Darius Stephens begins his physical therapy by getting on a treadmill.  He appears to be about 40, but very frail.  The therapist quickly turns the pace up to 6 minute miles and I get winded just watching him.

His son Michael, who is about 50, finds this “disgusting” because his father is actually 79 years old.  He tells his father’s doctor, “An artificial brain has turned him into a robot” although it is clear much of his body is not from the OEM.  Darius’s wife also seems to be about 40, so I guess she was a Trophy Wife before he started this process; but maybe just a Participation Trophy Wife at this point.  She accuses Michael of wanting his father dead so he can take over the family business and inherit the old man’s sweet, sweet Enron stock.

The next day, Darius is back at work ordering people around.  Michael announces that he is enacting the company’s succession plan.  Darius’s lawyer says this is a gray area because Darius is over 60% mechanical and has an electronic brain — technically, he is brain dead.  Sadly, Michael might have a point.  Darius shows signs of diminishing cognitive ability when he frequently repeats himself in conversations.  Darius shows signs of diminishing cognitive ability when he frequently repeats himself in conversations.

Darius’s mental acuity breaks down to the point where he should legitimately be declared dead.  He leaves behind a CD for his wife.  She inserts it in a computer and she somehow is able to have an interactive conversation with Darius and get free AOL for a month.

There is an interesting story here, but they didn’t find it.  That is especially disappointing as this is the last episode of this iteration of The Twilight Zone.  So does Darius come back to vanquish his dickish son?  No.  Does he return as a megalomaniacal monster who will live forever?  No.  Is he doomed to exist only on the CD that he left to his wife, incapable of any physical sensation?  No.  He is just kind of there on a screen and says they will try again.  On second thought, maybe this namby-pamby mess was the right choice to kill off TZ for 13 years.

1980s Twilight Zone Post Mortem:  There were some fine episodes in this run, but overall, the series was hobbled by several recurring choices.

1) Insipid, synth-driven scores.  Sure, it was the the 80’s, but that is no excuse for the frequently god-awful scores of this series.  The original TZ often had to make do with random stock scores from the archives, but they made them work.

2) The dreadful narration.  In the early episodes, Charles Aidman was far too avuncular for the role.  At least he had a certain gravitas, having appeared in 2 episodes of the original series.  His replacement, Robin Ward, offered nothing.  He was a poor hybrid of Serling and Aidman, almost always far chirpier than the story called for.

3) The happy endings.  I love the quote “Life is pain.  Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”  That should have been the theme of this series.  The universe doesn’t care about your happiness, but if you try to take more than your share, it will crush you.  Instead we got too many episodes where the twist was finding true love or saving the family farm.

Sadly, only a handful of episodes were memorable.  And those were often in spite of the above issues.

Notes:

• As the 2002 TZ series doesn’t not appear to be available on DVD, this slot goes to One Step Beyond.

I have honestly gone back and forth for 2 weeks on whether this is a great episode or just unwatchable shit.  And it’s not even a close call — it is decidedly one or the other.

It uses a garish color palette, something you would expect from Tales from the Crypt.  Well done, if this is what you’re looking for.

The lead character Arky is a skinny, obnoxious, hyperkinetic, man-child with a high pitched voice like very-early-era Jerry Lewis.  Unfortunately, he is about as funny as every-other-era Jerry Lewis.  Yet, I can’t help but be impressed by his commitment to the part.  Seriously, the actor gives it 100% and I think is successful in what he wanted to do.

The dialogue is stilted and wordy.  For example: “Before you have Gus and Bork reduce him to his component parts for shipment, are you interested in hearing his tale of woe?”  Or, when Arky is asked why he made a deal with a demon: “For a first-refusal option on 51% of my immortal soul.”  Yes, I understand that it is purposely so, and I appreciated the musicality of some of the lines, but to what end?

That is just one of many indications that this does not take place in the Twilight Zone universe (ie our universe).  The whole foundation of TZ was that is existed in little cracks of our reality.  The old TZ’s stories took place in dull, B&W 1958-1964 when suddenly BAM! — your daughter falls out of bed and into another dimension.  This uber-styled episode is, again, a better fit for TFTC than TZ.

