“On the afternoon of April12^th, Dr. George Stoneham received an emergency call to a large downtown nightclub [The Kitten Club].  Chet Arnold, manager of the club and a personal friend of Dr. Stoneham, summoned the physician when Nina LaSalle, a dancer, collapsed screaming in the middle of a rehearsal.  Although Dr. Stoneham didn’t know it yet, this was to be one of his most unusual cases.”

Oh yeah, the case when he left the suffering tubercular patients in his office in the middle of the day to make the country’s last recorded house-call at a nudie bar?  Yeah, that one might stick in the memory.

With no evidence at all, Stoneham says his diagnosis is “severe pressure on the optic nerve.”  Once the pressure is relieved, the hallucinations should go away.   Nina says that was no hallucination, she really saw an atomic explosion. ^[1]  When Mrs. Dr. Stoneham learns her husband abandoned his practice to ogle young women, he might feel a pressure on his optic nerve.

That night, Stoneham has dinner with his friend, scientist Dr. Albert Neville.  During desert with Neville’s mother, he mentions that Nina had a hallucination of a nuclear explosion.  While Ma Neville is doing the dishes, her son reveals that at exactly the same time Nina had her hallucination, a nuclear bomb was exploded by accident in the Pacific.  Since there was a democrat in office, the press did not deem it worth reporting. ^[2] 

Neville suggests Nina might be clairvoyant.  He helpfully defines it as “the faculty of perceiving a pictorial representation of a current and distant scene.”   Neville’s hobby is the paranormal, so he wants to further examine the case; which means — well, well, well — a trip to see the girls at the club.

Nina says she had a vision once before when her boyfriend Larry died.  He was in uniform, clutching his gut.  An army pal of his confirmed his exact time of death as the same time she had her vision, plus there was a time-stamped receipt from the Taco Bell near the base in his pocket.  Then SFT surprised me by earning the only laugh in its entire run:

• Neville: Have you ever heard of clairvoyance?
• Nina:  Who?

Nina agrees to help the boys with an experiment about clairvoyance.  Just as they are leaving, though, she collapses.  They take her to the dressing room and connect her to an EEG.  Neville tells her “radiant energy” is the reason for her clairvoyance.  The electrical wave-lengths of her brain are too close together.  Nina has another clairvoyant episode in the lab.

Blah, blah, blah.  The episode gets bogged down trying to conjure a scientific basis for Nina’s clairvoyance.  That’s really too bad because they had a genuine talent in Joyce Jameson as Nina.  No nudie bar employee since Jack Ruby has so quickly emerged from the pack to blow away others on screen.

As often happens on SFT, the discoverer or possessor of the skillz does not seem to reap the benefit of their talent.  For taking time off to cultivate her clairvoyance, the bar manager allows her to change her stage name from Nina (pronounced Nine-uh) LaSalle to . . . Claire Voyance!

No, that would be too much to expect from SFT.  He allows her to change her name to the god-awful Saturday Knight.  Seriously.

The two doctors received $500 and $750 for the episode.  Joyce Jameson was paid only $300.  Even sadder, she would be dead by 59.  She was a ray of sunshine here, though.  Enough to recommend the episode?  Oh, hell no!

Other Stuff:

• [1]  Note the complex, clockwork, Nolandesque exposition: First, an evidence-free diagnosis, then a treatment, followed by the symptom.
• [2]  Oh, alright, Eisenhower was President when this aired.
• And it wasn’t a nudie bar.  But this COVID thing is going on for so long . . .

This week, Truman Bradley is excited to show us a keyboard on which the keys play sounds from the English language.  Maybe I’m not appreciating this leap in technology, but it is pretty unimpressive.  He says the goal is to create “a machine that translates a given text from one language to another.”  So far they have invented the See n’ Say. ^[1] Baby steps, I guess.

Dr. Edgar Barnes, head of Operation Polyglot, has come in early to see if anyone was tampering with the machines.  He finds that someone has soldered some wires to a terminal.  Worse, he realizes it will take a year of programming to make the machine understand the word “solder” does not rhyme with colder.  He also notices the debris leftover from some computer punch-cards.

