Writer Paul Duveen is driving through England. He passes a sign that the Cambridge By-Pass is opening in Autumn 1979.  The funny thing is, this aired in 1980.  That’s it, the only funny thing.

He cruises past the world’s oldest and best dressed hitchhiker.  Then he has a second thought and slows down.  The old gentleman trots up to the car and asks if Paul is going to London.  As they drive off together, Paul is seen to be one of those lunatics that actually likes meeting people, enjoys talking to them, and is genuinely interested in what they have to say.  Wait, I have a feeling I’m rooting for the wrong guy here.

Paul is actually a very affable guy.  He talks to the man about Epsom (the town, not the salts) and the Derby (the race, not the hat).  Then he somehow surmises the man might be a busker.  The man takes offense at that and demands to be let out.  Paul pulls over and the man gets out.  Paul sincerely apologizes and asks the man to reconsider.

They continue on.  Paul gets the car up to a smooth 70 MPH, which seems strange since it is a German car with the wheel on the wrong side being driven in England by an Australian.  Shouldn’t it be in Gobsmacks per Fahrvergnügen or whatever the hell they use over there?   The hitchhiker asks how fast the car will go.  Paul, proud of his new toy with only 2,503 miles on it, claims it will go 129 MPH.  He is offended when the HH suggests the dealer was lying. Whoever heard of such a thing!

Paul tells the HH to fasten his seatbelt, and he puts his on too.  I guess going a mere 70 without them had been OK. They are thrown back in their seats as Paul  accelerates.  He gets the speed up to 125 MPH, then sees a motorcycle cop in the mirror.  The HH urges him to just outrun the cop.

Paul pulls over.  The HH says that model of motorbike maxes out at 112 MPH, so they should have outrun him.  Well then, how did the cop catch up to them?

This is one of those episodes that would just be tedious to recount step-by-step.  The good news is that is because there is character development, ideas, red herrings, foreshadowing, and twists.  Great for the show, not so great to transcribe or read.  With the cop entering the stage for an extended scene, we now have all the characters on deck.  This might be the most uniformly excellent ensemble I have come across since Dan Hedaya’s one-man performance of The Vagina Monologues at The Winter Garden. ^[2]

Rod Taylor (The Birds) plays Paul Duveen as a cheerful, inquisitive sort befitting his job as a writer (the inquisitive part, not the cheerful part). ^[4]  He occasionally gets ticked at the hitchhiker, but shakes it off.  He just seems like a great guy.

Cyril Cusak plays the hitchhiker as a seemingly harmless old chap.  His charming Irish accent is empathy-bait for Americans.  He even survived an episode of Ray Bradbury Theater.  Best of all, he seems to be no relation to former actor John Cusack.

I’ve never heard of John Forgeham who plays the cop.  However, he absolutely nails it as the humorless, laconic authority figure who has your future in his hands and knows it.  Alfred Hitchcock would have loved him.

Watching all three of them work is a delight pleasure.  The fact that their performances are also in support of a good story makes this the best episode of TOTU so far.  Bravo!

SPOILER:

I started with the ending when writing this post, so this does give away a plot point . . .

Hey, wait a minute.  That twist of stealing the cop’s notepad is right out of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents Episode.  Just one story beat you say?  Well in both cases it came after an upstanding citizen was goaded into speeding by a sticky-fingered hitchhiker and was pulled over by a motorcycle cop.  Not feeling it yet?  The AHP episode was entitled Hitch Hike — pretty close.  OK, we’ve had a few Tales of the Unexpected episodes based on stories that were originally used on AHP:  The Landlady, Man from the South, and Lamb to the Slaughter (all by Roald Dahl).  The difference is, Roald Dahl was given no credit on the AHP version of this one. ^[1]

Finally, thanks to the producers for actually filming a scene where the actors get wet in the rain.  Usually it is an effect or a screen of drizzle between them and the camera.  The reality this adds is worth a million Fahrvergnügens. 

