After enduring two episodes this week of men beating up their wives, finally something to celebrate:  The last episode of Tales of Tomorrow. ^[1]  

Peter has brought his work home with him.  Sadly, he does not work in a bakery or modeling agency, but in a lab that produces toxic chemicals.  He tells Anne he has created “the perfect serum”.  Wow, does it cure cancer?   Maybe reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s?  Spit it out, man!  He tells her, “I gave a shot of this stuff to the monkeys at the lab to see how they reacted.  Instantly, they lost all their behavior control and their inhibitions.”  Yeah, that behavior-control that inhibited monkeys are so famous for.

Unfortunately, the refrigerator at the lab broke down and the serum must be kept cold, so he brought it home.  Pffft, some “perfect” serum.  After putting it next to last night’s meatloaf, he tells Anne that it works on humans too.  “It goes straight to the glands, then they overpower the mind.  That unleashes the evil within the human being!”  Well thank God science cracked this problem; finally we can get some evil peeps ’round here.  I wouldn’t wait for Jonas Salk to share his Nobel Prize. ^[2]

Anne wants to go out to a movie, but in addition to bringing his work home with him, Peter has brought his work home with him.  He pulls papers from his briefcase.  He plans to begin work immediately on an antidote which will bring out the good intentions in people.  Well that’s not really an antidote unless the people are only a**holes because they took the first drug.  What about those who are just naturally a**holes like Robert DeNiro and Peter Fonda? ^[3]

After a solid 15 seconds of working, he packs his bag and announces he is going for a walk, then returning to the lab to check on the monkeys.  Anne consoles herself by having a piece of the pie that was on the rack below the leaky test-tubes.  Just like the monkeys, Anne loses her inhibitions immediately and begins writhing seductively in her chair.  She dances around the apartment.  Then she gleefully pours the test tubes in the sink.  My God, if that gets in the water supply, New Yorkers could turn into angry, loud, obnoxious jerks!  Then she sets fire to Peter’s notes.

The next morning, Peter sees that the test-tubes are empty.  Anne tells him it was an accident and he isn’t too upset.  Unlike every scientist in sci-fi history, he is able to reproduce his discovery.  Well . . . he isn’t so sure when he gets to the lab and realizes he has lost his notes and has no backup.  Now that’s a Hollywood sci-fi scientist!

He returns home and confronts Anne about a call she received from his lab assistant the previous night.  She lies about it.  Then she giddily tells him she poured the serum down the drain and “burned your precious formula!”  She is happily in his face as she proudly confesses, even trilling the R’s in precious — a great choice by the actress.  “She taunts him that she “destroyed everything you care about.”

Peter figures out that Anne ate the infected pie.  Again, he tells her it will be OK because he can analyze the pie and reverse-engineer the formula.  She still says she wants to destroy him.  She pulls out a kitchen knife, and says she wants to “destroy you the way you destroyed me.”  She plans to kill herself so she will be on his conscience.  He promises to give up his career if she will put down the knife.

Peter’s lab assistant calls to tell him the serum has worn off, the monkeys are acting like little angels, although them feces-hurling angels like in the Old Testament.  He asks Anne to not do anything crazy for 15 minutes.  The serum wears off and she starts crying.

Meh, not the worst episode of the series.  In a three-person cast which included Rod Steiger and James Dean, only Margaret Phillips’ name was announced at the top of the show — and she deserved it.  Rod Steiger is the same mumbling, erratic, inexplicably praised lump he would evolve into.  As the lab assistant, James Dean — also inexplicably revered — wasn’t given much to do, but at least he didn’t cry this time.  Mags came off great though!  She was attractive as Before, but as After she was an untamed, grinning seductress / killer pie-eater.

Thus endeth Tales of Tomorrow.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Last of the three DVD sets released, anyway.
• ^[2] I am shocked to learn Salk did not get a Nobel Prize.  Barack Obama got one for reasons that still no one can figure out.  But saving millions of kids world-wide from a devastating disease only gets you into the Polio Hall of Fame (no, really).
• ^[3] This doesn’t need to break down by party.  Forget politics — really, not one person in that auditorium thought DeNiro was just coarse and trashy?  And Jesus Christ, WTF did Henry Fonda do to his kids?

Dr. Henry Marco (Boris Karloff) is in a bed at State Hospital dead of pneumonia; or maybe just sleeping — it’s hard to tell with Karloff.  Wait, he’s breathing, barely hanging on.  The doctor says he has had no visitors and no one knows where he came from.  Karloff claimed he was from the future, but no one believed him.  In his stupor, he mumbles for penicillin, but the doctors in 1910 have never heard of it.

