Before watching: Airing as the 2nd half of the episode that began with A View Through the Window, there is just no way this can’t suffer by comparison.

After watching:  They pulled off a truly great hour.

Cary Elwes is being tormented in bed by noises from the street below. There is music, but strangely no thumping rap.  And vehicle sounds, but strangely not the worst noise offender on earth besides rap — Harley Davidsons.

He tries to watch a little TV, but it is all stories about crime, murders and explosions.  He chances upon a documentary set in fictional that Archer State Park, and sets out that weekend for a little peaceful rest & relaxation.

He hikes up the side of a mountain. Well prepared, he pitches a tent (heh, heh) and cooks up some grub.  That night, his sleep is once again disturbed.  He finds another camper (Brian Dennehy) close by, hammering tent pegs into the ground, although it sounds more like he is forging a sword on an anvil.

They have a fairly cordial exchange, but it is a testimony to Dennehy that there is feeling of menace even though nothing overt I can point to.

The next morning, Elwes is awakened by a police scanner.  He again goes to visit his noisy neighbor.  Dennehy warns him that he “stumbled over a pile of bear crap the size of a Honda.”  When Elwes confronts Dennehy about the scanner, he nicely offers to turn the scanner off.  But when Elwes suggests that he was here first and that Dennehy should more on, he is not so friendly.

Later Elwes is fishing, Dennehy interrupts him to offer some tips on fishing.  He also offers several ideas on what is wrong with the country.  Again, there is nothing explicitly threatening, but Dennehy is just so intrusive and overly friendly.  He tells Elwes about the serial killer that has been terrorizing the town.  He also mentioned that he found tracks of the bear.  Inexplicably, he also says that a bear has the exact same skeleton as a man, which is just absurd.  When Dennehy pulls out a Rambo-esque knife, Elwes decides to take off.

The next night, Dennehy is again pounding his peg (heh, heh) within earshot of Elwes’ new campsite.  When Elwes accuses him of stalking, Dennehy is a little nasty this time.  The next morning, Dennehy brings his dead dog, killed by a grizzly, to Elwes and together they bury him.

Elwes and Dennehy both pull off their characters perfectly, providing just the right amount of misdirection to make the episode work.  I could bitch about that pile of bear crap, but I don’t think we’re supposed to think too much about that.

Post-Post:

• Brian Dennehy hassled another outdoorsman and got what was coming to him.
• His daughter hassled the Borg.

This is the one.

Major Ben Darnell is summoned to the middle of the desert.  This might be the best thing for him as his son has been killed in a car accident and his wife blames him.  She flatly tells him she doesn’t care where he is going.

He arrives in the desert and is shown the phenomena that prompted his trip.  And it is kind of trippy — as he walks over a ridge, in the middle of the desert he sees another reality intruding.  The titular window, if you will, into another time and another place.  In a landscape of sand and dull earth-tones sits a brilliant oasis of Middle-Earth-tones ^[1].  Darnell sees a farmhouse in a lush, wooded area and a boy playing with his dog.  By the boy’s knickers and suspenders we can infer that this is a window into long ago; or that the kid is a bit of a dandy.

As with all windows, this one gets more interesting when there is an unsuspecting hot babe seen through it.  A woman in a 19th century dress only slightly less conservative than a burka strolls into the yard.  Darnell is transfixed by this hottie who can neither see nor hear him, just like his wife.  He continues watching as a young daughter shows up and the family is frolicking in this pastoral paradise.  With his binoculars, he is able to see that she has no ring — so possibly a young widow living with her father.

I can see why these images stuck with me for so many years.  They are haunting in both technique and emotion.  Just the voyeuristic act introduces a basic tension because we know it is wrong.  But there is also the fascination with watching someone who doesn’t know they are being watched.  For Darnell, watching this happy — except for, you know, the dead father — family just compounds his pain at the literal loss of his son and the figurative loss of his wife.

On a technical, level, I appreciated that the camera mostly kept its distance.  The family was usually observed from afar as Darnell watched from outside the barrier.  If there were close-ups, it was because a family member approached the barrier, or was observed through binoculars.^[2]  This maintained the other-worldliness of the situation and also illustrated Darnell’s detachment. He was clearly grafting himself into this happy scenario.  Not being able to interact or hear them, the fantasy was perfect, but impossible.