He takes the bits of paper to Security Chief Phil Coulson — wait, what?  They go back to the lab.  Barnes — is his nickname Bucky by any chance? — shows him the typewriter where words are input, and the other typewriter where they come out in “French, German, Spanish, Russian and Chinese” although I am dubious of a 1956 Smith Corona having a 废话 key. ^[2]

He says no one could have punched those cards except his 3 subordinates.  But they passed the rigorous 1956 security screening by being US citizens over 21, white, male, and owning a hat.  Coulson goes undercover as a member of the foundation supporting their work, and takes the gang out to dinner.  They discuss what they do in their off hours.  Sadly, Dr. Lopert’s wife “has been ill for some time” so he hangs out at the lab most of the time.  A government worker putting in those kind of hours sounds suspicious to our guys, so they go back to the lab and go through his desk.  They find letters written in several languages.  Luckily, they have just the machine to translate them.

After a couple of embarrassing letters to Russian mail-order bride magazines, they discover a letter from a German doctor stating his experience treating sub-acute bacterial endocarditis — hey, that’s what Mrs. Lopert suffers from!  So, Lopert has been using the machine to help his wife.  Coulson still thinks there might be something nefarious encoded in the letters, but he thought the same thing about his Alpha-Bits this morning.  After all, a man with a sick wife might be willing to sell secrets to the Russkis for cash or a coupon to upgrade his new mail-order wife from a dumpy 1950’s model to a swinging 1960’s Commie babe.  A search of Lopert’s home reveals a soldering iron and punch-cards.

I don’t know what this is, but it was a recommendation from dailymotion on this same page.

They catch Lopert in the lab that night tinkering with the computer.  He says he is using its logic to assess the best surgical treatment for his wife.  Touched by this, Coulson helps him and they work through the night.  The computer finally recommends a medical strategy, and even provides a contingency plan in case the procedure fails — insist on a Ukrainian girl.

The Loperts accept the computer’s decision and Mrs. L. has the operation.  In no time she is back in great health, and Lopert has lost his deposit from the magazine.  Even better, a grant has been approved for him to continue researching medical applications of the device.

Despite the always welcome presence of the gnome-like Whit Bissell, one of the series bigger slogs.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  Why is the turkey quacking like a duck?  Maybe this technology is trickier than I thought.
• [UPDATE] Starting the video a bit earlier, I see the pointer started on the duck.  I am not going erase the observation, though, because it was literally the most entertainment I got from the episode.  And in fairness — to me — it is a pretty poor design.  You point at the animal you want to hear, then pull the string.  The pointer spins while the noise plays.  There is nothing to contemporaneously associate the sound to the original selection.
• [2]  A little off-point here, but what do Chinese people eat for breakfast?  They have lunch and dinner covered, but where are the Chinese joints open at 6 am for breakfast?

Host Truman Bradley tells us some of the barriers to space flight.  The first step on the journey is to break the sound barrier.  Then the heat barrier, which melts airplanes at high-speed like a 10 cent plastic model recycled from a previous episode.  But most of all there is the gravity barrier, a small force which requires tremendous energy to lift a rocket or me after the COVID lockdown.

A naval task force, led by the USS Morgan, is in the Pacific.  Hmmm, there really was a USS John Morgan launched May 4, 1943.  Sadly, it was sunk 2 weeks later after colliding with the USS Montana.  Men were lost from both ships and the ships were needed for the war effort, so nothing funny about that.  But it is a fitting choice for this series.

Their mission has been publicly announced as a nuclear weapons test shot, but that is just a ruse — they are just going to test fire a rocket out of the atmosphere.  So rather than honestly inform the public of an event that would excite America after a depression and two wars, fuel the imaginations of kids who would grow up to be writers and astronauts and scientists, and energize the country by beating those darn Russkis, the government decided it is better to call it a nuclear bomb.  Although, to be fair, at that point, abominations like nuclear blasts and Buddy Hackett were still used as entertainment in Las Vegas.

The crew tells Dr. Porter that they are also sending 2 mice up on the rocket, which seems a very inefficient way to get rid of mice.  The men in the control room work busily to  launch the rocket and see it break through to outer space.  Dr. Masters gleefully proclaims, “Operation Outer Space is successful!”  Nice work maintaining that cover story, Doc!

The Hydrogen-Ion Propulsion System will keep the rocket traveling through space forever, but it is only programmed to go to the moon.  It successfully reaches the moon and circles around it.  On the way back to Earth, 6 flying saucers join it!  Holy smoke, the rocket crashes back on earth!  Only SFT could turn this into a boring gabfest.

One other barrier they neglected to mention is zero-gravity, maybe because it hits too close to home.  This show has no weight whatsoever.

At the time this aired, Alfred Hitchcock Presents was on the air.  The Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond were just 3 years away.  I just can’t fathom how something like this was considered acceptable.