We flash back, and by back I mean forward, to 1953 where Marco’s wife is nagging him to unlock the basement door where he is working on his experiments.  He opens the door so Jane can berate him about their money problems and “this fantastic, stupid comic book idea of yours!”  She motions toward a seat surrounded by chrome and metal disks.  He asks her what she would say if he told her he could go back to any time in the past.  Jane threatens to smash the time machine and runs back upstairs.

Dr. Marco sees the time machine as the answer to all his problems.  He is tired of being poor, and he is tired of merely treating headaches and colds.  He might also want to visit the young Henry Marco back around the Civil War and tell him to steer clear of that Jane chick.

He takes off his lab jacket, and puts on a proper suit jacket.  He grabs a few items < 3.4 ounces from the fridge and sits in the time machine.  As he goes back in time, we see stock footage of catastrophes such as Hiroshima (1945), Pearl Harbor (1941), and FDR’s inauguration (1933).  He finally sees some good news about Charles Lindbergh making it (1927) and plops down in 1923.

He tries to introduce modern medicines to the 1923 medical community, but they are understandably skeptical.  He finally gets in to see Dr. Giles and Dr. Laskey without an appointment. ^[1]   They are hesitant to try his miracle drug without proper testing. Also because he wants $250,000 in bonds which will mature in 1953.  Marco asks for a test subject on the verge of death from meningitis, pneumonia, or the boogie-woogie flu.  He will revive the poor sap with his so-called “penicillin.”

Dr. Giles is a smart dude and leaves.  Dr. Laskey is interested, though.  He tells Marco there is a great candidate in the children’s ward — a little girl hours from death.  Karloff is giddy with excitement.  He injects the girl with 300,000 units.  Her temperature continues to go up.  He gives her another 300,000.  Then she gets better.  No, wait, she dies an agonizing death with a 105 degree temperature.

Karloff’s excuse is that she was a little too close to death for the penicillin to be effective.  Besides, one case is not enough to evaluate his cure.  He asks for another test subject, but is refused.  To make amends to Dr. Laskey whose career he killed along with the girl, he gives them a bottle of penicillin for free.

Marco goes back home to 1953 for no reason that I can see.  While there, he invites Jane to go back to 1923 with him, also for no reason  I can see.  She declines, so he offers to bring her back a souvenir, “an autographed picture of President Taft” even though Harding or Coolidge was the president in 1923.  Jane isn’t scared, she just thinks he is tampering with things beyond his understanding.  He says, “Some people look to the future for their success.  I get mine out of the past.”  He explains, “I wanted to bring them the benefits of penicillin,” but leaves out the part about the $250k. ^[3]

Marco decides to try again.  He will go the the same company, but in 1910!  Dammit, Giles is running things then too.  He held on to that job like Justice Ginsberg.  Even in 1910, he is experienced enough to not use untested drugs.  He has Marco hauled away for impersonating a physician, and just generally being a lunatic.

It is not clear what happens to bring us back to the opening scene.  It is six months later, still 1910, so Marco somehow got pneumonia the same year he arrived.  He dies, and Laskey holds the penicillin bottle in his hand.  “If only there were such a drug!”  Wait, was he carrying that bottle around for six months?

So Dr. Marco failed at saving millions of lives by inventing penicillin 18 years early.  Did he at least drop Charles Lindbergh a note telling him to keep an eye on his kid? ^[2]

Footnotes:

• ^[1] As he is introduced, we learn that the time travel has apparently changed his name to Harry.  Or the other actor screwed up.
• ^[2] Although, to be fair, Lindbergh was only 8 at the time, so it probably wouldn’t have helped.
• ^[3] I’m sure he had that earmarked for Alexander Fleming and family after denying him the discovery.

Leslie Nielsen is hanging out in his apartment wearing a tie, and lets his wife Joan in with groceries, all exactly like he did six weeks ago in Another Chance.  Maybe this is the other chance.  He reminds her that he left the agency — I’m thinking advertising, not CIA — a year ago, and all he has to show for it is one short story published in a small magazine.  For six months, he has been working on a novel.  And I mean working!  With paper, ribbons, and a manual typewriter.

