33-year old Ryan Unger is hitting the engineering books trying to figure out why he is one of the few humans who cannot suck on the titular Stream.  15-year old Nazi Mark helpfully reminds him that it is not a hardware limitation, he is defective. Mark orders him to get rid of shelves of books that are taking up space. This society has a networked stream that can wirelessly send and receive data directly into the brain, but the Kindle is still in beta, I guess.

Ryan sees Cheryl accessing the Stream and tries to strike up a conversation.  It is clear he is regarded as less than a man because he does not spend his life online. So Outer Limits is not exactly Nostradamus on that point.

There is an excellent exchange where Ryan asks Cheryl if she has read Ulysses by James Joyce.  She downloads it into her memory in five seconds and sincerely asks, “Is there something you didn’t understand?”  Kudos!  The trite reading would have been condescension, but they put a refreshing spin on it.

Ryan’s step-father Stanley helpfully tells us, “The Stream gives us instantaneous access to every fact and idea ever recorded.”  Cheryl finds Ryan in the basement reading. She tells him, the other 99% look at a page and it is translated and dumped into their memory.  She doesn’t even understand the concept of looking at words and reading.

That night, Stanley flips out.  He obsessively counts the number of hairs on his head, which would have been far easier for me.  He then frantically starts on his arm.  He collapses in a quivering heap but Ryan can’t call for help because he can’t call 911 with his brain.  Turns out, Stanley has contracted a computer virus.

Stanley goes into surgery because apparently these big-shots can’t fix the virus remotely.  During the operation, a nurse gets the virus and chaos ensues.  Stanley has a cerebral hemorrhage as random data floods into it, such as dates, numbers and how to spell hemorrhage.  The virus causes an insatiable, obsessive curiosity in people — it’s the V’ger Virus.

As other people become infected, Ryan realizes that the stream must be shut down.  When he starts whacking Stream routers with a baseball bat, Mark calls him the r-word (this episode is so old, the r-word was retarded, not racist).

As more and more people fall victim to the virus, Ryan decides the Stream must be stopped.  It really kind of feels like wish fulfillment for him, but his point is valid.  He finds a book with instructions on how to shut down the Stream and tricks Cheryl into scanning it.  This causes the program to upload to the stream and be executed.

The Stream stops and the citizens are a helpless bunch of illiterate dopes.  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  As in Idiocracy, an average dude is now the smartest guy on the planet.  He is seen teaching Cheryl and a little kid the alphabet using a chalkboard.  On a planet of billions, this does not seem to be the most efficient way to educate the masses.

One of my favorite episodes.  It feels ahead of its time even if it wasn’t.^[1]  I was consistently surprised at the writing and dialogue.  Sadly, this is David Shore’s only script for the series.

Any rating I give it (baud rate, kbps, mbps, etc) will just become outdated, so let’s just say it’s some good shit.

• ^[1] The same year this episode aired, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released, so it isn’t as prescient as it might seem.
• This episode aired a few months before the similar Gattaca was released.
• In what is surely a slip-up and still humiliating to the producers 20 years later, one of Ryan’s books is Freedom to Choose by Milton Friedman.  [UPDATE] Friedman’s book was Free to Choose — I should have known better.

“Ethernet doesn’t have a valid IP configuration.” What the hell?

From the intro:  “Events in our past seem to slip further away with time.”  Well, duh.

Star athlete Danny Martin brings his new girlfriend home to meet his parents.  She is named Jade as are all mysterious Chinese women on TV.  This is also a coincidence of Lou Gehrigian proportions as she has freakishly green eyes.

Awkward:  Danny’s father Frank immediately recognizes her as a girl he tortured 20 years earlier when he was in the army.  He remembers her screaming in pain while strapped to a chair.  I took an immediate dislike to Frank (Peter Onorati) because he has one of them butt-chins. ^[1]  Also for torturing a cute girl, but mostly the chin thing.

Rather than try to avoid being recognized, Frank begins making the usual small dinner-table talk about where she is from, if she has ever been to Virginia, if she ever had a car battery clamped to her nipples.  While Danny and Jade go upstairs to fool around, Frank has another flashback.  Turns out, he was merely a witness to the torture.  He was standing guard as Doctor Sinclair injected her with chemicals to test her blood.