Other Stuff:

• [1]  As nearly as I can tell after 30 seconds of research, Roald Dahl was the 3rd greatest source of stories for AHP.
• [1]  Odd that I immediately assumed Dahl was ripped off by AHP.  It was days later that I saw Dahl’s story was published 17 years after the AHP episode.   
• [2]  Though lacking the range of Russell Collins — cited recently by me as the greatest actor in history — Dan Hedaya never fails to amuse or interest me.
• [2]  Blatant rip-off of JFK’s gag about his Nobel Prize winning guests being the greatest collection of talent since Thomas Jefferson dined alone in the White House.  He had tried it in the clubs as “the greatest collection of drunken a**holes since Ted Kennedy dined alone because he killed his date.”  Luckily Ted Sorenson bailed him out again, crafting the crude jibe into the witty bon mot we remember today. ^[3]
• [3]  Details from this era are sketchy at best.
• [4]  Actually, it makes more sense the other way.  Today’s newspeeps are preening, self-important idiots who are not at all inquisitive.

Roald Dahl’s Intro:  This time he tells us everything in tonight’s episode is true.

William Perkins recalls taking the 8:12 train into work five days a week for 36 years.  He is a meticulous chap in his bowler and 3-piece grey suit.  He actually likes the process of commuting.  He and the other upper class twits even have a specific order in which they wait on the platform.

Hey, you in the middle — get a hat!

Dahl continues, “One of his special pleasures is to have his own particular seat, in the same compartment, with the same good solid people sitting in their right places with the right umbrellas and hats and ties and newspapers.”

One morning he is startled to see another man standing in his spot on the platform.  I’m sure the man’s billowing powder blue trousers had nothing to do with his discomfort.  However the man’s stylish grey hair, stylish neatly trimmed beard, stylish suede overcoat, and stylish walking stick do set this dandy apart from the other gents.

The man sits in Perkins’ non-assigned, unreserved, publicly available seat — the effrontery!  He then begins smoking in this, the designated smoking car — the nerve!  Most egregiously, he breaks the silence the men have enjoyed for 36 years  — to ask permission for his totally appropriate smoking, “as a matter of form”.  This guy is an monster!  He is even a different breed of cat with his reading material which seems more tabloid than the stodgy broadsheets the other chaps are reading. ^[1]

He shows up for a third day wearing another powder blue leisure suit.  Perkins recognizes him as Galloping Foxley!  This is narrated with the same expectation of awe as the “MY NAME IS KHAN” line that drew blank stares in the Kelvin Timeline, and eye-rolls in ours.

Perkins remembers being dropped off at St. Wilfred’s School in 1907.  From the first day, Foxley was a prick.  He bumped into Perkins’ father and continued on without an apology.  Mr. Perkins’ busted him to the headmaster, sealing his son’s fate.  Foxley tells 10-year old Perkins, “You are my personal servant, valet, bed-maker, dogsbody, washer-upper, boot-cleaner — you’re my slave, Perkins.”

The next morning, Foxley tells Perkins, “You’d better get down to the bogs, the lavatories, the water closets, the latrines, le petit quan (?), the places of easement.”  Not only is he to clean them, he is to warm the seat for Foxley.  “If it is not warm enough, I’ll warm yours.”  Back in the train, Perkins fantasizes over exposing Foxley’s cruelty.

For some unseen infraction, Foxley announces he is going to give the 10-year old boy a caning.  We were told earlier that punishments were usually a number of whacks with the dressing gown on, or a lesser number with the dressing gown off.  To no one’s surprise, Foxley says today Perkins gets no choice — the dressing gown will be off.

Foxley gets a good running — galloping, hence the name — start at applying the punishment.  That night as Perkins is crying, the other boys admire the scars on on his butt.  Rrrrright . . . the scars.

It goes on and is perfectly fine, but tedious to recap.  Ironically (probably not really ironic), Perkin’s proper English reserve undermines the ending.  He gives a speech about his days being tortured by Foxley before accusing the stranger of being the titular Foxley.  Then the stranger introduces himself with a different name.  However, since Perkins did not really work up a good head of steam and make a scene, the denial did not result in the humiliation it should have.  Oh, we can see on his face that he is squirming inside.  It might well have been humiliating to this repressed bloke, but it is hard for the audience to relate to.