He receives a letter from Lee Morton, a professional writer offering to be his collaborator.  Joan wants him to keep trying on his own, but Leslie thinks this could lead to big money.  I guess he heard about James Patterson and Bill Clinton.  After she goes back to work another shift, he calls Morton to ask about collaborating and any #METOO moments that might embarrassingly derail TV appearances. ^[1]

He goes to Morton’s office.  Morton says that he’s had a long successful career.  “But I’m getting older.  “Oh, the stories are still there, the ideas still flow, but they don’t come fast enough.”  He tells Leslie, “I’ll pay you $500 for every story you finish for me.” ^[2]  As a test, he reads Leslie a summary of one of his unfinished stories.  Leslie improvs a tale of a sordid love triangle which ends with two people dead, leaving just a love point, geometrically-speaking.

Joan is working late at the store where she is a clerk.  Her boss leaves just as the morning papers are delivered.  Wait, what?  How bloody late did they work?  It makes no sense, but I think it is just convenient sloppiness in the script.  Leslie stops by the shop very excited.  He finished off two stories for Morton and was paid $1,000 in cash.  Joan is upset because he had promised her he would not use the collaborator.  Leslie, however, is ecstatic that “I finally sold something.”  So I guess Mr. Big Shot forgot his first sale to that small magazine.  Typical.

At the store, Leslie notices one of the newspapers has an article describing a crime just like the one he made up for Morton.  Two days later, Leslie is still unable to reach Morton.  Joan wants him to return the money because it was “too easy” and has seemed to have had a sinister outcome.  Well, not really — this was the first story he pitched to Morton for free, not one of the two he was paid $500 each for.  “Will all the stories you write for him end in some tragedy?” she frets.

He says of course not.  “The second one I wrote was altogether different.  It centers around some hotel out in California.”  Joan tells him about that day’s hotel fire in Palm Springs where 40 people could check out any time they want, but they could never leave!  OMG!  That was in the afternoon paper that arrived at 6 am! ^[3]  She further tells Leslie that she has checked all the usual writer hang-outs — bookstores, bars, the unemployment office — and no one has heard of Lee Morton.  Joan says if Leslie collaborates with him again, he can forget about collaborating with her ever again.  He grabs the cash and heads out the door to return it to Morton.

He confronts Morton and says he can’t work for him anymore.  “Those two stories I finished for you — the fire and the murder — they came true!”  Morton claims it is a coincidence.  He pleads with Leslie to write just one more story at double the payment.  Leslie just can’t turn down that kind of money, so he takes the gig.  When he forgets to pick Joan up from work, she calls Morton.  She is distraught that Leslie lied to her and is writing another story.

Leslie finishes off the story with a car crash killing a woman.  When he turns it in, Morton tells him that his wife called and is tired of his lies.  She is driving back to live with her parents.  Of course, Joan dies in an auto accident.  He instantly regrets killing the character in his story and makes notes for an epilogue where her husband marries a blonde 10 years younger with big boobs.  What a cad.  Just a real jerk.  Who thinks like that?

Meh.  Another week, another episode.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Not unusually for this series, this line of dialogue is diametrically opposed to the actual problem being shown — the ideas are flowing too fast.
• [2] I think we can all agree Clinton didn’t write a single word of that book.  The farce here is thinking that the head of the Patterson Industrial Complex did either.
• [3] How did he not regard his story as tragic?  It obviously included the fire which killed 40 people.
• Similar premise to TZ’s Printer’s Devil.
• Title Analysis:  No ghost.

Professor Kimsworth is looking snappy in his smoking jacket.  He goes to his bookshelf and carefully makes a selection.  He holds it very close to his face like a man with presbyopia or a Hustler subscription.  Confirming it is the desired volume, he hands it to someone just out of frame.  The person begins reading A Scandal in Bohemia and the game is afoot.

Not as sophisticated as the robot on the new Netflix Lost in Space, but less robotic than the new John Robinson.

A former student, Sidney Strong, rings the bell at the remote house and Kimsworth’s daughter Patricia lets him in.  She takes Sidney into the reading room.  He relieves himself after the long trip, then they go to the room where the actual reading is happening.  Sidney doesn’t want to interrupt, but Professor Kimsworth tells Herr Doktor to stick a bookmark in it.  Sidney is stunned when he sees Herr Doktor is a robot.

Some time later, Patricia calls Sidney.  She is worried because her father has started having literary conversations with Herr Doktor.  After first the reading, then the discussion, she wants to put a stop to this before her father asks for any other oral pleasures from Herr Doktor.  Of course, the primitive robot was not actually conversing; Kimsworth just seemed to be getting a little demented.  Sidney is more interested in making money.