Using an ice-Cube Goldberg device to launch an ice cube at the barrier every 3 seconds, Darnell is able to determine that the barrier drops every day for 15 seconds. Naturally, since Darnell is making progress and intelligently investigating this amazing phenomena, the Army decides he must be stopped.

While he hanging out in the canvas prison, he hears a commotion at the barrier — it has dropped again.  He belts the guard and makes a fast break for the barrier, leaping through the wall.  Now he can’t see the desert or the Army, but the woman can see him.

And then it ends.  Awesomely.  An ending so excellent that I hope I can forget it and be thrilled by it again some day.  They could have gone a few different ways, but they NAILED IT!

This Night Visions is 20/20, baby!

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Referring to the Shire or New Zealand in general.  Mordor, not so much.
• ^[2] My only minuscule criticism is that I wish the binocular POV shots had used the hokey black matting.
• Title Analysis: Although the window metaphor is also used within the episode, it isn’t accurate — the phenomena is actually 3-dimensional rather than a 2-d window.  Possibly, however, it was also meant as reference to a window into the soul.
• I saw that Karen Austin was in this, and remembered her from Night Court.  Turns out it is a different Karen Austin.  I thought the Union had rules against that.  There are actually 6 Karen Austins listed on IMDb.  WTH?
• Only the 2nd (and last) directing gig for Bill Pullman, who starred as Darnell.  Too bad — there was nothing flashy, but damn if it wasn’t just about perfect.

The Millers look at a house that could charitably be called a fixer-upper and honestly be called a tearer-downer. They take their baby with them as the realtor opens the house. It is strange that once Keith sets the baby’s carrier on the floor, he is completely ignored.  In fact, I must have blinked and missed him being carried into the house — until I rewound 30 seconds, I actually thought it was a ghost-baby they couldn’t see.

The realtor is required by TV-law to tell them that a murder occurred there 30 years ago. Keith says that is OK if it saves them $100,000.  Seeing this house, he must be expecting the seller to pay him $75,000 to take it off his hands.

Flash-forward to the Millers living in the house.  Keith comes home from the hardware store which Arriane takes as bad news, as she thought he was at an Alcoholic’s Anonymous meeting.  He awakens that night hearing shouts from the night of the murder.  Like any responsible parent, he pulls a loaded pistol out of the nightstand to investigate.

As he begins the titular renovation, a door slams and he hears a more voices from the night of the murder.  Arriane comes in and suggests the “christen” every room in the house. She suggests starting in the dining room, which is indeed suggestive.  I wonder if the writers intended that.

As they start making out, we see the murderer in the background and Keith gets a chill and leaps up.  He gets crap from Arriane who suggests that he see a therapist.  That night, after dreaming of M&Ms, he awakens to see the murderer enter their bedroom.  He watches the man grab a bottle of hooch from the closet and finish it off.  He tells Keith,  “Get some more!” and tosses the bottle against the wall.

When Arriane comes home from work the next day wearing a suit that would have seemed very 70s in the 80s.  She finds that Keith has pried the padlock off the basement.  You might think they would have checked out the basement before buying the place.  Next week, take a look at the backyard — I hear good things.

She finds the baby’s crib in the basement and comes back up to find a different crib in the baby’s room; also an empty whiskey bottle.  Keith, holding groceries in one arm and their son in the other, seems a little tipsy.  He then takes a belt right in front of his wife.  When she starts to nag him, be punches her out at the urging of the murderer.

As Keith is talking to their baby, Arriane emerges from hiding in the bathroom and does two very unlikely things.  1) she plans to get away and leave her baby there, and 2) when Keith asks where she is going, she gives the least believable answer possible: “Looks like you might need some more whiskey so I thought I’d run out and get you some.” He’s crazy and a drunk, not stupid and drunk.  She might as well have said she was going out to buy him some brass knuckles.

As Keith’s actions are paralleling the night of the murder 30 years ago, he takes a pistol out of the sock drawer.  Christ, is there a drawer in this house that doesn’t contain a gun?  BANG — he shoots her in front of the baby just as his predecessor did.

