T. Bradley shortly before beating.
Host Truman Bradley breaks the glass on a fire alarm and pulls the switch. An alarm begins blaring, and he says, “In a few minutes, 23 fire engines will converge on this place to fight a 3-alarm fire”. He gives a big laugh. “Only, there isn’t any fire! I merely wanted to explain as graphically as possible what happens to a human body overpowered by spreading infection.”
He says when the human body is in danger, “an alarm goes up” and white corpuscles flock to attack the scene of the infection. Like the 50 pissed-off fireman that will beat the crap out of him about 2 minutes from now.
Dr. Scott and a cat walk into Dr. Bach’s office. Bach says only one week ago the cat had a broken back. It was cured by a dose of Scott’s new miracle hormone. In one of several laughingly bad bits of dialogue, Dr. Bach recalls the drug’s previous success:
“The miraculous cure of a rabid dog and a tubercular guinea pig.”
However, Bach still refuses to allow him to try his new wonder drug on a human.
Well, there is one candidate, a hopeless case. They go to the room of a patient “in 
the last stages of tuberculosis.” I mean the very last — she will die in a few hours. Kyra Zelas agrees to try the experimental drug.
Over the next few days, she regains her vitality, begins to eat, and sits up in bed. Scott and Bach examine her x-rays and see that her lungs are entirely clear and shapely. Kyra doesn’t know what to do with her life now that Dr. Scott has cured her. She says:
“He made a dog well and cured a cat. Now me.”
Bach assures the grown woman twice that she is a very important girl. He says, “Why don’t you come stay a few days at my place?” He gives her an injection of vitamin B and notices that the puncture wound heals immediately.
After work, the doctors go to Bach’s house to check on Kyra. Bach tells him about the puncture wound healing and says, “this case is not finished.” Bach’s housekeeper tells him that Kyra never showed up. They get a call from the police. Kyra was picked up near the unemployment office a few minutes after they were robbed, with $700 in her pocket.
The doctors go to the police station. The clerk from the unemployment office is able to give a description of the robber. “She was skinny, looked sick, had on a blue dress, black stringy hair.” They bring in a line-up of women for him to make an identification. Dr. Scott says she is not in the line-up. Bach, however, recognizes her as the 2nd from the left. Scott says, “That’s impossible. That girl is blonde and beautiful.” However, Bach recognizes . . .
“the same bony structure in the face”
Sadly, at this point, the video’s sound went out. If they had a sign language interpreter, he would be slapping his knees at some of this dialogue.
Kyra continues to show up throughout the episode with increasingly stylish hairdos and snappy outfits. Even without sound, it is not hard to follow, though.
Eventually, some creep with a hose in his hand is peeking in her bedroom widow as she goes to sleep, which gives me deja vu.
Hey, wait a minute, I saw this exact same scene in Tales of Tomorrow’s The Miraculous Serum two years ago! That’s why that’s why the Peeping Tom act feels familiar . . . er, yeah, that’s it.
The guy slips the hose in her window and pumps in CO2 to knock her out. He knows it is enough when the candle by her bed goes out. In both episodes, Dr. Bach and Dr. Scott [1] worry that the cured woman has grown too beautiful, too smart, too powerful, and out of their control, ergo must be put back in her place. This must be a metaphor for something . . . or maybe it is just the thing itself in the 1950s.
Both episodes give a story credit to Stanley G. Weinbam for The Adaptive Ultimate. [2]
Other Stuff:
- [1] The doctors retain the same names from the story (give or taken an “e”), however the exotic Kyra Zelas was a pedestrian Carol Williams in the version aired 3 years earlier on Tales of Tomorrow.
- [2] Weinbaum used the pseudonym John Jessel on Science Fiction Theatre. But after his name appearing on Tales of Tomorrow, who wouldn’t?
A couple of dicks — you’ll see in a second — are driving up to the Daniels Farm. “An ideal place to bring up a child. But also a place that is lonely and secluded, if there are secrets that one wishes to hide from the outside world.”