Also, even though we don’t see it, I got the sense that this treatment of a “new boy” was not that unusual at such a school.  And that’s why all the men in old Perkin’s cohort were button-down, conformist types.

So while I really liked all the performers, it needed to be tightened up a little to be truly effective.

Other Stuff:

• WTF?  Young Perkins is 5 years younger than Foxley, but Old Perkins is 12 years older that the man on the train.  Both actors do a great job, but if we are supposed to believe the man could be Foxley, they should have cast age-appropriate actors.
• Reminiscent of RBT’s By the Numbers.
• John Mills plays both adult Perkins and Perkins’ father in the flashback.
• [1]  He even flashes the Page 3 Girl to the other gents.  Those unfamiliar with that last gasp of journalistic integrity should checkout the Wiki article.  Trigger Warning:  The more woke might have their head explode that this was a real thing not that long ago on planet earth.  Unsurprisingly, you have to go elsewhere for pictures.

“All her life Mrs. Foster had had an almost pathological fear of missing the train, a plane, a boat, or even a theater curtain.  In other respects, she was not a particularly nervous woman. But the mere thought of being late would throw her into such a state that she would begin to twitch.” 

This is such a day, as she gets a twitchy eye from her late husband.  I mean literally late, as in not on schedule.  Although, at 25 years her senior, he might be the other literally late literally any day.

They are about to leave for six weeks vacation, or holiday, or summering in Balmoral, or whatever the hell rich English people do.  Actually, she is going to New York to see their grandchildren, and he is going to stay at “the club”.  The chauffer thinks Mr. Foster always keeps his wife waiting just to make her crazy.  The butler advises him to shut his gob, but that is good advice for most Brits given the condition of their teeth. ^[1] She is frantic, fearing she will miss her plane.  Finally, Mr. Foster descends in their elevator.  Told ya they were rich.

Mr. Foster slow-walks out of the elevator, but he is about 90, so maybe he just walks.  Possibly to further irritate his wife, he says he wants to wash his hands.  He says “wash my hands”, but I hear prostate.

They get the kind of break you never get when you’re late.  The flight is delayed while they pre-board the the Handicapped, the Handi-Capable, the Differently-Abled, one real old cripple guy, First Class, the Air Marshall, the Diamond Club, the Emerald Club, the Premier Club, the Admiral Club, the Sky Club, the Ham & Turkey Club, members of the Armed Forces, First Responders, Second Responders, COVID-era Grocery Store Clerks, Airline Credit Card Holders, Travelers with Small Children, Travelers with Support Animals . . .  The Fosters can see this is going to go on all night.  The next flight is 11:00 am, so the airline offers to put them up for the night.  Fearing it would be at a Hostel-6, they go back home.  

The next morning, Mr. Foster surprises his wife by actually being ready to leave early for the airport.  As they are about to leave, he mentions that they will have to stop by their bank which is nowhere near them, kinda like an open Bank of America.

Further infuriating her, he remembers he forgot a package and goes back into the house.  Mrs. Foster finds the package between the seat cushions, which makes no sense.  Mr. Foster was not just carrying it, and this is a different car than they used yesterday.

Anyhoo, she runs to the door, but before she opens it, she can hear Mr. Foster calling her name.  She looks through the letterslot, but doesn’t understand why there are black bars on each side.

She runs back to the car and tells the driver she can’t wait for her husband.  He can take an Uber to “the club”.  They take off for the airport.

Six weeks later, Mrs. Foster returns home.  There are letters all over the floor that have been put through the mail-slot, including weekly letters from her to her husband.  She also finds her husband dead in the elevator which is stuck between floors.  Cue TOTU’s secret weapon, the jaunty carnival-like closing theme.