This was a fairly standard tale until the ending.  It really looked like they were going to go for something truly shocking.  Then it looked like they were going to settle for something somewhat shocking.  Then it was clear they were going to completely puss out.  Then we close on a shot that is supposed to be . . . profound? A revelation?

No-Neck Rollins: “They say you can’t go home again.  But haunted by the ghost of his past, Keith Miller couldn’t go anywhere else.”  Wait, what?  Is Butt-Chin saying that the baby who witnessed the murder 30 years ago grew up to be Keith?  Was there the slightest freaking clue to this in the actual story?  How then did this baby with the blonde hair grow up to be the black-haired Keith?

After close review, there actually is evidence for this twist, but you really have to work for it — the M&M dream turns out to be memories of colored balls in a baby’s toy.  That same toy is seen in the crib which was moved up from the basement. They botched this in a couple of ways, though.  First, the toy is half-hidden under a blanket.  Second, it was never established that the toy belonged to the original baby.

This twist might be even more botched than I give it credit for. Arriane finds a white toy rabbit in the basement crib.  It is never established which baby this toy belonged to, however, new baby was seen in the company of a brown bear.  So if the rabbit belonged to original baby, why was that still in the basement while original baby’s ball-toy was upstairs?  Arriane carries the rabbit back upstairs as if it belongs there, so maybe it does belong to new baby.

And while we’re at it, they could have done a better job with the crib.  I do give them credit for making the original crib a dark color and the new one white.  However, they seem to have made this episode for NSA cryptographers.  We get to see literally about 3 inches of railing during the original murder.

But the hair thing really bothers me.  And if the original murderer was Keith’s father, wouldn’t he have recognized him during the hallucinations?  Granted, he was a toddler at the time of the murder, but wouldn’t he have seen pictures?  Or known this was the house he had lived in?  He was young, but he remembered the colored balls (which inexplicably whack him in the face in his dream).

So maybe it wasn’t him as a baby.

Although, having both men be drunks was probably intended to suggest a family history of alcoholism.  I’m thinking of suggesting it right now.

So maybe it was him as a baby.

I really have no idea.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Hunh?  OK, Keith was renovating the house, but that didn’t really impact the story.  I guess it was his personality also being renovated.  Just seems like more of a stretch than they could make work in 30 minutes.
• I was running out of gas at about the 300 word mark, then heard Tattoo-Boy’s closing.  Maybe I should start listening to the Cryptkeeper’s segments.  Nah.

We’re immediately on thin ice:  strike one, Henry Rollins.  Strike two, a story about a disc jockey.  DJ stories just never work for me because they always feature programs no sane person would ever listen to the in the free market — like NPR ^[1].

At least the episode is not pretending this guy is a saint.  Within a minute he has cut off a caller and insulted the station janitor’s wife.  Not that the truth would have been much of a defense, but she actually is kind of cute in a nerd-girl way.  Nadine doesn’t need this crap and she does a quick pivot back out into the rain.

Tom Fallor is working the graveyard shift at KLED.  His gig is to listen to callers’ scary stories and offer his evaluation.  Like anyone cares what this dope thinks of other people’s creative endeavors . . . two . . .three . . . four . . .

His next call is from Laura who is telling her story, but stops to take delivery of a pizza. Coincidentally, a pizza man shows up at the station with a pre-paid-pie from Tasty Mon Pizza. If they offer ganj as a topping, this could be an even better weed/munchies time-management combo than pot brownies.

He slips his hand in the box and pulls out a slice.  Laura calls back and tells him there is a huge dead rat on the pizza she just received.  He mocks her, but is appalled to find his own pizza also contains a huge dead rat; and anchovies.

Laura continues her call and really creeps Fallor out.  He puts on a little 5th Dimension and grabs his coffee. Unfortunately, he takes his coffee like he takes his plague — black.  OK, that doesn’t quite make sense — I mean he finds another dead rat in his conveniently rat-sized travel cup.  But really, he had it coming — who drinks coffee with pizza?

Fallor decides the rats are the work of the janitor whose gal he insulted.  The janitor proves him wrong by being found hanging by his neck.  He also finds the janitor’s girlfriend with a plastic bag over her head.  He finds that the exterior door is blocked by a car.  I might find this a little more menacing if he had tried calling the police.  Or if he wasn’t working in a place that could broadcast a 50,000 watt 9-1-1 call to thousands of people.