Shockingly, eight minutes into the episode when they are alone, Jade tells him his memory is correct.  Quite reasonably, however, he assumes she is the daughter of the girl who was experimented on.  At that very minute, in a nearby town, a scarred Dr. Sinclair sees her in a news clip with Danny as he has just been MVP of whatever sport he plays.  Sinclair thought he was the only survivor of that explosion at the lab.

Not a good night for the Martin men.  Frank’s past has come back to haunt him.  Then after dinner, Danny’s mother — let’s call her Carol — tells him that he and Jade will not be sleeping together under her roof.

Frank again flashes back to that night.  When Sinclair and his staff take a torture break, he enters the operating room to see the screaming girl.  She begs him to let her go.  Frank is caught by Sinclair as he is carrying Jade to safety.   Through a freak accident, a gunshot sets off a gas tank ^[2] and explodes Frank and Jade right out the 2nd floor window like Darkman.

When Frank and Jade are alone again, he asks her if he is her father.  Poor Danny is cock-blocked for the second time as Frank says she can’t be with his son because he would be her step-brother!  OK, maybe he isn’t quite as prudish as Carol since “step-sibling porn” is decades in the future.^[3]  She finally tells him that she is the girl he saved in the lab.

She says she is centuries old.  When she was a teenager, the Black Plague swept through her village in northern Spain.  Wait, were there Chinese people in 14th century Spain?  Did they live in Chinapueblo?  Is that why there were no cats around to catch the disease-ridden rats?  OK, settle down.  Jade even shows him her portrait in a book of paintings from the 18th century English Romantic Period, reasonably thinking the Cubist book would offer little proof of her identity.

After she goes up to bed, Frank again thinks back to that rainy night night long ago, when he rescued the beautiful girl from sadistic doctors . . . when, scared and alone, they found comfort in each other’s arms . . . where they hid out in an abandoned warehouse . . . and how he banged the shit out of his future daughter-in-law.  Carol asks if he is coming up to bed.  He fortuitously has the art book in his lap, and says he’ll be along soon.

He goes upstairs alright, but takes a detour to Jade’s room — they sure seem to end up alone a lot.  This time, she takes the opportunity to show him a crescent wrench shaped birthmark that he would surely remember 20 years later.  She drops her top and he touches it, just below her bare breasts.  And . . . in walks Danny.  No, now this is awkward!

Frank tries to explain, but Danny punches him out.  When Carol comes down to see what is going on, Danny immediately rats his father out.  Jade comes downstairs and pleads for everyone to listen to her and Frank’s story.

Dr. Sinclair breaks in and ties everyone up at gunpoint.  He hooks an IV up to Jade to get some of that magic blood.  The blood does clear up his complexion, but it goes further, transforming into a younger man, a boy, a baby — I guess a fetus would have been a little too pro-life, so the baby just devolves directly into a puddle of goo.

At least this proves to Carol and Danny that Frank’s and Jade’s story was true.  The next morning, Jade goes out to wait for a cab.  As his parents watch from a window, Danny goes out and kisses her.  So I guess everything is alright, but these are going to be some tense-ass Thanksgivings.

There was very little science-fiction to be had here.  In fact, it seemed more like one of the recent melodramatic 1980s Twilight Zones.  Somehow, it works though.  Maybe it was Sandrine Holt’s performance as Jade and some solid directorial choices.

I rate it a medium well-done.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Seriously, I can tolerate only about five people on this list.  It would have been six, butt they somehow left off the most famous butt-chin in motion picture history.
• ^[2] Just as in Halloween II.
• ^[3] I read somewhere recently that the most searched term in porn is now “step-sister”.  Of course, trying to find the original article just returned a million porn sites in Google.  Two hours later . . .
• Title Analysis:  I think I get it.  This was literally the last supper this family would have before their relationship was changed forever.  But is the dinner itself really that important?
• Well-directed by Helen Shaver, previously seen in The Sandkings.

Four year old Justin is being rushed through the hospital with a contusion on the posterior skull from falling down the stairs.  His mother Rebecca (Kim Cattrall) rushes to the hospital to join her husband Graham (Daniel Benghazi) who is showing all the emotion of a man of a man sitting for a passport photo.  Sadly, Justin did not survive.

