OK, this should be interesting.  And by “interesting” I mean not interesting.  Due to copyright issues, I’m watching this episode like a silent movie.  And I mean really silent, not even a peppy piano score.

A car containing a young couple and a 3rd wheel dude in a wacky backward cap is driving along a lakeside road.  The guy driving has an earring, so backward hat guy is in the unusual situation of not being the biggest douche in the group.

The car hits a rock and they do a Thelma & Louise off the bank into the lake.  Luckily no one was Kopechned, so their response is mostly laughing and splashing each other. The horseplay ends, however, when they have a hallucination of the car going down with them still in it.

Walking back along the road, Backward Hat Guy and The Girl dive out of the way of a truck.  Earring Guy just stands in the road and the truck swerves around him.  They pick themselves up and continue walking.  They are apparently discussing the accident since there are a couple of flashbacks of the sinking car.

Then they are walking around a school.  Some priests are lighting candles, and Earring Guy shows up and gives a confession.  We get a visual of the car resting on the bottom of the lake with the three people still in it.  The Girl and Backward Hat Guy are running across the campus when they suddenly vanish.  As each of them disappear, they seem to re-inhabit their bodies in the submerged car.  This is evidenced by a blink rather than them reacting, “Oh shit, I’m going to drown!” and swimming to the surface.  While Earring Guy is still confessing, The Girl and Backward Hat guy reappear on the lawn, puking up water.

Like Ted Kennedy, Earring Guy only returns to the submerged car the next day. Unlike the senator, he dives down and tries to open the door.  The Girl and Backward Hat Guy show up as he is still under water peeling back the convertible top.  He manages to extract his friends’ bodies, but his body remains buckled-in as the car slips down into a crevasse.

He sees his friends on the dock disappear once again.  He screams “It was supposed to be me!”  Hey, I’m a lip reader!

As the paramedics are hauling the bodies away, we get a close-up of an eye which is shedding a tear of blood — nice shot, but I have no idea who it is supposed to be.  We have just seen all six of their eyes, and no blood-tears.  Live Earring Guy is holding a rose, which he drops in the water.  It sinks past Dead Earring Guy still in the car.

So why is Earring Guy still alive?  It might have made sense if he was not also still in the submerged car.  But this perplexes me — Backward Hat Guy and The Girl faded away or re-entered their corpses.  On the other hand, there are now two Earring Guys. What happens when they haul that car up?  Even Candace Hilligoss had the good manners to rendezvous with her dead body.

Granted, I’m working only from the visuals, but I just can’t combine these elements into a plausible story.  It would have made far more sense to have Earring Guy holding the rose, then fade away, and then the rose drops into the water sinking past his bloated corpse.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Just speculation and maybe giving the producers too much credit. Backward Hat Guy and The Girl permanently rejoin with their dead bodies only after their dead bodies are witnessed by a fisherman.  So like the proverbial tree falling in the forest . . . are they really dead if no one sees them?
• Point For:  Earring Guy does not rejoin his dead body because the fisherman did not see his corpse.
• Point Against:  If they are dead, why do they seem to have corporeal bodies?  The driver sees them clearly enough to swerve, Earring Guy confesses to the priest, and the other two are dodged by people in the school hallway.
• Point Break:  What I should have watched instead.

Michael Doyle (Randy Quaid) is lying in a casket with his eyes wide open.  He can’t be laying in the casket because he is dead.

The mortician says his eyes keep popping open.  Since this is supposed to be a closed-casket service, he isn’t too worried about that.  His assistant does that thing characters always do on TV — the thing where they move their whole hand down the face of the corpse, and afterward the eyes are closed.  I’ve always been pretty dubious of that. Does the hand really get down in those eye sockets?  Wouldn’t it be much simpler to do the 2-finger method?

It seems to work, at least for a while.  As his daughter Kaitlin is saying a few dull, dull words at his service, the casket begins to rock.  A few moments later, Doyle flips open the lid, sits up in the casket, and unsteadily climbs out.

His daughter is thrilled to see him and gives him a big hug.  His wife Natalie just seems stunned, or maybe she had already used his insurance for a deposit on a Beemer ^[1]. BTW, kudos for him getting out to reveal a backless suit jacket.  Is that how corpses are buried?  What would be the reason?  Doesn’t the family supply the suit?  By that logic, why would he have pants at all?  But it just feels right.  Ezra Thornberry would be proud.

Natalie tells him this has given them a 2nd chance, and that she regrets that they were about to separate.  He responds, “When I look at you, all I can see is the rotting flesh that is to come.”  Hey, pal — you were the one buried without the benefit of formaldehyde!

