • This episode was remade in 1985 for an AHP reboot.  John Huston was pretty good in the Peter Lorre role.  Steven Bauer and Melanie Griffith just couldn’t compete with Steve McQueen and Niele Adams, though.  But, really, who could?
  • No subtly was allowed on TV by the 1980s, so the contest goes all the way to 10.  Huston brings the butcher knife down but the ending is so muddled that it is not clear if he missed on purpose or was startled.  It is really a decent remake, though.
  • Adams and McQueen were married when this was filmed.  According to IMDb, she is 26% Chinese, Japanese & Mongolian, 7% Polynesian, and 67% Spanish; she plays a woman pretending to be Russian, then admits she is from Iowa.  Only in America.
  • For a more complete and coherent look at the episode and production, check out bare*bones e-zine.