Chris Taylor is the 1980s:  Yellow polo shirt that might as well have no buttons . . . collar turned up . . . worn under a suit jacket . . . padded shoulders . . . sleeves pushed up his arms.  I guess it is presentism to judge people in the past.  Hey, Shakespeare, what’s up with that air filter around your neck? ^[1]

Chris is pitching miracle supplement Fit Forever in what appears to be an infomercial, with the exaggerated speech and practiced awful jokes.  When the camera pulls back to reveal he is working this hard in a junky living room for a single uninterested housewife who is ironing, it is a pretty good gag and bodes well for the episode.

Maybe my optimism was premature.  This episode suffers the same lack of coherence as A Whole New You by the same writer.  He meets up with old girlfriend Cheryl in a restaurant.  He got her into the Fit Forever biz.  She has done so well, that she has been promoted, “I am no longer your distributor.  I’m your competitor.”  Wait, Chris doesn’t own the company, he seems to be selling door-to-door — how is that above a distributor?

She says, “I found something inside me that really makes a difference.  I’m stronger now.”  Well, great, you go girl!  The problem is that she mocks him for never having used the product, “not one day in your life”.  This is exactly the opposite of where the scene should go.  Given what comes later, it should have been made clear that Cheryl had never used the product so that we clearly understood later where her new strength really came from.  To  muddy things even more, Chris says “I put you on Fit Forever.”  He clearly means that she used it, but her response is immediately about her financial success so it is not clear whether he put her on it as a user, or put her on it as a career.

The shot so nice they used it twice

When Cheryl goes to answer a phone, Chris takes a look through her sales receipts to poach some customers.  I still don’t understand where they are.  It is clearly a restaurant — there is a cash register, glasses hanging from a rack above, liquor bottles.  It is morning and they are standing behind the bar, so clearly they have some connection to it, but what?  She takes a call — does she work there part-time?  I thought she was doing so well financially.  Why is he there?  In my A Whole New You post, I questioned whether anyone on the set spoke English.  That episode was set in France; I don’t know what the excuse is here.

Chris goes to an old folks homes to talk to one of Cheryl’s leads, wisely making it his first stop because their clocks are ticking.  The old woman says she is no salesman, but Chris says they have a built-in market with the residents.  He says they will all want it for the secret ingredient that makes them feel young again.  All for the low, low price of $5,000 — hey this is starting to sound like Aqua Vita.  While the old woman is writing the check, he sees a beautiful young woman; at least relatively i an old folks home.

She looks even more relatively lovely when she leaves in her hideous orange Volkswagen Thing.  Again, I question the choices.  She is supposed to be an attractive, elegant woman.  Why do they have her driving this German POS (piece of Scheiss)?  He follows her home, as guys do.  When she carries a bundle of neatly-cut store bought wood into her house, he steals mail from her mailbox, as guys do.  He finds a letter addressed to:

Belinda Hascombe

1020 Faygate Lane

Washington

857112

My first though was, they don’t have cities in Washington?  Then I gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought, maybe it is Washington DC (and they forgot the DC, which I could totally believe from this bunch).  I figured the Zip Code would confirm that, but the Zip has a Twilight Zonish 6 digits.  Then I’m thinking, maybe this is supposed to be Canada — who knows what kind of crazy Zip Codes they use up there — but no, there is an American flag on the stamp.  And I wouldn’t say Faygate too quickly, either.  Just amazing.

He does not hesitate to walk right into her house, as guys do.  She is laying wood out by the hot tub, which he coincidentally hopes to do later himself — heyyoooo!  He tries to sell her Fit Forever and its titular special ingredient.  Belinda spots him as a Leo because he such a good salesman.  He tells her she is “an awesome chick” and would make a great Fit Forever distributor.  And believing in astrology, she’s used to peddling horseshit.  Fortuitously, she is having a party that night and can scam all her friends.  Chris opens his briefcase and his sales book is gone.

He panics and drives back to the Sunset Care Home.  He finds Cheryl there holding his book.  She has already copied it and makes a quip about his female distributors that I couldn’t understand even after multiple replays.  I’m sure it was great, though.