At their first post-funeral family dinner, Doyle’s daughter is thrilled that her prayers were answered.  She planned the meal with all his favorites.  Unfortunately, when he takes a bite, he gags.  Illustrating the general ineptness of this series, a point is made twice about the amount of garlic in the meal.  Any genre fan would immediately interpret his reaction to the garlicky meal as indicating he was a vampire.  Yet, there is no indication of vampirism before or after.  Doyle even says his reaction is because the food tastes like dirt.  I like that even though I could quibble that this is also off-base because he was never actually put in the ground.  Bringing garlic into the scene, however, just muddles the story.  Geez, the previous scene was an extended shot of him in a mirror.  No one is thinking vampire!

Doyle just asks to left alone and goes out on the balcony to stare out at the city.  After the gals go to sleep, he cuts up pictures, magazines, and wallpaper to make a collage of himself standing in a psychedelic landscape.  When his daughter wakes up, he finally gets animated, telling her that is where he went when he died.  Much like Season Six Buffy, he doesn’t understand why he was brought back from this paradise.

Doyle finally concludes that he was brought back from the dead to take Kaitlin back with him.  To illustrate this, he adds a picture of her to the collage.  The lousy quality of the YouTube video might be to blame, but the picture he uses looks much more like Natalie than Kaitlin.  Doyle attempts to accomplish this by dragging his terrified daughter out onto the balcony.  He pulls her up on the parapet of the building and they do a little cha cha as she screams in terror.

I have no particular fear of heights, but this scene really grabbed me.  Whether it was Kaitlin’s performance, or Doyle’s bizarre actions, it truly was suspenseful.  The series seems a little afraid to commit, so not surprisingly, Kaitlin is saved by her mother and Doyle falls to his 2nd death.

They tried something strange with his fall.  It is one of the worst special effects I’ve ever seen, but I’m not sure if it might not have been intentional.  It begins with him looking 2-dimensional like the picture in his collage, but it is a different pose (more of the series’ lack of focus — why use that effect and a different pose?).  Then it becomes a really unnatural green-screen.  They could have done more to tie this to the collage, but really it seemed pointless as it was.

There is a sort of twist at the end.  It is an interesting cap to the story, but lacks any sort of shock, irony or relevance to the episode’s main theme.

Despite the bitching and moaning (mine, I mean), I did enjoy it.  Seeing a young, healthy Randy Quaid was nice, and his daughter was good.  Just some poor choices hold the episode back from living up to their performances.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Technically Beemer refers to a motorcycle.  The term for a BMW automobile is Bimmer.
• Natalie (Susan Gibney) played Leah Brahms on Star Trek TNG.
• Susan Gibney is fine as Natalie, but her daughter is really effective in some scenes.  Strangely, even though she seems to be about 14, she dresses like a 1980’s MBA.
• OK, this was really only true on the close-ups, but seriously, she did wear the same clothes for days.

Vicki, Sara, Tim and other guy are trucking along for a camping weekend.  Inexplicably, Sara pulls over to offer a ride to a hitchhiker.  She thinks Andy the hitchhiker is cute, so maybe other guy is her brother.  Or maybe Tim is her brother and other guy is just some other guy.  I’m really not interested enough to diagram this out.

They pull into the titular Rest Area.  While Vicki goes to see a man about a racehorse, Sara checks out a swap meet.  Andy picks up a bracelet and tells Sara it would look nice on her.  Uh, am I the only one here who thinks this thing is made of teeth?  Am I the only one here?  ECHO Echo echo . . .

When the gang comes out of the shitters, they see that the swap meet was also a swipe meet and they have made off with our heroes’ car.  Yellow-hat guy goes back in and is attacked after taking a drink directly from the faucet in the Men’s Room.  Sara and Andy find that he has been paralyzed, but really how long could he have survived after that grotesque act?  At least the scene established that he was Chuck.  So, we know the other guy is Tim, and I’m pretty sure Tim and Vicki are siblings.

World’s worst tanning bed

Tim and Vicki try to flag down a passing car for help, but the car nearly runs them over.  Then the driver chases them through the woods.  Now there’s a guy who knows who to treat hitchhikers. Only Vicki makes it back to the Rest Stop.  She quickly disappears.  As Sara searches for her, she finds a trap door in the floor and goes exploring.

Sara finds Vicki paralyzed in the world’s worst tanning bed.  Chuck is there also and seems to have been given a full-body Brazilian.  No idea what happened to Tim.  Andy shows up, but turns out to be one of the swap meet gang.

The gang does a little surgery to come up with material for their arts & crafts.  They cut off Sara’s hair to make a scarf.  Hey, there’s Tim — they cut a loop of skin from his upper arm to make a . . . thing . . . but worth $50 because it has Tim’s tattoo on it.