For some reason, a particularly egregious example of this did make me laugh.  Poor Arky is on the hook to the mob for a loan with 750% interest!  Or maybe this was set during the Carter Administration.

I did enjoy the design of the demon.  It is arguably cheesy, but I found its shifting, yellow, cloud-like form to be fabulous.  It was also given a voice that was a perfect blend of menace and stentorian parody.  That was great as far as it went, but it just kept going and going.  Paradoxically, that’s just how I want my demon to speak, but the constant yelling does get tedious.

The anchor of the episode is its straight man, Anthony Franciosa. As the mobster, he projected cool, confident authority and confidence.  Without him, the episode would have been irredeemable.

This felt like when they used to take an episode of a sitcom and unexpectedly shift the focus to a different family or character as a non-committal spin-off pilot.

So I guess I appreciated more than I liked it.  It is impossible to assign it a number or letter grade.  I rate this one a mauve.

Jack Haines is sitting outside a CW bar drinking in his car.  He overheard a conversation that his wife is meeting another man there.  He takes a gun from the glove compartment and turns it into a CCW bar.

He walks around inside but doesn’t see her.  He orders a beer and listens to the singer.  Haines is stunned by what he is hearing.  The song is jarring and baffles him.  Is this for real?  Are other people hearing the same thing he is?  Which is the same effect country music has on me.

He hears aspects of his own life in the singer’s words.  The bartender says the old man just wandered in out of the storm, so they let him open for the house band.  He says the man was so good he didn’t even notice he was “blind as a bat.”  If coming in at night wearing opaque welding goggles and a thousand yard stare didn’t tip off the bartender, maybe his eyesight isn’t so great either.

The singer comes over and asks how Haines like the song.  “Kind of hits you where you live, don’t it?  That’s what it was meant to do.”  Haines asks how the man knows all about him.  He replies, “I don’t know everything, just the bad things.”  He says he has been “blessed or cursed.  The sounds just come to me when I’m around certain people.”  He tells Haines he knows what he is about to do, and it will cause everyone pain.

Haines spots his wife in the bar with another dude.  Just when he is about to make his move, he realizes it is just a stranger hitting on her.  The singer reminds him just how close he came to killing an innocent man.  Yada yada . . .

It is another perplexing third season episode.  There have been several that were as good as anything this run of the series every did.  Too many, however, fell into the same old traps of happy endings, maudlin stories, and those dreadful, insipid scores.

This was one of the good ones.  It was serious, but not somber.  Romantic but not sappy.  And, thank God, it had a soundtrack rather than a score.  That could have gone very wrong.  They happened to find an interesting actor with an engaging, twangy voice.  I completely bought him as the mysterious blind man.   I even enjoyed his singing and I’m not really a country fan.  That was some lucky or shrewd casting because he carries the episode.  The other actors are stiffs or insanely hammy.

And, yeah, it’s another TZ happy ending.  But that’s OK sometimes.

John Sellig is shaving and thinking how much he looks like the guy from American Werewolf in London.  He is using a noticeably odd wall-mirror, small and not part of a medicine cabinet.  That design is necessary as one side suddenly gives way and the mirror begins swinging.  It reveals a camera behind the mirror.

John calls for his wife, but an English guy enters the bathroom instead and repairs the mirror.  I have no beef with the English, but this guy is just awful.  Being the 1980s TZ, you know there is a good chance they will squander a good premise.  I peeked ahead, and sure enough this is prime example.

They take an idea so good that The Truman Show won Oscars for it 9 years later, strip away all the nuance, slap on one of their patented, god-awful scores, and completely blow it.  Archie is just the first sign.  His chirpy demeanor, unthreatening accent, and tubby body are the perfect metaphor for this show.  Take anything unique, and grind it down until it is a featureless ball with no edges.  I know they only had 20 minutes to work with, but somehow Rod Serling did it 25 years earlier, backwards and in heels (although I might be mixing up 2 Hollywood stories).