Rebecca is distraught because it had been  so difficult for her to get pregnant the first time.  Graham suggests that this day of their son’s death, they head down to the lab. They meet Dr. Cole (genresnaps-fave Teryl Rothery) who show how they can inject a glob of snot with some DNA from their dead son and grow a new Justin.

This is the act break for the credits.  After only four minutes, it is already obvious what the problem is with this episode.  Daniel Benzali is unbelievably emotionless and dull.  As a coma patient, he would be too subdued; as the father of a dead son who is playing God, he is virtually inhuman.  This is dullness on a Gabriel Byrne level.  Like Byrne, he has a unique talent for sucking the life out of every scene, every line-reading and every word; also like Byrne, he has an inexplicable talent for getting cast. ^[1]

Always a master of timing, Graham chooses the day of the funeral to talk Rebecca into having this science project injected into her.  Although, with Graham’s meat-syringe as the alternative, her acceptance is understandable.  He shows her a simulation of new Justin at 20 years old “already an inch taller than his dad.”  WTF?  Is he suggesting that he won’t be fully grown by age 20?

Six months after Rebecca’s insemination, Graham gets a call from the governor possibly to endorse Graham’s run for congress.  After building a hugely successful medical company on the cutting edge of innovation, anonymously funding a hospital wing and raking in big coin, he is finally ready to make the tens of millions of dollars, stocks and real estate mysteriously earned by $174,000 per year civil servants.

While he is out, Rebecca has a vision, but is is seen through ex-Justin’s eyes; memories from his POV.  Justin II is a sentient infant like the one in The Small Assassin, or Donald Trump.  She goes to Dr. Cole for an ultrasound.  She amazes Cole by being able to wake the baby in her  stomach and also have him wave at the doctor on the ultra-sound.  Cole decides the reason she can communicate with Justin II is the special umbilical cord.  In addition to the standard two arteries and a vein, there is an HTML cable going into her brain.

That night, Justin II is thrashing around, waking Rebecca up to more visions from Justin I’s perspective.  Although, just be clear, Justin II IS Justin I.  To comfort the baby, she brings out some of his toys and plays with them.  Sadly it was not Mr. Bubble and a little tugboat, but being six months pregnant I can overlook this lost opportunity.  When Graham begins speaking to the baby, he throws a fit and Rebecca has a seizure.

When she leaves the hospital, she gives Justin a tour of the house.  When she approaches the fireplace, he begins thrashing about.  She again experiences from Justin’s POV.  This time she sees her husband get frustrated at the kid’s noise making.  He accidentally knocks Justin back and he conks his skull on the hearth.  Just to make sure we get it, the memories suddenly become omniscient POV, including both Graham and Justin in the shot.  They still retain the same memory-indicating masking around the frame, though.

Rebecca promises Justin that Graham will never go near him again.  She senses that Graham is going to push her down the stairs, so flees toward the attic.  I’m not one to criticize the staging of a scene mostly because I’m usually too dense to notice.  It really is egregious here, though.  Rebecca pushes past Graham and goes down the hall.  Despite him being only 10 feet behind her, the pregnant woman has time to 1) grab a stick with a hook on it, 2) use said hook to lower the folding stairs to the attic, 3) climb the stairs to the attic, 4) find the light, and 5) work the mechanism which will pull the stairs back up.

Graham resourcefully grabs a fireplace poker to attempt to lower the stairs.  His dullness in this scene would be comical if it evoked any response at all.  Here is a man who killed his son (accidentally, to be fair), discovered a miraculous baby is gestating in his wife, has had his dark secret revealed to his wife, has just been accused of trying to kill her (or maybe actually planning to do so ^[2]), and has chased her into the attic.  He is more laid back than Michael Myers smoking a bone.  His delivery of his wife’s name, “Rebecca” as he stares at the closed attic door could not have had less dramatic impact if it were crocheted onto a satin pillow.

Baby Justin has apparently added psychic abilities to his repertoire as he shows Rebecca where a rifle is hidden in the attic.  Then shows her where the bullets are. Then shows her where the key is.  Is this really information they allowed Justin to have?  And don’t forget we keep the trigger lock in the sock drawer, sweetie.

Graham is finally able to lower the stairs, climbs into the attic, and approaches Rebecca.  He calmly (how else?) tells her she has nothing to be afraid of.  Is his stoicism because he is psychotic or because he is sincerely worried about her?  Since it is exactly the same monotone as every word he has spoken in the episode, it is impossible to say.  However, since his demeanor has not changed one iota in 41 minutes, it does seems premature when she shotguns him.