She goes to the reading room, but finds her father has dozed off.  Herr Doktor says, “Wake him up, wake him up so that both of you can hear what I’ve got to say.”  Patricia is terrified as Herr Doktor has never appeared sentient before.  She tries unsuccessfully to shut him off.  It says, “What good are switches?  Switches are for machines.  Switches have no effect on men.”  The professor says to him, “That will be all for now.”  Herr Doktor replies, “On the contrary, that will not be all for now.  In fact, we have only just begun.”  That’s about as good an act break as you’re going to get out of this series.

When we return, Kimsworth is still proclaiming that this is impossible.  Herr Doktor condemns Kimsworth, “You made a man.  A man but not a man; a half-man.  And then you fed it romance and adventure.  You filled its coils with love for living.”  This is shockingly good stuff from this series.  Herr Doktor tells Kimsworth he must finish the job.

Oh, the irony:  Herr Doktor forces the professor to read to him.  He drives the old man to exhaustion.  It really makes no sense as the robot could have absorbed this info much faster than a human could read it to him.  But the symmetry of the master becoming the slave is just too delicious to worry about that.

While Herr Doktor is taking his final exams — no, really — Sidney comes back.  He rings the bell, which alerts Herr Doktor.  He strangles the professor and demands that Patricia send Sidney away.  She sends him away, and Herr Doktor releases the professor so he can grade his exam — no, really.

When Herr Doktor and Patricia are alone, he apparently decides it is time for post-exam Spring Break.  He begins quoting a Shakespeare sonnet to Patricia.  OK, not exactly Beach Blanket Bacchanalia, but he is clearly looking for love, using the ideas he has learned while reading the classics.  He laments how the professor built him as a machine to read, but exposed him to ideas of love and romance.  “He gave me beauty to read and beauty to look at.  Don Quixote, D’Artagnan, Romeo — men who loved, and a machine can love too.  And to the machine, you were always the woman.”

Mind blown.  Did this inane little series actually just circle back around to A Scandal in Bohemia?  The famous first line of that story, read aloud by the professor earlier, is “To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.”  And who better for Herr Doktor to identify with than the emotionless Sherlock Holmes?  If this wasn’t a coincidence — and it might well have been — then bravo!

Unfortunately, Herr Doktor must have also read de Sade as he starts getting rough with Patricia.  He then clubs the professor when he tries to help.  He insists that Patricia must love him because he fought for her.  He must be referring to the brief clubbing of the 90 year old professor.  There isn’t much honor in that, but credit again to the writer.  The classics he read taught him a woman must be fought for, or won in a duel.  How many people have to die before we put warning labels on these books!

She yells at him, “The books are wrong!” and this rocks his world.  Herr Doktor stumbles back to the reading room und ist kaput.  The professor opens him up and removes the defective part.  “The heart of the machine is broken . . . like Don Quixote, he was a man in love.”

Of course, by any objective standard, the episode is dreadful.  Judging it within the series, though, it is a winner.  Yes, the robot is Ludacris, but whaddya gonna do?  They had no money.  However, I appreciated the signs of life in the writing.  It was more ambitious than almost any other episode.  Even this was uneven, though.  What was the point of Sidney even being in the episode?  He comes, he goes, he comes back, he leaves, he returns, Patricia gets rid of him.  I really expected him to peek in a window, see there was trouble and break in for a proper duel.  But no.

Other Stuff:

• Mercedes McCambridge (Patricia) went on to be the voice of the demon in The Exorcist.  Could this proper 37 year old low-budget TV actress have ever imagined that in 20 years she would be on the big screen telling a priest his mother sucks c****s in hell?

Borden and his guide Brenegan come staggering out of the dense jungle into a slightly less dense area of the jungle.  They are showing up 15 days late and without the porters slaves and supplies they were supposed to bring.  Borden blames Brenegan for their associates slaves abandoning them.  He was “vicious, inhuman toward them.”  Like some kind of partner-master.

They walk a little more, calling out for the group they were supposed to meet.  They quickly arrive at a cabin which just baffles me.  If it was this close by, why didn’t they just rendezvous here?  The cabin is stocked with food, so Borden says they will stay the night.  On the table, they notice a large titular cocoon.

They hear a scream and run outside.  Their last porter has found the bodies of his co-workers fellow slaves.  Borden says, “Some giant leach of an animal drained them of every drop of blood.”  They hear noise in the brush and Brenegan raises his weapon.  A woman staggers out and babbles incoherently about “hundreds of them” before fainting.  Borden carries her back to the cabin.