As usual with TOTU, I hated the episode the first time I watched it.  Then, on a second viewing to fill in some notes, I liked it much more.  There is just one problem and it is a biggie.  No, not the mysterious appearance of Mr. Foster’s package.  [note to self: there must be a less Toobinesque way to say that]

Who am I to criticize the great Roald Dahl?  Fighter pilot, screenwriter, children’s author, Hitchcock fav, antisemite.  Wait, what?  OK, I feel a little better about it.  There was a huge misstep in this story.  Mr. Foster clearly irritated his wife with his lateness, but there were also signs throughout that she loved him.  So why make her a murderer?  A better solution would have been to have her leave for the airport without knowing he was trapped in the elevator.  It was already established that he would write her no letters, so that would not have been a clue.^[2] When she returns home, only then she realizes her impetuous decision to race to the airport caused his death.  Maybe the answer is that Dahl (like Hitchcock) preferred straight-up murder to accidental death.  That’s how I want to go. ^[3]

So, another episode that I ended up liking, but would never recommend to anyone.

Other Stuff:

• Title Analysis:  No idea.  One explanation I found online seems like horseshit.  The story is called “The Way Up to Heaven” because Mrs. Foster’s path to heaven on earth comes from killing her husband by leaving him trapped in an elevator heading up in their six-story New York [England in the episode] home. Her husband is a sadistic man, and she feels free with him gone.  1) Mr. Foster did not seem deliberately sadistic; just old and Bidenesque.  2) How is anyone’s path to Heaven secured by breaking one of the 10 Commandments?  And one of the big ones, not like coveting your neighbor’s sweet, sweet ass.  3)  A parallel is suggested of the “Up” in the title and the elevator going up.  That would only make sense if Mr. Foster were going to Heaven; but you just called him a sadistic monster.  I guess it does mean her personal Heaven on Earth.^[4]  But the elevator going up did not free her.  In fact, the elevator not going up freed her.  I just don’t like the title.
• [1]  Apparently this has improved since WWI.
• [2]  Fun Fact:  There were no telephones in England in the 1970s.
• [3]  The short story is online, but I’m not sure it should be.  It describes Mrs. Foster hearing something through the door, but doesn’t specify what.  
• [4]  Learned tonight:  It is Ooooh Heaven, not Blue Heaven.

Wow, a helicopter shot! Pretty extravagant for this cheap TV series. They zoom in on a cruise ship. We can see this week’s guest star is actually on the ship. This is no One Step Beyond insert. ^[1] However, if I had one of those devices they use to track debates by the second, here is where the line would nose-dive like when Hillary speaks  appears is introduced.  This week’s star is the odious Jack Weston.

To be fair, that reaction might just be due to his role as Julius Moomer in The Bard episode of The Twilight Zone.  He was the most repulsive citizen of TZ, just edging out Feathersmith in Of Late I Think of Cliffordville.  That is strange because he was one of the first people I recognized as an actor when I was a kid.  I liked him as the avuncular friend in The Incredible Mr. Limpet.  As I got older, I realized his screen persona was an obnoxious man-child.  I didn’t see it earlier because I was an obnoxious child-child.

Weston is on the Lido Deck, scribbling in a notebook, wearing a leisure suit.  The Renshaws sit next to him and he introduces himself as “Botibol:  B Brooklyn, O Oliver, T Tommy, I Idaho, B Brooklyn, O Oliver, L as in Love” — an affectation so floridly over the top that Roald Dahl should have sent Ray Bradbury a gift basket.

He bribes his way to the Purser’s table at dinner and asks Gopher about the Ship’s Pool.  After a brief fright that we might see Botibol in a Speedo, we learn that the titular Pool is actually a wager on how many miles the ship will travel by noon tomorrow.

During the meal, the sea gets rough.  Botibol thinks maybe Captain Stubing did not account for this when he estimated the mileage.  If the storm slows the ship down, it might be worth a bet.  Unfortunately, Gopher doesn’t know if the Captain was aware of the storm.  What is this, the Costa Concordia?  Wouldn’t the Captain have checked the radar, monitored weather reports, or heard the non-stop complaining about sore joints of the 800 retirees on board?