Burton says the real find is the pictures Keller took through his prototype telescope. He has found pictures of an asteroid heading toward earth. Of more concern to me is that giant spear zooming our way. Burton shows Cole the postcard. He recognizes PQ – QP = 1H4 as Keller’s Sub-Quantum Theory of the Universe. [1] The postcard is suspiciously dated 1 year before Keller announced his KSQ breakthrough to the world.
I guess Nina accepts their Ludcris offer because they are working for the next 3 days on the electronic telescope to learn more about the asteroid. They finally locate it, but discover it is not an asteroid. Cole says it is a “man-made” object; although I think he just means it was fabricated, rather than occurring naturally. “Man-made” includes aliens; just not alien women. Suddenly, they lose sight of the object and get a message on the radio: Say nothing until you hear from Barcelona.
Not much here, but at least it did have a story and a mystery. Sadly, the cast did not help. Walter Kingsford was fine and credible as Dr. Cole. Christine Larson was angrier than seemed necessary, but that might have been due to weakness in the screenplay. The killer was Burton. His line deliveries were maybe the dullest, flattest, most wooden acting I have seen in years (and I just saw Gabriel Byrne in Hereditary!). His performance truly must be seen to be appreciated.
“It’s hard to believe that termites cost millions of dollars every year by their devastation of telephone and telegraph poles in the United States. This is the central research laboratory of the Continental Telephone Company. Scientists are employed by this firm to develop chemical preservatives for telephone poles in defense against woodpeckers, carpenter ants, and termites.”
Clausen tells him Pat’s father, Dr. Hastings, mans the termite research outpost in Peru. He had asked for an electronics expert to be sent down. The last “chemical shipment” that came from him was accompanied by moldy, unreadable notes. Pat ran an analysis on the solution, assuming it was a new insecticide.
They arrive at the outpost, which is a tent in the jungle. They immediately find the generator has been stripped for parts. Pat, quite the detective, notices that Dr. Hastings had not changed the calendar in 22 days; but maybe he just had the hots for Miss October. [4] Not only that, she knows her father had 3 pairs of glasses and all 3 are there in the tent.
They notice a tunnel that was not in Dr. Hastings’ notes and conclude that the termites swarmed the area to create it. Pat grimaces as she realizes her father was “eaten alive by termites.” Bill says, “It must have happened while he was asleep” (i.e. he was sleeping like a log). He further concludes the termites were attracted by the Doctor’s morning wood from dreaming about Bettie Page, but is too much of a gentleman to say so.
In a few seconds the old woman’s face relaxes and her eyes shut. The overly-optimistic Bondar does not check her pulse, but rather asks, “Mrs. Canby, do you know me?” He tells his students that not only is she not asleep, but some are her senses are more acute than when she is awake. He drapes a handkerchief in front of her face, and has a student hold an open book behind it. She astounds the class by being able to read the text, although she mistakes a booger for a comma.
Back at home, Julie Bondar is saddened by the loss of her husband’s cushy job. She suggests that maybe if he had concentrated less on the para- and more on the -psychology, he might still have the gig. He says she was never supportive and considers his work “the foolish fumblings of the family idiot!” Sing it, sister!
Bondar is uncomfortable having his crazy beliefs put to the test like, you know, science. He argues that such skills can’t be turned on and off like a water tap. The Dean, quite appropriately, accuses him of not really believing in this stuff himself. Bondar says that psychics usually have a possession of the victim to work with, like an article of clothing. Whew, guess we can’t test my beliefs, nosiree! His wife helpfully reminds him that he has a letter from Mannheim, and Bondar almost does a 
That does not work either, so Bondar tries using light as a stimulus. Maybe they were still using the fungus, because he shines a spot in Mrs. Canby’s eye, then shines it in Julie’s for no reason I can figure. Trying to put Mrs. Canby under, Bondar counts slowly from 1 to 29. Think of that — on network TV, they had a scene where absolutely nothing happened except a dude counted slowly for 30 seconds. Maybe that earlier 10 second countdown tested well. Mrs. Canby freaks out at the pressure they put on her and is taken away.
Like Tales of Tomorrow, you really have to grade this series on a curve. Objectively, the episode is awful. However, considering the budget, the times, and compared to the rest of the series, parts of the episode are just a masterpiece. The metronome, the editing, the counting, the shot compositions . . . there was just a lot to like here.