While Borden tends to Susan, who I think is his daughter or niece, Brenegan reads from the notes of the late Dr. Blankford:

August 3 . . .  The creature died this night.  Conclusion: it could not have been of earthly origin.  By some miracle, the meteorite brought it here.  A sample of life from beyond our universe in the form of a monstrous, invisible insect.”

Borden grabs the notebook and reads of Blankford’s discovery of a giant cocoon.  An invisible creature the size of a large dog crawled out of it.  Blankford and his assistant caught the creature and covered it with plaster to create a visible statue of it.  Borden continues reading:

July 23 . . . the plaster model is finished.  It is the most dreadful insect I have ever seen.  Note to self, order another case of model glue.

I hope it was worth the wait since the journal entry dates suggest the plaster took 11 months to dry.

July 28 . . . I discovered what the creature feeds on.  Its exclusive nutriment is . . . human blood!”

Exclusive?  No wonder it was so pissed off.  It must have gotten pretty hungry back on its homeworld with no humans.  They look around and find the plaster model Blankford made.  It is indeed hideous, a modern art masterpiece.  Susan wakes up groggily saying, “Run away, hide!  There are hundreds of them!”

When she is fully awake, she tells of the attack of the invisible creatures.  She says, “Mr. Bordon, please don’t leave me.” ^[1]  Brenegan gets the idea that the insects could be inside the cabin already and grabs his gun.  That night they are awakened by scratching noises and one of the beasts really does make it into the cabin.

The invisible critter attacks Brenegan, and Borden inexplicably saves the maniacal paranoid whiner.  He is able to pry the insect off and tie it up.  We see the “empty” coil of ropes moving about as it struggles.  Then Susan is attacked; wait, no, she just fainted.

That night, Brenegan finally gets full cabin fever.  He takes down the boxes stacked in front of the door and makes a run for it.  In seconds he is screaming off-screen as the insects attack him.  His death was not for nothing though.  First, it raises the caliber of the acting about 50%.  Second, he knocked over a box of insecticide canisters and that seems to have killed the insect they captured.  Hmmmmm, insecticide is fatal to insects — who knew?

Borden and Susan load up with canisters of the bug spray and make their escape.  They make it safely to the river.  Back at the cabin, we see hints that one of the insects has gotten into the cabin.  It goes to the statute of its fallen comrade and pulls it over with a black string visible even in this lousy transfer.

This episode is frustrating in its perfect illustration of the limitations of the time.  It was created by the team of Don Medford and Frank De Fellita, who have been responsible for the best episodes of the series.  It has all the elements for a classic episode, but is frequently undermined by technology.

As always, the transfer is just awful.  But it is just a kinescope of the original live broadcast.  Whaddya gonna do?  Have ya seen that Apollo 11 film lately?  The best argument against a moon-landing hoax is that hoaxsters would have had better footage.

Some of the acting is just over-the-top hammy.  I’m sure in 1953 that actors had figured out they didn’t still have to play to the last row of a live audience, or wildly over-emote like they did before talkies.  However, I think this genre still brought these traits out in them.  Borden was OK, but Susan was a little hysterical.  Brenegan was just a maniacal, cackling wild man.

The music was fine.  There were even bits that are pretty close to music in some classic movies.  There is a bit from The Shining ^[2] and a sequence that sounds a lot like the shark attack theme from Jaws.

In looking for that Jaws clip, I realized that the episode needs no excuses.  For what they had to work with in technology and budget, they did a fine job.  The set-up and key plot-points could have provided Halloween-level suspense — maybe in 1953, it did.  Zooming through undistracted by note-taking, I was struck by the interesting camera-work . . . the zooms in on Brenegan’s eyes (or the insect’s eyes), the focus on Susan as the men fought the insect, the effect of the tied-up invisible insect, the overwrought music (used effectively for a change).  If you have the imagination to look past the superficial problems, and appreciate what they were going for in 1953, this is another winner for Medford and De Felitta.  Relative winner.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] But I thought they were related.  When the two men were searching for their companions, he called out, “Bordon!”  But his name is Bordon, so I assumed the other person was his brother (as his father would have been far too old for such shenanigans; the 20 year old dame I mean, not the safari).  Pffft, I have no idea who these people are.
• ^[2] Bartok, I see from You Tube comments.
• Nancy Coleman (Susan) previously acted in Dangerously They Live (1941), The Gay Sisters (1942), and Her Sister’s Secret (1946) which are the last three clips I watched on Pornhub.