I’m not a fan of emojis, LOLs, etc but I did have to LOL at this.  When Chris pulls out of Sunset Care Home, we can see Belinda’s distinctive orange VW Thing ahead of him on the road — remember, Belinda is now back at her house.  They re-used the same piece of film (picture above).  I’m no director, but how long could it have taken to set up a second shot?  Or to edit around the car?  Or to use a more nondescript blue/brown/gray Oldsmobuick ^[2] that I would not have even noticed?  Or to not compound the problem by having 2 identifiable pedestrians prominently in the shots?  Or to use 2 cameras simultaneously shooting at different angles?  Or to not pan past the orange car, then swing back to actually catch it a second time for a few frames?

Back at casa de Belinda, she comes out of the house and gets into her car which — what the heck? — now has the convertible top down.  Ach du Lieber!  Chris pulls up as she is leaving.  She says she’ll be right back and is fine with the stranger waiting alone in her house with her bank statements, jewelry, and underwear.  I guess she never locks her house since he goes right back in.

Oh, he isn’t alone.  Belinda’s friend Elizabeth is there — her punky, slutty, gothy friend Elizabeth.  Maybe I’m just looking for trouble now, but that is some lame-ass character-naming there.  At least Esther Nairn was played for a joke.  She downs a glass of Fit Forever.  Despite Chris touting the secret ingredient, she says “something is missing” and pours the rest down the drain.

He asks her how many friends are coming to the party.  She says 10 or eleven.  I’ll be charitable and assume she isn’t including herself and Belinda in that count — that would get them the requisite 13 for a coven.  But why would she have even suggested 10, which would only get them to 12 women?  Surely the writer knew a coven needs 13 witches.  Right?  Right?  She says she just hopes there is enough of him to go around which is a pretty good line.  He asks her sign and she says, “Over 1 Billion Served.” What, did some else write the 2nd half of this episode?  Like a writer?

That night at the party, the music is playing, wine is flowing, and Chris is the only man there.  He sees Elizabeth slip into the hot tub naked and joins her.  She grabs a can of Fit Forever and dumps in into the bubbling water.  Belinda and her guests — including Cheryl — now all dressed in white, circle the hot tub.  They chant, “We banish you.”

Belinda says, “Better luck next lifetime” and Cheryl clubs him in the head.  This sequence is pointlessly repeated — literally the same footage — two more times.  The screen goes red and returns to show Chris floating lifelessly in the water surrounded by the witches.

The titular Hitchhiker seems a little more interactive this episode.  A Fit Forever can rolls down the road and he stops it with his foot.  Now just WTF did that can come from?  He closes, “Chris promised a secret ingredient.  He gave up everything to deliver the goods.”  And tosses the can away.  They should call this The Litterer.

I have to constantly compare this to A Whole New You because they are from the same writer and have some of the same problems.  This episode, however, is far superior.  It does not star Elliott Gould, which is a good start to any production.  Dean Paul Martin does a great job as the unctuous salesman.  He is even able to sell some gags appropriated from Steve Martin.  I totally bought it as awkward humor from his character rather than laziness from the writer — and that is almost never successfully done on-screen.  Candy Clark as Cheryl elevates the episode with her 1980s perkiness.

Most of the problems above are just sloppiness ^[3], not show killers.  They just compounded the problem that this is a pretty straightforward story:

• Chris was not a great guy, but did he deserve to be killed?
• Was he just a random dude that they needed for a sacrifice?  I would guess not since Cheryl set him up to meet Belinda at the old folks home.
• Why didn’t the old woman buy the $5,000 of product from Cheryl?  They seemed very friendly.
• Was she in on the set-up?  If so, then why didn’t they show her wearing the ankh symbol that the other women wore?
• What did Elizabeth mean when she said something was missing from the drink?  It feels like that was meant to be significant.
• Why did Elizabeth pour the Fit Forever into the hot tub?  Actually, bathing in one of these miracle cures rather than drinking it seems seems like a concept that could have set up a much better episode.
• And what is this freakin’ special ingredient that is so special that they mention it repeatedly and named the episode after it?  Nothing is done with it.  Nothing.  It does not even rise to the level of a McGuffin.  It is a goose-egg.  It is an egg McGuffin.
• Maybe if the coven had started selling New & Improved Fit Forever with a special ingredient, they would have had something.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert for the 1973 Soylent Green.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] I originally made a note about George Washington’s wig, but turns out it wasn’t a wig.  What a yankee doodle dandy.
• ^[2] A shout-out to Fletch which co-starred Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (Belinda).
• ^[3] The sloppiness is surprising since the director went on to great shows like Fargo and Breaking Bad.
• The episode did not air as scheduled due to Dean Paul Martin’s recent death in a jet crash.  An HBO spokesman said “on review, some of the lines were in poor taste” so it was replaced by The Legendary Billy B.  You know, the episode about the dead 1960s rock star . . . which Martin was in the 1960s.  It’s not logic, it’s HBO.

A blind Stan Lee doppelganger is walking his dog.  He passes a Bob Dylan doppelganger.  Someone yells, “F*** you all!” since this is HBO and guest star Kirstie Alley is unlikely to take her top off.  We hear a gunshot.  He looks around to see where it came from — the blind man looks around, I mean — this is The Hitchhiker, after all.

We cut to an 18 year old kid running away from a motorcycle cop.  He passes through an intersection which has a traffic jam of old-timey classic cars, then runs into the kitchen entrance of the San Marino Hospitality Inn.  The butcher-knife wielding chef chases him out.  He enters the lobby of the hotel which is filled with Felliniesque menagerie of weirdos, freaks, drama queens, and weirdos.  Did I mention this is set in California?

He sees the chef talking to the cop.  The cop pursues him with his gun drawn, for some reason bringing the chef along.  The cop says, “Are you sure it was him?”  Is he sure it was who?  It’s not like the chef identified someone from a mugshot.  He just said he said he saw an 18-year old kid.  The cop says, “He sure made a mess of things.  I can’t wait to get my hands on him.”

The kid is also packing heat.  He wanders into a bizarre room, made more bizarre by the from-nowhere entrance of Kirstie Alley.  As he spins around, she shoves a puppet in his face and is lucky he doesn’t shoot her.  She shouts, “They don’t like me either, but they’re stuck with me.”  He asks who she is and she pulls a card magically out of the air.  It says:

NECROMANCY

ONEICROMACY ^[1]

THAUMATURGY

The card changes before his eyes to say The Amazing Angelica.  He asks how she did that, but she says she has a lot better tricks.  She then pulls dead flowers out of a hat which is not a better trick.  She leaves, and the card goes blank, which is an equivalent trick.

The kid finds himself at the bar, but doesn’t know how he got there.  He asks if the bartender knows a guy name Baxy, same as he asked the chef.  He doesn’t, but the waitress does.  She says, “Baxy can’t help anyone, not even himself.  He’s a major head case.”

The waitress disappears; suddenly there is an older woman sitting beside him and the bar is full of people.  She says the waitress doesn’t care about him, but that is also the kind of girl her son likes.  The kid sees the cop, and asks the woman to help him sneak out.  They go up to her room.  She asks him what happened and he says if he told her, she would hate him.  When she tries to kiss him, he freaks out.  There is a knock at the door and he sneaks out the open window.

Suddenly he appears in an elevator with Kirstie.  As going down goes, that’s better than going out the window.  But again he has no idea how he got there.  She says she is putting on a show tonight and if he comes with her, he will be history around here.  He sees the waitress walk by and follows her as she goes into a sauna.  We get a nice topless scene.  They begin kissing and she slides off his jacket.  His shirt has conveniently disappeared, but his gun has not.  She freaks out when she finds he is not “just glad to see me.”  He leaves and she says he will end up just like his pal Baxy.

Again, suddenly, he is a waiter at the Conference of American Cardiologists.  Again with the suddenly — all the diners become white-coated physicians.  He escapes, and Kirstie again appears.  She drags him before a cheering crowd.  At this point, it is pretty clear what is happening.