I think a lot of the problem here is the bad transfer again.  It has many good elements. The cast is good, once I figured out who was who.  Who isn’t creeped out by Rest Stops?  The gang was suitable creepy with their piercings and dreadlocks.

Real rest stop horrors

Post-Post:

• Katherine Isabelle (Vicki) starred in Genre Snaps Ginger Snaps.
• Jerry O’Connell (Andy) was the fat kid in Stand by Me.

Charlotte (Sherilyn “should be a much bigger star” Fenn) and Jack are enjoying the afternoon car-shopping as presumably they could not find a dentist available to do a root canal with no anesthetic.

A hand turns on the radio in a car a few spaces away, luring them over for a look with the song Some Day We’ll be Together.  Her husband describes the car as “flashy,” but c’mon it’s a Volvo.  Charlotte climbs into the driver’s seat and takes the song as a sign that she and the car were manufactured for each other.

That night she asks if he is mad that she wanted that used car and not a new one.  She also asks if her husband is tired of her.  She suggests that his medical students must be tempting to him.  At this time, Sherilyn Fenn was a beautiful 31 year-old who could easily have passed for 25.  Even made up with mom jeans, frumpy glasses and an awful hairdo, there is no hiding this.  She thinks maybe having a baby would give her life more meaning.

The next morning, after having started work on the baby, Charlotte describes the car as “frivolous” for a new mom.  C’mon, it’s a Volvo.  Either these two know nothing about cars or they speak English as a second language.  Later that day, Charlotte gets in the car.  In her rear view mirror she sees a young woman in the back seat saying, “We’re going to have a baby.”

She calls her husband.  The hospital says he is in surgery, but can we paged.  WTH, when I’m being operated on, the surgeon is returning calls?  Driving home from a friend’s house, she notices a home pregnancy test in the car.  It is showing a positive. There is also a credit card slip signed by a Lucy Sykes.

There is no Lucy Sykes in the phone-book, but there is a G. Sykes.  Couldn’t they come up with more unusual name to make it believable that there was only one in the phone-book?  Where did she live, Chinatown?  At least they didn’t go with Smith, which had four numbers listed.  Getting no answer by phone, she drives to the address.  Turns out G. Sykes is Lucy’s uncle.  While waiting for him to get home, Charlotte gets the “We’re having a baby vision” again, this time with Lucy bleeding from the wrists.

Lucy’s uncle confirms that she committed suicide in a car just like Charlotte’s.  He offers Lucy’s stuff to Charlotte.  When Jack gets home that night, he finds clothing and personal items strewn on the floor and up the stairs to their bedroom. At the top of the stairs, he finds Lucy’s driver’s license.

In the bedroom, Charlotte is wearing Lucy’s glittery red dress.  She says she bets Jack liked the dress when Lucy wore it.  She produces a picture that shows Jack with Lucy on the hood of the red Volvo that they just bought — the same car Jack originally bought for Lucy.  This would have been more impactful if Lucy were actually wearing the same dress in the photo, but I guess that’s too much to ask of Night Visions.

Charlotte confronts Jack about his cheating and knocking up Lucy, then flees in the Volvo.  In the car, she hears Lucy talking again, and even sees visions of Lucy and Jack as a happy couple.  One shot shows Lucy dancing in a glittery dress very much like the one Charlotte was wearing — but a different color.  Why, why, why?  The vision continues with Jack telling Lucy they can’t have a baby, so she tells him, “Then kill your wife!  Kill your wife!”

The car stops, the locks go down, Charlotte can’t escape.  Smoke begins pouring into the car as Someday We’ll be Together comes on the radio again.  Lucy appears and I’m not sure what happens.  It looks like she has something wrong with her teeth, but it could just be the horrible quality of the video on You Tube.  But then she leans into Charlotte’s neck like a vampire before we cut away.  So this is either inconceivably stupid, or just a poor decision on the staging.  If Lucy is going to bite her like a vampire, that is just a complete non-sequitur.  If she is not a vampire, why lean into her neck with her mouth open?  And wasn’t she going to die from smoke or CO2 inhalation anyway?

Back at the house, Jack hears a long solid blast from a car horn.  He looks out the window and sees the Volvo roll up the driveway.  He goes out to the car, the horn still wailing.  He opens the door, and Charlotte spills out of the smokey car.  The radio again plays Someday We’ll be Together, and it is also written in the condensation in the windshield.

What was that horn-blast all about?  I guess Charlotte was dead and slumped against the horn the whole time and Lucy “drove” the car home.  Charlotte’s neck is bloody, so I guess they did go for the vampire thing, although with ghost-like tendencies..