I’m no Don Draper, but wouldn’t it be a better sign for the business if it faced out instead of in?

The killer shows up, and I’m not sure it makes much sense.  It is hard to fairly judge this one because the YouTube video is of such low quality.  Much like Curtains, I don’t know how much better this would have been with a decent print.  My gut feeling is that with a clear picture, this would have been pretty good.  The plot doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, but as an exercise in suspense it works fine.  Even though DJs are notoriously bad characters, Lou Diamond Philips makes the most of what he is given to work with.

It is only a slight act of faith to say this is the best of the series so far.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] I last listened to NPR in 2012.  Just twice, and both times within minutes, they implied Mitt Romney was racist.  It really is a shame — much like the New York Times, NPR is excellent in many ways but so full of intolerance and bias that they are repulsive.  I’ll say this for the New York Times, though — they don’t take my money at the point of a gun.
• I assume the station call letters KLED were mean to suggest KILLED.  There actually is a KLED in Gillette Wyoming, but it began 11 years after this episode.
• Henry Rollins closing statement:  “For all you pains in the asses out there. Remember you can only irritate so many people before you piss off the wrong one.” Ooooh, TV-cursing makes you seem so edgy!

The episode starts out on a miscue with a title card for the Southeastern Florida School of Medicine.  There is no Southeastern Florida — there is only South Florida and Southwest Florida.  Doesn’t seem fair to me either, but tell it to East Virginia.

Medical student Diane Barnes (erroneously named Diane Ballard on IMDb) joins two other students, Paul and Cheryl, in the morgue late at night to examine a body.  They uncover the stiff and see that it has a tattoo on its forehead — a leap too far even for Henry Rollins.  She recognizes the man as a Bokor — an evil voodoo priest — and knows that the tattoo was applied after death to keep him dead and block his evil power.

The lovely Samantha Mathis (Diane) has a slight southern accent.  I don’t ever recall hearing that from her.  I have too much of a tin ear to know if it is well done or legitimate; it does make her even more adorable, though.

Diane refuses to slash into the tattoo.  One of the other students is not so smart and slices right through it.  Diane asks for a coffee break.  When they get back to the slab, the Bokor’s body is missing, along with his extracted organs, and Diane.

They follow Diane out of the morgue.  The Bokor follows Paul and Cheryl, even following after they fall into a well.  Turns out it was a ruse, that Diane is in cahoots with Richard who Paul and Cheryl had caught stealing morphine.  They toss the dead Bokor into the hole with Cheryl and Paul.  Diane and Richard pull out shovels and start filling in the hole.  A couple of things wrong with this:  1) That hole is about 10 feet in diameter and 20 feet deep — it would take a week for them to fill it in.  2) The rate at which they could refill that hole by hand is so slow that Paul and Cheryl could easily just step up on the dirt they shovel in and walk right out.

Back at their love-nest, Diane is cleaning up after their murder spree.  She realizes her bracelet is missing and must have fallen into the well.  That night she goes back to the site and re-digs the hole  All the way down.  Alone.  By hand.  Richard wakes up, goes to the hole and clubs her with a shovel.  He admits aloud that he actually pawned the bracelet last week.

Richard rushes back home a packs a bag because nothing screams innocence like fleeing the scene of a crime.  That night at a hotel, he wakes up bound and gagged.  Standing over him is a bloody, muddy, hot Diane.  She breaks out her autopsy toolkit.

So what happened?  Certainly it is intended that Richard killed Diane because the whole point was to eliminate witnesses to his addiction.  When he awakens, she tells him he should have burned her bones and spread the ashes.  Why, is she also a Bokor?  There is nothing to suggest that.  She does go on to say her Nanny told her, “a Bokor’s lover must be as pure as the sky just as a Bokor’s heart must be as black as the earth.”  I guess she is a Bokor which is really out of left field.

So far, both segments of the first episode have taken some solid, if well-worn, tropes and undermined them with a really sloppy narrative.

Post-Post:

• Meh.  Just that Samantha Mathis should be much more successful.
• IMDb and YouTube.