Unfortunately, we get an interminable scene — OK, 3 minutes — of Kirstie Alley grotesquely hamming it up in front of a crowd.  It finally ends to reveal the kid is a patient in an operating room — he is Baxy.  As the doctors finish up, they say he had attempted suicide, but will recover.  The surgeon, the same actor as the cop, goes downstairs to inform his family.  He approaches the older woman seen earlier and says, “Your son is going to be fine.”  The girl seen before as the waitress is with her.  I think the producers were worried that people — as I did — would think that was his sister and that he dreamed a topless make-out session with her.  There is a clunky “You must be his sister / No, his girlfriend” bit of dialogue inserted to make it less sexy creepy.

Most impractical operating room ever!

This one actually benefits from a second viewing.  I didn’t care for it on the first go-round.  The second time, however, I was able to see all the foreshadowing, and how an impressive number of lines of dialogue were parallel to what would be happening in the operating room.  Some of the scenes that seemed a little creepy, like his mother kissing him on the bed, could be interpreted as a caring mother, but more-so on a second viewing than relying on my memory.

I appreciated the visual style as it reflected the randomness of dreams.  The titular hitchhiker’s intro was a little off, though.  The kid hallucinates this crazy hospital with all the classic old cars out front.  And there is the hitchhiker right in the middle of it. Was he in the kid’s dreams?  I thought it was weird when he was in France.

No other episode has improved so much upon further reflection.  If not for that god-awful scene with Kirstie Alley near the end, it would have been a success.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Did they mean ONEIROMANCY?  Could this series really be that lame?
• In Baxy’s imagination, the building sign said SAN MARINO HOSPITALITY INN.  Back in reality, it says SAN MARINO HOSPITAL with an IN sign beside it.  Pretty clever, but you really have to look for it.
• The chef with the butcher knife was the surgeon’s assistant.  When the kid initially entered the kitchen, we saw him cutting into a fresh piece of meat — again pretty clever.
• Given some of the bartender’s lines (kill the pain / pump the gas), it is clear that he was intended to be the anesthesiologist.  It is a major faux pas that the director did not get a shot of him in the operating room; at least not a shot without the surgical mask.
• Why did he dream of a conference of cardiologists when he had a head wound?
• Written by Marjorie David who also wrote The Legendary Billy B.  Maybe I should go back and watch that one again.  Not gonna happen.
• The cop was also in the excellent Trial by Fire.

Local douche-bag Jerry Macklin takes an ancestral mask off his wall to show his party guests.  He shouts to his business manager, “What did I pay for this one, Mike?”  $4,000.  “I took this to an appraiser and he valued it at what?”  $16,000.  He figures to donate it to a museum, take a tax write-off and double his money.  He sees a another woman giving him the eye across the room and goes to her.

He asks if he knows her and she says no.  This is where being a woman is handy; his next question to a dude would be “WTF are you doing in my apartment?”  Her name is Tanya. Mike interrupts while Jerry is hitting on her.  Someone fell through a rotten railing at one of his properties and plummeted a couple of stories.  Since Tanya has disappeared, Jerry goes to check it out.

The place is definitely a fixer-upper, has character, is a slum.  He goes in and checks out the crumbling building.  He sees a snake slither into an apartment and, inexplicably, follows it.  The old woman living there knows his name.  She thinks it is strange that he owns the building but has never been there. He says he owns stock in General Motors but has never been to Detroit.

She asks what he is going to do about people being hurt in his building.  He says, “I’m going to make repairs.”  As she is stroking the snake, he says he will fix the railing, and fix the heat, “all kinds of stuff”.

He tells Mike about the building as they are working out at a gym.  There are 2 easily mockable things in this scene. First, Mike is wearing insanely short shorts.  Second, Jerry is only lifting 2 plates on his machine.  What is that, 23 pounds, sport?

Jerry wants to do the right thing.  He asks Mike how much it would take to fix the place up.  Mike says it would cost him the beach house he had been dreaming of.