David Naughton is a fine actor, but completely miscast here (actually he is well-cast for what TZ wanted to do — they were just wrong).  He always seems like a nice, dull, relatable guy on-screen.  That’s what made him effective in American Werewolf.  He was an average guy thrust into something horrific (lycanthropy, not Jenny Agutter).  When you take a dull guy and water down the conflict, you just get a dull, wet guy.

The story, such as it is, doesn’t even play by its own rules.  WTF would Archie show up to cover up the mirror?  How was he there so quickly?  Why is he English?  How does he think taking John into a closet to talk is not suspicious to viewers?  Then why does he keep spilling the beans after they leave the closet and go to the front door?  The ending tries to be clever.  In a way, it is, but I’m not even sure they meant it that way.

How to wrap up this mess?  Have John tap dance in his living room while the dreadful closing narration decisively undermines the episode.  There might be no better example in this series of an great idea just pissed away.

Other Stuff:

• Title Analysis:  Hunh?  Special Service?  There is no way, in combination or individually, that I can relate these words to the episode.

This is like Harold and Maude.  Except there is no Harold, and Maude is the one with the death obsession.  So, really not like it at all.  However, it is like Nothing in the Dark from the original Twilight Zone.  But reversed; so, also not a good match.

Barbara LeMay loves going to funerals.  She has just gone to one and even slid her hand along the coffin as it passed.  She complements the preacher, but admits she doesn’t know anyone there, horizontal or vertical.  At home, she lovingly describes every detail to her son Jason.  He says her obsession “is not good, is not healthy, it is morbid.”

That night, after her son has left, a man breaks into her house.  When Barbara sees him, he pulls a gun on her and says, “Don’t move, don’t call the cops!  I’ll kill you, I swear!”  Then he collapses from pre-existing condition, namely a gunshot wound.  Barbara makes him comfortable, but tells him it looks bad for him.  She promises to wait with him.  They don’t have to wait long, as Mr. Death appears immediately.

Barbara is fairly calm seeing Mr. Death, but she seems surprised that he is not surprised that he can see her.  Wouldn’t she expect him to know the rules better than her?  In all the funerals she has attended, and with all the people she has seen die in the hospital, she has never seen Mr. Death.  She attributes his visibility this night to her frequent proximity to him.  Wake up and smell the coffee, baby!  Even the dying crook can’t see him because “it isn’t his time.”

When death approaches the dying man, Barbara offers her soul in place of his.  Death asks why.  She says because, “I can see the beauty in you.  I can.  I see it in so many ways.  The peace, the freedom, the tranquility,the poignant fragile beauty of their one final exhalation, the gathering of the soul, the ceremony.”  Correction, this is becoming more like TZ’s One for the Angels where an old guy runs his yap all night so Death misses an appointment.

Death says he can’t take her.  But he says he has seen her many times and noticed she “does not run from his touch, but seeks to embrace it.”  He says, “I could no more take you than take your end-table because neither one lives” or matches his sofa.

He leans over the crook as he struggles to breathe.  Death says, even now, the man is more alive than Barbara.  Death takes the man’s soul and becomes invisible to Barbara.  She says he “can’t just leave, we’ve been together through so much.”  She says she has no one.  Her son doesn’t need her, and Death has taken all her other friends and family.  “They’re all with you now!”

The next night — after having the dead body taken away that morning — Barbara gets dolled up in a nice evening gown.  Death shows up and asks, “Have I hurt you?”  There are only two sappy ways the story could end — either Barbara lives or Barbara dies.  Amazingly, neither of these options are used.

The story took an unexpected turn and ended up like TZ’s A Game of Pool except the motivations and the response of the main character are different.  So forget I mentioned it.  It was a little talky and the sappy score was dreadful.  I liked the curveball at the end, and Janet Leigh did a nice job.  Stephen McHattie was a great Mr. Death, but isn’t he always?