The Captain’s estimate is 515 miles.  Botibol bids $1,000 that the actual distance traveled will be less.  He sees Renshaw and tells him about the bet, and the Pool which is now $14,000.  He is sure there is no chance of him losing.

The next morning, Botibol is the only one onboard sad to see that the storm passed uneventfully.  The ship is cruising along now, making up the time it lost.  He is distraught at the money he is sure to lose.  He wonders how he will be able to tell his wife.  Although, how did he explain he was taking a cruise?  How did he plan to explain the suntan (ahhh, maybe that explains the leisure suit by the pool).  I have a feeling his gaining 10 pounds in a week would not be a red flag.

Botibol decides he will jump over the rail, forcing the ship to stop.  Thus, the ship would fall short of its goal, and he would win the Pool.

He sees an old woman on the fantail.  He chats her up to be sure she isn’t blind.  Then he jumps.  And credit for the stunt here.  It sure looks like Jack Weston took that plunge.

The old lady’s nurse walks up and does not believe her patient’s crazy story about a man jumping in the ocean.  She is clearly in a Bidenesque fog of dementia.  So we close with Botibol becoming a smaller and smaller flailing shape in the distance.

Sadly, the casting of Jack Weston was hard to overcome for me.  There was also an unnecessary flatness to the story.  Surely, there was a way to foreshadow the old woman.  Maybe she could have been Renshaw’s senile mother.  As is:

1.  Renshaw exists only so this is not a one-man show (brrrr, shiver me timbers).
2.  The old woman jarringly appears as a new character at the last second.
3.  A better opportunity of humorous misdirection over her faculties is squandered.

On the other hand, actually being filmed on a real ship was awesome.  Also, since there is no supernatural element, his predicament is relatable and quite scary.  So, there are some things to like, but it could have been so much better.

Other Stuff:

• [1]  With all due respect to OSB who does that expertly.
• For anyone who did not click the link above, this is stunning.  Hey, there’s Arte Johnson, Bernie Kopell, Rich Little, that guy from Dallas, Iowa Congressman Fred Grandy, F Troop’s Forrest Tucker, and Donnie Osmond!  All seriousness aside, I look forward to a remake full of tattoos, piercings, green hair, shaved heads, trans-women, and all your favorite reality TV stars from My 600 Lb. Life.

Well, one of the cast played Luke’s Uncle Owen in Star Wars.  I guess that’s something. 

And I do like watching cats.  Like the car in Vanishing Point or the choppers in Easy Rider, you can have a good time just watching them travel across the screen.  But that’s about all you’re going to get out of this episode.  It’s a shame, too, because with some of the dry wit that TOTU is capable of, this could have been fun.  Couldn’t anyone on the set . . . the caterer? . . . anyone? . . . have said, “Maybe we could liven this up a bit.”

The horror of this house’s architecture would have made for a better story, BTW.

Edward, the inexplicably titular conqueror, is burning brush behind his house.   His wife Louisa notices a cat watching the fire.  Edward shoos it away, but somehow it mysteriously turns up later inside the house.  

Louisa finds it on their sofa and tries to make it comfortable by a) putting out a saucer of milk, b) bringing out that leftover tuna, or c) playing a little Schuman on the piano.  Of course it is C, although why there is a Schumann song in a book that says LISZT on the cover is not explained.

She also tries playing some Liszt and Bach to see what the cat prefers.  He makes his preference known by knocking over her collection of great composer bobble-heads, except for Liszt.

Louisa excitedly calls Edward into the house.  She says she believes the cat is the reincarnation of Franz Liszt.  Edward face-palms and thinks, “How did I end up here?  I was in freakin’ Citizen Kane!” ^[1]  She plays a few bars of Liszt and the cat suddenly becomes frisky, jumping off the couch.  Hey, maybe I need me some Liszt!  Feeling vindicated, she takes off her glasses and gives Edward a smile that probably worked when Ike was President.

Edward wants to again test the cat’s ability to identify its own music, but Louisa says,  “I refuse to treat him like a circus animal”.  Well, it sure is nice to see she is such an activist for animals’ welfare.  To get proof, Louisa goes to visit a local crackpot that specializes in reincarnation — and leaves the cat in the car with the windows rolled up. 