Back at home, Jerry stares wistfully at a model of his dream-house.  There is a very creepy shot of a snake crawling around a hanging plant basket.^[1]  Jerry carefully carries it to the bathroom and cleverly puts it in the shower stall.  He calls the super and says, “This is Mr. Macklin in 7-B.”  There is a knock at the door.  He abandons the call and opens the door to reveal 1) Tanya, and 2) that he lives in apartment 7-5, not 7-B.

Nice work with those 2 plates, he-man!

Tanya gives him a massage as he tells his favorite story, how he got rich.  Mike calls.  While Tanya slips into a negligible negligee, Jerry tells him to sell the building.  Tanya unbuckles Jerry’s belt — hey, she’s a snake handler, too!  Wait, you don’t think . . .

Tanya rubs him down with oil, then they have the sex.^[2]  Jerry wakes up alone in the morning.   He sees a spot of blood, then more, then way more.  His right leg is a bloody mess.  He goes to the emergency room.  They clean off the leg and reveal a fresh tattoo of a huge snake from his ankle up to his thigh.

After he is cleaned up, he goes back to the building.  He accuses the old woman of siccing Tanya on him.  She says she didn’t sic anyone on him . . . wink, wink.  He shows her the tattoo (and the most precious little anklet sock — seriously dudes, there is no acceptable style where a guy wears less than a full sock).  She says he brought it on himself — literally on himself — by not making the repairs.

He says he will make the repairs and give the building to the tenants.  He asks if that will satisfy her.  She says, “It is not me you have to satisfy.”   He rips open his shirt and sees the tattoo has moved up around his chest.

Later at his apartment, he sees the tattoo has advanced over his shoulder and is up to his neck.  Tanya comes in.  She gives him a knife and tells him to cut off the head of the serpent before it strikes.  He sees the snake around his ankle begins to ripple.  His skin bulges.  We can see something running beneath the tattoo, working its way up to his neck.  A snake bursts its head through the skin near his neck.  He screams and falls to the floor.

When he gets back up, the snake and the tattoos are gone.  He throws the model of his beach-house out the window.  He looks out the window.  He sees the old woman walking away.

This is an example of what The Hitchhiker should be.  It is an interesting story, well-shot, an genuinely creepy.  Well-done.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] This is worth the price of admission for me.  There was a scene in the old movie Frogs which had a snake in a chandelier.  The question of how that snake got into the chandelier was a conundrum that still boggles my mind.
• ^[2] In the commentary, Harry Hamlin says he got the idea of their sex scene from a copy of an old nudie magazine called Eros.  Really, no one could independently come up with the idea of inter-racial sex?

Although the score is immediately dreadful, I was quickly hooked by the artwork of Luthor Redmond (Fred Ward).  Most of it is macabre, but some of it is just strange.  Sadly, my favorite is only seen for a split-second — a toaster with a piece of toast coming out of one slot, and a hand coming out of the other.

Luthor has regrets about his girlfriend Arielle walking out.  He jumps in his red Mustang and goes after her.  She has literally walked out , so he quickly catches up to her on the road hoofing her way to the bus station.  His “Need a ride?” and charming “Going my way, little girl?” strangely do not entice her back into the car.  His next approach is, “You know what you look like?  An Eskimo igloo during the thaw” which I don’t understand at all.  Finally, he takes the pragmatic approach, telling her she’ll never make it to the bus station in time on foot.  She gets in the car after he promises to take her straight to the bus station.

He slow-drives her a little way toward the bus station, then turns the car around to take her back to his farmhouse studio.  She demands that he stop the car.  Mr. Literal slams on the brakes which strangely throws her forward, but not him.  He calls her a whore and throws her out of the car.  As she resumes her journey on foot, he guns the engine and drives toward her.  Like Charlize Theron, she has not mastered turning as she runs mostly straight along the road.  Luthor pins her against a wooden gate.  She is only a little banged up and Luthor carries her back to his studio.

3-D, comin’ at ya!

That night, while Luthor is working on a welding project, a drifter sneaks into an old beat up car just a few feet from him.  It is impossible that he did not see Luthor — if not him, then at least the blinding welding flame. When Luthor confronts him, he swings a log at the camera like it is a 3-D movie.  Luthor reacts by offering him a modeling job.