The jury must disagree because in the next shot she is taking Justin to the doctor for a cold — a baby, not a fetus.  Unseen by Rebecca, Dr. Cole is around the corner patting her stomach and assuring her in utero baby Graham that everything will be alright.  We get the same internal shot of her baby that we were repeatedly treated to of Justin.  What the hell?

I suppose the answer is that she got her hands on some of Graham’s DNA and injected another one of those snot-balls ^[3] to make herself a new Graham.  But why?

Is this new super-baby also destined to avenge a wrongful death?  But, unlike Justin I, there was no mystery to Graham’s death.  The facts would have been pretty clear and either Rebecca was not charged or she was found not-guilty.

Evil babies are always fun, and it’s always nice to see Teryl Rothery.  Sadly, Daniel Benzali sinks the episode.

.Post-Post:

• ^[1] Dan, baby, what’s with the colored lenses on your IMDb page?  You’ve gone Hollywood, man!
• ^[2] Such a void is his performance that it is impossible to tell whether he planned to kill her or not.  It would have been out of character to, you know, actually do something; but super-baby seemed to sense it.
• ^[3] Technically, a blastocyst.

Howie Mandel is mentally challenged.

Now on to the review.  See, the problem is, it’s hard to have fun with this.  He actually does a good job in the portrayal, but my gut tells me this is exploitative.  Logically, I don’t believe that.  I feel a Flowers for Algernon story coming, and that was good.  Hard to shake that vibe, though.

Blah, blah, dying scientist, Dr. Valerian, transfers his brains into Karl Durand’s (Mandel) noggin.  Afterward, he slips up and uses some big words that Karl would never use.  The next day, his caretakers are stunned to see he can suddenly play the piano as great as me if I were a great piano-player.  However, he is still jealous when his favorite nurse Rose gets engaged, so there must be a little Karl left in there somewhere.  Maybe in “Little Karl.”

Karl goes to Valerian’s office and sees it is being looted by William Talbot.  He is looking for the mind-transfer device Valerian invented.  When he walks out with it, Karl tries to stop him.  In the struggle, Talbot falls down the stairs and dies.  Karl panics, but Valerian surfaces and calms Karl down.^[2]  He is then able to transfer Talbot’s mind into his melon also.  And transfer Talbot’s briefcase full of bearer bonds into his brokerage account. ^[1]

The three personalities fight to be in control.  The wildcard is Talbot who is understandably peeved at being killed.  He does, however, see this as an opportunity to commit crimes that will be blamed on Karl.  Well, whose body does he think will go to jail?  What is he, retar . . . oh wait.

Karl goes on a spending spree buying jewelry for Rose.  When she asks where he got the money, he says his stock split 2 for 1 and he cashed out.  So apparently, the writer thinks a stock split doubles your money.  She says the jewelry has to go back because she is engaged.  We then get to meet her fiancee — a long-haired poet with a soul-patch.  Maybe she should have held on to the jewelry; something tells me Rose will be supporting this guy for a while.

But then, she’s no prize either — coming out of the shower and getting into bed wearing a towel.  Did we use up the season’s NQ (nudity quota) with Bits of Love?  So no more naughty bits of love?  Karl senses the detective investigating Valerian’s and Talbot’s murders is getting too close, so he calls anonymously and sets up a meeting behind a bar (in the alley, not the place where the bartender stands.  He bops the detective on the melon with a beer bottle and takes his gun.  Karl considers shooting him, but instead uses his gizmo to transfer the cop’s mind into his.

All those people in his head, and tragically not one stylist.

Since the last meet-up went so well, Karl phones Rose’s fiancee and says she was in an accident. Pretending to be a cop, he gives the him the address of the parking lot.

The poet pulls into the lot, and leaps from the car, she’s all he’s got, but he doesn’t get far.

A car ahead flicks on its lights, it has the poet dead in its sights, it guns the engine and spins its tires, it doesn’t care what he desires.

Aw screw it, Karl runs the poet’s ass down and absorbs his brain.