Finally, the song could have made sense, but Night Visions once again dropped the ball. It was nice that it was initially interpreted as Charlotte and the car “will be together.”  The callback at the end would have been great if Jack were the one who had died — then Lucy would have had her way and she and Jack would “be together” for eternity.  As it is, who “will be together”?  Lucy and Charlotte?  Hot but nonsensical.

Just as in the first segment of this episode, they had most of the pieces, but just put them together wrong.

Post-Post:

• Hart Bochner (Jack) went on to be the coke-snorting douchebag in Die Hard.  And by “went on” I mean 13 years earlier.

We first meet Dr. Sears when the parents of an anorexic girl hire him to heal their daughter.  He has the “talent or a curse” that he can “feel what other people are feeling.”  He can draw their illness out of their mind into his own.  Moments later, the girl is chowing down.  In a really clever shot, Sears later sees his reflection in the elevator door and perceives his reflection as a fat bastard.  Well done.

In the next scene, he has ordered enough room service food to cater a wedding.  As he gazes upon this borgasmord laid out in front of him, he perceives the grub as rotten and covered by roaches, beetles and literal grubs.  He forces himself to dig in.  I’m not sure this makes sense — isn’t anorexia more about body-image and not about food being gross?  But it works.

His doctor is concerned that it is taking Sears longer and longer to row back from absorbing his patients’ maladies.  Taking a few days off, he is tracked down by a woman seeking help for her son Mark.  She takes Sears to the boy’s bedroom where is is rocking and repeating over and over, “Now he’s coming thorough the woods. Now he’s coming through the yard.  Now he’s coming in the house.  Now he’s coming up the stairs.”

This started after an accident where his mother ran over a pedestrian. The victim’s head smashed into the windshield right in front of the boy. Sears feels his pain and the boy suddenly runs downstairs to his mother.  Their maid goes to see Sears and he has collapsed on the bedroom floor. After a handful of psychotropic drugs, or possibly hawaiiantropic drugs given the fruity mixture of colors, he feels much better.

Everything is both hunky and dory as Sears is back on his feet, then sitting down at their kitchen table.  Mom and the nanny are happy, and the boy is chirpy.  Until he isn’t.  The boy is suddenly terrified.  He runs back to his room and starts his “Now he’s coming thorough the woods” shit again.  Sears goes to the window to show him that there is no one coming through the yard, but is interrupted by the man coming through the yard.

The kid continues his screaming four sentence play-by-play more obnoxiously than John Madden as the man comes in the house and up the stairs.  Sears is baffled and says the condition can’t manifest itself physically.  The non-manifested condition pounds on the bedroom door.  Sears believes this is all in his head, but Carol tells him she and Mark are real.  He screams at her that she is not real and suddenly finds himself alone in the silent bedroom.  He walks out into the house and finds everyone brutally murdered before he is himself attacked by the mystery man.

That’s it, end of story.  You can validly interpret the killer as a “physical manifestation” or the doped up doctor.  The gravitas of the two murdered women and the child effectively trumps any churlish plot issues.  Except it is not the end.

Snap — we loop back to the just-cured boy running downstairs to his mother.  The nanny goes upstairs as she did in the first iteration.  She finds Sears sitting in the corner blankly rocking back and forth repeating those same four sentences.  The end.

Thumbhead’s closing remarks did not offer any revelations this time. I am at a loss to explain how something this egregious comes from a good writer, gets past a story editor, and into the final product.

Nevermind the logic of the hallucination, what really bugs me is the very ending.  The zinger is that Sears is sitting on the floor rocking back and forth just like the boy.  But that should be no surprise — it is his standard reaction. Just the way curing the anorexic girl gave him the symptoms of anorexia, it is perfectly predictable that he would have reacted by mimicking the boy.  In fact, following the logical course, shortly thereafter he should have metabolized the symptoms and be back to normal.  It’s a happy ending for everyone — who wants that?

In fact, so wrong is this ending, that I think it would have improved the episode to have the two iterations in exactly the opposite order.

Post-Post:

• The episode kept reminding me of The Empath on Star Trek.
• I really enjoyed Allison Hossack as Carol.  She was believable as the mom and also believable as the anonymous, slightly androgynous cutie in the restaurant (not that they would be mutually exclusive types).
• The nanny, on the other hand, was a mess.  She seems to have been coiffed by Ayn Rand’s hairdresser on a bad day.  Or was she the nanny?  Maybe they were a couple.  Carol was rocking that man’s blazer and a snappy short haircut.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Not.  At.  All.
• Theresa falls up the stairs, Theresa falls down the stairs.