The next morning, Arielle uses her head and sneaks out the back-door, escaping from this abusive lunatic.  This time, wisely avoiding the road, she runs through the woods finding freedom and regaining the spirit that Luther’s oppression had crushed.  No, wait, she goes to the kitchen for breakfast.  She sees Cal the drifter at the table and is immediately hot for him.  He is filthy, wearing a wife-beater, sporting the mustache of a 13-year old, stuffing his face like he hasn’t eaten in a week, chugging milk, barely raising his eyes to acknowledge her — what gal wouldn’t be?

After Cal gets cleaned up, Luthor puts him to work washing his car.  Through the window, Luthor sees Arielle dressed like June Cleaver bringing them lemonade.  He makes an excuse to leave so they will be alone.  Later, he poses them as the couple recently found in a murder / suicide scene.  After a few hours shooting, they take a break.  Luthor recalls how he got his start:

I was 5 years old.  I was playing on the front porch.  I heard this tremendous crash.  Two cars had collided.  I ran down to the curb, something rolled from one of the over-turned cars.  It was the head of a little girl.  When I was about 15, I became interested in photography.  I bought a camera.  I spent hours, days looking through the lens.  Then a miracle happened.  I realized I wasn’t holding a camera.  It was the little girl’s face.

What does that even mean?  I get that witnessing that horrific event led to the macabre nature of his work.  The girl’s face as a metaphor for a camera just makes no sense, though.  Maybe if he said the image he was searching for was the little girl’s face . . . but, the camera?

Arielle amazingly tears herself away from this yarn and goes out to sit under a tree.  Luthor orders Cal to “go out and entertain her for me.” They have an awkward conver-sation.  It isn’t awkward because of what they are saying.  It is awkward because Cal just isn’t much of an actor.  Here, as in previous scenes, he just isn’t there. There are awkward silences.  OK, if the lines aren’t in the script, then there is going to be silence.  However, I never get the sense that he is listening.  He just seems to be lurking, hovering, an interloper in the scene, like a crew-member who got caught in the shot.  You can have no lines and still be a presence.  He does not come off as stoic, taciturn, laconic, contemplative, scheming . . . I see no wheels turning.  He is just vacant.

They go into the barn.  She takes off her top and says, “Let’s go south.”  However, they skip the foreplay.  Even during this, he hardly reacts.  Arielle throws her leg around him and he just stands there.  She kisses him and he just rubs his face along her shoulder like he’s checking for a melanoma.

Luthor calls for Cal to come back to the studio.  Cal walks into the studio and says nothing.  Luthor says, “Where have you been?”  Cal says nothing.  Luthor says, “I’ve been calling and calling.”  Cal says nothing.  Luthor says, “The girl.  No telling where that little harlot has been.”  Cal says nothing.

From here on, I am completely lost.  This seems to be happening a lot.  I would think I was getting dumber, but people seem to think that isn’t possible.

Luthor tells Cal he knows what is going on; he knows about their plan to drive south.  He starts in with Bible verses and Cal puts his hands over his ears like a child.  Shouting “The wages of sin are death!” he shows Cal a woman (or maybe a dummy of Arielle, who the hell knows) in a casket with a burned face.  We saw it earlier in the episode, but that ain’t helping.  Was this a previous Arielle? Luthor says, “Do you believe me now?”  He slides Cal the car keys and says, “Put this evil woman to rest.”

Cal goes to the garage.  Arielle walks into the dark garage.  Cal says nothing.  She calls his name.  He says nothing.  He gets in the car.  She calls for him again.  He says nothing.  He starts the car, turns on the lights, and guns the engine.  Having been in this situation before, she knows just what to do — she stands directly in front of the car.

She does finally jump in the car, but certainly not because Cal said, “Hey, get in the car!”  She says, “Kiss me” and he barely makes a move.  Than he floors it, puts it in gear and busts through the closed garage door.  Luthor cries “Noooo” as they drive off.  They go a little way, then suddenly stop.  It kind of looks like there is a cable restraining the car, but I think that is just a poorly composed shot.  Or maybe it was part of the stunt rig and they were too addle to shoot around it — I certainly wouldn’t doubt that.  It kind of sounded like he ran into a pile of junk and there is a pile of garbage nearby, but the next shot is of the front of the car and there is no obstruction.  So, I have no idea what happened.  Mostly it gave Luthor time to go inside and get a goddamn flame-thrower!