The scene with the reincarnation expert is intended to be the comedy portion of the show.  Really, it is mostly a series of non-sequiturs spouted by the expert such as “Epictetus came back as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cicero returned as Gladstone” and so on.  There seems to be no effort to connect the pairs and, of course, there is not a peon or a serf in the bunch.  However, he also mentions that Lord Byron was reincarnated as a tiger and the proof was a physical deformity: The tiger was “lame” and Byron had a “club foot”.  I suspect there are more woke ways to say that, but I shant waste a second looking for them. OK, this was actually a pretty good scene, but it did feel like a squandered opportunity. ^[3]

Luckily it was a typical pre-Global Warming English afternoon, so the cat survived being locked in the car.  Louise discovers that Liszt had 5 large warts on his face.  She then finds 5 bumps on the cat’s face.  QED!

Edward is still unpersuaded, so Louise plays a Chopin piece that Liszt was known to hate.  As she begins playing, the cat meows and runs off to another room.  When she changes to a Liszt piece, the cat comes back.  Edward actually begins to believe this is the reincarnation of Liszt, but is horrified that Louise wants to go public.  

She is sick of him oppressing her throughout their whole marriage, and he seems to hate that she has found something that might get her a little attention.  He orders her into the kitchen to make dinner.  Given the nature of English food, he must really be pissed.  She says, “You poor dear, you must be famished.”  It is a nice switcheroo when it is revealed she was talking to the cat.

Louise prepares a cat-meal fit for a maestro while Edward goes out to build up the fire.  He smiles for the first time maybe ever as he pitches something into the fire.  When she calls the cat to eat, he does not come.  However, Edward comes in and his hands are covered in bloody claw-marks.  Louise grabs a knife and advances on a terrified Edward.  A different cat enters their house through an open window. 

I find that I like these episodes more on the second viewing.  As I’ve said before, maybe I need that first pass to lower my expectations.  If I’m ever trapped in the house for extended period of time with nothing to do, maybe I’ll rewatch Ray Bradbury Theatre.  No, it will take more than COVID.  

But this episode did grow on me more than my notes would indicate.  It still had rough patches, especially the ending.  The editing could have been done by the architect who designed that house.  I guess Edward killed the cat first, then pitched him into the fire because we don’t hear any caterwauling or just plain wauling.  Then the other cat enters.

First, we are shown him entering through an open window which kinda wrecks the effect of the mysterious appearance of the first cat in the house.  Second, why is it a different cat?  Does that mean Liszt’s soul was in both cats?  Or did Liszt just seize this new cat’s body and kick out its existing soul when his old body got burned up, like Steve Trevor did to that rando in Wonder Woman 1984? I kinda thought reincarnation was baked in at birth. ^[4]

So again, I am left with a slightly positive feeling about an episode that I would never in a million cat-years recommend to anyone. 

Other Stuff:

• [1]  Joseph Cotton was indeed in Citizen Kane. He played Jed Leland, who ratted out the Governor of New York for having an inappropriate sexual relationship.  Hey, what is this, Science Fiction Theatre?  That could never happen today. ^[2]
• [2]  To be fair, Andrew Cuomo’s circumstances are different.  Kane was only a candidate for NY Governor.  Also, Kane did not use the story as a distraction to enable the corrupt media to largely ignore the worse crime of how he doomed hundreds of old people by sending them to nursing homes to catch COVID and then lied about it.
• [3]  For example, he says Julius Caesar was reincarnated as Abe Lincoln.  Why not reincarnate Caesar as Ty Cobb for a salad theme?  Or Lincoln as Henry Ford then Freddie Mercury for a car theme?  So, something like that except a lot more clever.
• [4]  And, yes, it is Liszt again because it goes straight to the still-standing Liszt bobble-head.  Shouldn’t this be called Liszt the Conqueror?  How is Edward a conqueror?
• We learn Liszt was Wagner’s father-in-law.  Or, at least, I did.