Icon of cool, Charles Martin Smith is wearing his flat cap, Member’s Only jacket, and driving his VW Cabriolet. Also, he is Charles Martin Smith.^[1]

His car fails to proceed, so he pulls over to the side of the road.  There is steam shooting out of the radiator, so I’m guessing leak?  His car, like mine, lacks the big ON/OFF switch under the hood that other guys seem to know about.  He grabs his suitcases out of the backseat and starts hoofing it.  After only a few steps, he encounters a sign reading:

PRIVATE PROPERTY

KEEP OUT

ABSOLUTELY NO SOLICITORS

OR TRESPASSERS

Not entirely clear on the meaning of the ambiguously-worded sign and padlocked gate, he slips between the barbed wire.  Before the opening narration is complete, he arrives at a beautiful cove with cliffs and a lighthouse overlooking the water.  Or maybe he is visiting the art gallery of the local maritime museum because he is in front of the most obvious 2-dimensional seascape rendering I have seen since I went to the art gallery of the local maritime museum.

He walks to the town which seems very 19th century, with dirt roads, sage brush growing here and there, and the Bellweather General Store.^[2]  The dark store appears to be closed, but he knocks on the door.  Proprietor William Cooper-James reluctantly lets him him, but warns him there are no phones here.  Despite having been closed, this is Bellweather’s biggest day of the year as 10-year old Teddy (a 10-year old, not as weird as he will be later, Giovanni Ribisi) then comes in.  Smith introduces himself as Dr. Barrows, but Teddy doesn’t know what a doctor is.

Barrows inquires about a room but of course there are no hotels here, what with the sign, barbed wire, and padlock having really taken a bite out of the local tourism.  Young Teddy, showing just how detached from reality this town really is, offers this strange man a room at his house.  As they leave, Teddy says to Cooper-James, “May the Beacon pass you by.”

Teddy’s mother lets him in, as is the town custom, reluctantly.  Dr. Barrows offers to take a look at her sick daughter Katie, but she declines.  Shortly after he settles in, the titular lighthouse beacon sweeps across the community scaring the citizens like Sauron’s eye.  Their reaction is reasonable as the light stops on Teddy’s house and his sick sister takes a turn for the worse.

Dr. Barrows checks out the girl.  Like all TV doctors on vacation, he travels with his medical gear and is a mobile pharmacy.  Teddy is now worried that maybe it was Katie’s time to die and “now it will be like we disobeyed it.”  They look out the window and see the townspeople approaching there house to see who will die.  They are carrying lanterns despite the house being swathed in a 4-billion watt light.  Teddy explains that the lighthouse “just picks a house.  Then shines a light on the house and somebody dies.”

Dr. Barrows is having none of this and gets Teddy to take him to the lighthouse.  Along the way, Teddy explains that the Beacon “protects and guides and keeps us happy”.  Well, except for the ones it kills. Cooper-James tells Barrows the story of Seth the lighthouse keeper 200 years ago.  Everyone in the town is descended from him which might explain some of the weirdness.  When ships started going to other ports, possibly due the sheer 100-foot cliffs along the shore, Seth taught the people to live off the land.  Years later, on his deathbed, “Seth decided that he just wasn’t going to go.”

Yada, yada, Barrows doesn’t buy the story of how Seth’s spirit inhabited the lighthouse, and how it protects the townspeople.  Because he saved Katie from death, the town sacrifices him to the Beacon.  They close in around him, he screams, the Beacon goes out.

Everything was fine as far as it went, but it just seemed to leave too much unexplained.  Seth’s story is a little underwhelming.  Is Seth even real or is Cooper-James pulling the strings? Either way, I can imagine this being fleshed out into a really good movie with a little more time.  We get a little The Village, a little The Lottery, a little Harmony, a little Children of the Corn, but with secluded small towns, there is going to be overlap.  Charles Martin Smith has an everydweeb quality that makes him very watchable.  Martin Landau is always solid.  The womenfolk weren’t given much to do.  Giovanni Ribisi had not yet acquired that weirdness that makes him interesting.

I rate it 75 watts.  That’s not great, but I consider the roll from last weeks episode to be continuing.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Actually, for directing the first episode of Buffy, he gets a lifetime Cool Pass.
• ^[2] Short for general merchandise store.
• Classic TZ Legacy:  Martin Landau was in two episodes.  This was really more of a Night Gallery episode, though.

In the first 2 minutes, this is shaping up to be way too melodramatic, with way too many insufferable 1980’s relics — big hair, upturned collars, MBA-speak, gigantic glasses, yuppies, Martin Kove.

Carl Wilkerson (Jeffrey Jones) has thrown a party for some reason.  Do you need a reason?  You do, right? Maybe that is part of my problem, but I digress.  When a big-glassesed yuppie pulls Carl aside for some MBA-talk, Joe Farrell (Kove) meets Carl’s wife Sally in the kitchen.  She is egging Joe on to kill Carl.  She describes him as “a machine — no heart, no passion, no nerves.”  To be honest he seemed like an OK guy in the 10 seconds we spent with him.