Suddenly free of whatever mysteriously stopped them, Cal & Arielle drive off, leaving Luther behind.  Despite the car speeding in a straight line, seconds later, Luther jumps out in front on them on the road.  Cal runs him down, then crashes into a tree and all three die in a fiery explosion.  The end.  Seriously.

At a few points during the episode I thought Luther must have killed Arielle in the opening scene and this was a flashback to explain why.  Actually I’m still not positive that there were no flashbacks.  But I have no idea of the motivations:

• Luther chases after Arielle, then throws her out of the car.
• He orchestrates an affair between Cal and Arielle, then gets angry when they take the bait.
• He gives Cal the key to his car then seems surprised when he drives off.

The three performances are perfectly distributed on the spectrum from pretty poor to pretty good (hint: Fred Ward is pretty good).  The script desperately needed another pass, especially by the producers when it was submitted.  And, not to bash our European friends, but we have another episode directed by someone with no prior directing credits in English.  Add an overly melodramatic score and you get a pretty bad episode.

Some Other Stuff:

• Title Analysis:  Lazy random crap.  If you are calling an episode Dead Heat, you better have some racing in it.  Or some heat — Arielle wore a heavy coat when she ran away, and you can see their breath at night, so it ain’t hot.  The heat was the raw lust and animal passion between Cal and Arielle, you say?  No.  No, it was not.
• Cal is played by the same actor who told Uhura she was old in Star Trek III.  Where the hell was he when she started fan dancing in Star Trek V?
• In Oh, God! Book 2, Denise Galik (Arielle) is credited as “Joan, Don’s Big-Boobed Girlfriend”.  If her character has a name, why further identify her that way?  And in a G-rated family movie?  Forget it Jake; it’s Hollywood.

I try not to pre-judge, but this does not bode well . . .

1. The opening shot establishes this as a European production which has been a bad sign, from The Miracle of Alice Aames in this series, to dozens of Ray Bradbury Theater episodes.
2. It is from the writer of the aforementioned Miracle of Alice Aames, although she has a fine resume otherwise.
3. It is from a director with no other American credits.  No offense to foreign directors, it just makes her un poisson hors de l’eau.
4. It stars our least-talented successful living American actor (regaining first place after the sad, untimely death of Bill Paxton), Elliott Gould.
5. It is The Hitchhiker.

A white van pulls up to a French hotel and disgorges Elliott Gould and his gendarme body-guards.^[1]  He might as well have come in a Mini Cooper for all the help his entourage provides.  A room service waiter in the hall pulls a gun as they pass.  Only Gould has the brains — am I really writing this? — to kick him down the stairs and pound his head into the floor.  This, BTW, after they magically appear on the stairs via a botched edit.

In his room, Gould lambastes the “stupid frogs supposed to be protecting me.”  While Gould is sometimes tolerable when he is just lumbering through a role, here he — God help us — tries to act.  He chews out LeBreaux, the French cop, for their “frog talk” and reminds them they promised to keep him safe while he was “here to get me a new face.”

We get a few hints about why Gould is looking to change his looks other than the obvious, but you have to be smarter than me to put it together. Some guy named Palazzo was killed by a car bomb in the states.  The sweaty, screaming Gould threatens to expose what Palazzo and LeBreaux “were up to.” He tells the cop, “You agreed to print that story about Palazzo if he would come here and give evidence for you!”  Wait, is LeBreaux a cop or a reporter?  Gould gives an extended buffoonish laugh that might be the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever seen on TV.

LeBreaux says, “OK, we’ll do it your way . . . for now” although I’m not clear on what that way is; or the other way.  Gould — and why is he so sweaty? — says, “Now you’re being smart.”  The camera is tight on the cop’s face and Gould’s grubby fingers creep into the shot to pinch his cheek.  BLECCH, as Mad Magazine used to say.^[2]   At this point, Gould is not just sitting down, he is slouched in the chair.  HTF did he reach the cop’s face?  Maybe these French directors is just too smart for me.