It didn’t go where I expected it to, which is probably a good thing.  I can’t figure out why Karl or Valerian keep adding more souls to the mix.  Of course, Valerian makes sense, but why would he or Karl want Talbot with them?  Or the others?  Also, a big deal is made over the fact that Talbot was dead during his transfer — then nothing is done with that.

Mandel probably did about as well as could be done with the part.  The scenario of a mentally challenged man possessed by five personalities is just risky.  It is way too easy to come off looking silly, especially for a comedian.  So credit to Mandel for attempting it and doing pretty well.  Otherwise, kind of a meh outing.

I feel your pain.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] I kinda see how he might cash in, stealing them from a dead guy. But how did Hans Gruber expect to cash in the bonds from the Nakatomi heist?  Wouldn’t the serial numbers have been reported stolen immediately?
• Or are they regulated by the same body that allowed Bane to bankrupt Bruce Wayne despite a thousand witnesses and an electronic audit trail?
• ^[2] Oh the irony.
• Title Analysis:  OK, he has a second consciousness in his head.  But he also has a third, fourth and fifth.  Why does the second one get top billing?
• References sadly not used:  Deal or No Deal, St. Elsewhere or that f-ing surgical-glove-over-the-head thing.

Aidan Hunter had the resources and foresight to build an underground bunker to survive whatever apocalypse occurred.  He has electricity, fresh air, food, booze, a nice home, and the scientific know-how to program holograms. Inexplicably, he has program-med most of these avatars to be his family; and also to continue using the name Aidan.

As we open, Aidan is being awakened by his mother — this is a 36 year old man, by the way.  She open the curtains, and says, “Hey sleepyhead.  What are you going to do, stay in bed all day?”  Wouldn’t this have gotten old during the design phase, or when he was 13?  He goes into the kitchen to see his 32 year old brother Griff in tight shorts and a wife-beater, stretching with his foot on the counter.  His full name should be Griff Loman Hunter.

Aidan examines a painting he has been working on.  He commands all his holographic pals to appear.  There’s his mother, his bath-robed father has joined them, here’s Griff still in his workout clothes, and Natasha Henstridge.  Wait, what?  Why didn’t he just make four of her?  After they critique his painting, Aidan sends them back into the computer.  All except Emma (Henstridge).

For entertainment that night, Aidan programs up a double-date for he and his cartoon brother.  Aidan is wearing some sort of black sleeveless scuba-looking thing.  His holographic brother appears to be wearing a jacket over his wife-beater. If this is a sly indication that his clothing can only be overlayed onto his basic template like a paper doll — bravo!

Sadly, the girls have no substance; also, they are not solid.  After a few dances, though, he takes one (only one?) to his swinging bachelor-pod.  He has designed the device to feed his skin’s sensors so that it is just like having a beautiful live girl; but I notice the girls don’t do any talking in there.

He decides that Emma is more real than the other pseudo-girls.  She would even make a perfect model.  For one thing, she is beautiful.  For another, she can sit for hours and not move a micron.  In fact, she can even look like a piece a cardboard for some shots.  After the painting is done, they go for a spin in the bachelor-pod.  Since Emma is tied into the server, she is able to mentally hit the snooze alarm so they aren’t stopped for using too much power.

Emma begins taking things a little too seriously.  The rest of Aidan’s fake family take her side.  Emma is the computer’s operating system, so they want to protect her.  Emma begins to think she is real and tells Aidan she loves him.  Aidan says, “Emma, you’re not here to love me.  You’re here to serve me.”  Oh shit!

When Aidan conjures up another girl to take into the pod, Emma takes over the form of the fantasy girl.  To really get on Aidan’s good side, Emma would have shown up in addition to, not in place of the first girl.  WTH, is there a weight limit on that ride? ^[1]

Emma finally resorts to the nuclear option and says she is pregnant.  That’s it, Aidan goes Dave Bowman on her fine, fine ass and starts destroying circuit cards.  You can’t beat the house, though, and Emma prevails in a satisfying way.

The episode could get a little tedious at times.  Also, there more shots of a sweaty post-coital Aidan than I really needed.  However AI run amok, an apocalypse and not-at-all gratuitous nudity redeem it.

50/64 bits.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Well, per-girl obviously, but you know what I mean.
• Aidan’s mother is played by Dana Sculley’s mother, Sheila Larkin.
• Griff suggests the music be changed to Feral Klansmen or Venereal Pink.