The next day, they go to see Dr. Renaud.  Discovering the doctor is a woman, Gould rants, “She’s a dame?  I don’t trust dames!  They’re always flapping their gums at the wrong time!”  Gould meets Renaud in her office and they have a very strange silence. They aren’t sizing each other up, they aren’t attracted to each other.  It is just a long, weird lull like they were bored, waiting for the director to say “action.”  Finally, she says, “Welcome to the institute.”

Gould is a complete dick, smoking a cigar  in her office after she asks him not to. He demands they get started immediately on replacing his face and, really, who can blame him?  Dr, Renaud tells him, “Here at the institute, we feel that cosmetic surgery is just one step in a much larger process.”  He suggests they get down to business “before I shove this desk down your stinking throat!”

LeBreaux suggests he talk to Dr. Renaud alone.  Gould says, “Well talk good, cop, or they’ll be fishing Palazzo out of the river!”  That would be the same Palazzo that LeBreaux told Gould was killed by a car bomb?  Christ, could anyone on this set read English?  Renaud understandably does not want to treat a psychopath like Gould. LeBreaux tells her if she doesn’t do this, she could lose her government funding.

Gould is subjected to tests like he was trying to be in the Mercury 7 [sadly, the relevant Right Stuff clip is not on You Tube].  After a week of this, Gould puts his hand on her throat and tells her she better not be playing him for a sucker.  Just repulsive.  The doctor’s assistant walks in and he lowers his hand.  He takes the opportunity to light up another cigar in the lab after spitting the tip on the floor.  Just repulsive.  Later, he starts feeling up Renaud’s assistant to unwind before his operation.  Just repulsive.

That night, Gould sneaks in to Bloc 6 where the surgery will be done.  He picks up a couple of instruments which look like a garlic press and a mixer to me, but I’m no brain surgeon; or chef.  On the X-Ray screen there are a lot more shots of brains than you might expect from a cosmetic surgeon.  He finds a room of men either bald or with their head in bandages.  One of them repeat–edly asks, “Bon jour, comment tallez-vous?”  I think they were lobotomized, but to be fair, Gould never answers him.

Gould decides to not have the surgery, runs oafishly out of the complex, steals the white van and speeds off.  LeBreaux finds Gould and tries to take him back.  Gould uses his one martial art — banging a guy’s head into the ground — and beats LeBreaux unconscious.  Blah blah, some other goons knock Gould out and take him back to the institute for surgery.  After the surgery, his head is bandaged like the men he saw at the institute.  And:

• LeBreaux comes to visit, carrying flowers.  Hunh, they’re suddenly bros?  Or is it frères?  Is this the beginning of a LeBreaux-mance?
• Gould’s personality is completely changed.  He is now warm and smiling and friendly.  Was he supposed to have gotten a lobotomy?  I don’t think this would be the result.  Why is he not like the other men?
• And why is the doctor so gung-ho about lobotomies anyway?  It wasn’t just revenge against Gould — remember, there was a room full of these guys.
• There is a long, purposeful close-up of Gould’s eye which I don’t understand at all.  I know lobotomies can be done through the eye-hole, but there is no indication of that. There is no tear which would indicate something . . . anything.  It just seems random.
• The cop lights a cigar as he leaves, just as Gould had smoked them before. LeBreaux had only smoked cigarettes.  Are we supposed to think that Gould and the cop switched faces?  Clearly they did not, but why else throw that scene in?

Merde.  Just a steaming load of merde.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Kudos where due.  They exited the van with all the men wearing military garrison caps, except one wearing a fedora.  I immediately thought they were idiots by making their charge so easily identifiable, but Gould was wearing one of the caps.
• ^[2] And maybe still do.  Every 10 years, I’ll look at a current issue — same jokes.
• After some time back in the US, the titular hitchhiker is back in France.  This guy really needs an AAA membership (remember, this was pre Google Maps).