Sally and Joe go back out to the party and meet Carl.  Tomorrow is the titular Opening Day of duck season, Carl can’t wait to bag some ducks at his fancy club with the $100,000 dues, so they plan to meet at 4:30 the next morning.  There’s three things I don’t understand right in that sentence.

At dawn, they paddle their canoe to a nice spot on the sound-stage and wait for the horn that announces it’s duck-murdering time.  Carl gets one on his first shot.  Before he can massacre the whole family, Joe whacks him on the head with a rifle butt.  Carl goes into the water and Joe holds his head under since that is easier to explain than a gunshot wound.

After the cops show up and and he describes what happened (leaving out the more murdery parts, of course), Joe goes back to Carl’s house.  He looks at a photo we saw earlier of Carl & Sally, only now it is of Joe & Sally.  Then Carl’s kids run in and recognize Joe as their father.  Sally comes in and sees him as Joe also.  She says he needs to get ready for the big party.  He tempts fate by wearing the same clothes that Carl had worn the previous night.  At the party, he sees Joe wearing his clothes, and disappear into the kitchen with Sally.

After the party, he confronts Sally about her affair with Joe and their plan to kill Carl.  He tells her that maybe he will come back from the hunting trip without Joe.  The next morning, they row back to the same sound-stage.  I know what they were going for even if I don’t really understand what happened.  As Joe-as-Carl is about to club Carl-as Joe on the noggin, he sees Carl’s wristwatch disappear from his wrist.  So he is turning back into Joe.  But he was already Joe; or at least looked like Joe.  So why not go on with the murder?  That’s the problem with body-switches, it screws up your perception.  Or maybe that’s the virtue.  See what I mean?

Anyway, for no particular reason, justice is done.  But not early enough to save the duck.

With the exception of Jeffrey Jones, the performances only ranged from irritating to adequate.  And it was’t a big shocking or flashy twist, just a slice of life in the TZ.  But, sometimes that is enough.  I did appreciate some of the small throwaway bits like the lovely bogus bog at dawn (no, seriously), and the sassy daughter, and who knew duck hunting was such a big thing?

With Shadow Man and even the skipped segment, this was something of a comeback episode for TZ.

Post-Post:

• The Sheriff is played by Frank McRae.  What the hell ever happened to him — he was always great.
• Swinging 80’s bachelor Joe drives a station wagon?  Was Miami Vice using all the cool cars?
• Skipped Segment:  The Uncle Devil Show.  Nice little 8 minute segment, I’m just not going to get 500 words out of it.

I’m sure this was a stunning shot, but the DVDs and You-Tube just blur it into a mess

The jaunty synth music that opens the episode is so happy in an awful 80’s syndicated sitcom kind of way that I literally did not register how wrong it was for a Twilight Zone episode.  For 20 minutes I was able to forget my expectations and cynicism to just roll with the episode.  I’m not saying bouncy tunes would have saved the often painful 11/15/85 episode, but at least it would have prepared me for the sappy segments that followed.

15-year old Danny is trying to figure a way to get his crush girl Liana to go out with him.  His best plan involves tricking her by mailing her a single ticket to a play, then showing up to take the adjoining seat.  So deceit & chicanery.

That night as Danny is walking home, bully Eric uses Liana as bait to humiliate Danny.  She strolls out from the bushes, back-lit by streetlights, hair lightly blowing in the breeze.  She stops and smiles at him.  As he can’t believe his good fortune, a couple of Eric’s equally dickish friends jump out with pig masks and plastic chainsaws.  They chase Danny until he falls.  Eric emerges to tell Danny he is the “biggest chicken in Willow Creek.”  Eric puts his arm around Liana and they walk off.

That night as he is in bed, his mother opens his bedroom door.  Since he is 15, thank God she has the good sense to knock first.  She shuts off all the lights in his room, telling him he is too old for such things.  She leaves him in total darkness. Immediately after she leaves, the window shade suddenly rolls up letting a little light into the room.

His bed begins violently shaking, banging against the wall. His mother again has the good sense not to barge in.  Danny watches as a dark figure rises from beneath his bed wearing a cape and floppy hat.  He is terrified as the moaning figure approaches him.  However, it tells him, “I am the Shadow Man and I will never harm the person under whose bed I live.”  It then opens his window and floats out.

The next day, his only friend quite reasonably does not believe this story.  As they are walking into the school, however, they hear that a student was killed in the park last night.  A witness said the killer was tall and skinny and dressed in black, but his face was not visible.

That night Danny is armed with a Polaroid, but falls asleep.  The entity arises and again says, “I am the Shadow Man and I will never harm the person under whose bed I live.” He vanishes out the window before Danny can get a picture.  The entity kills another student that night. Everyone at the school is now afraid to go out after dark.

The next day, Danny overhears Eric telling Liana ^[1] that he can’t study with her that night because he doesn’t want to go out after dark.  Time to play that deceit & chicanery card.  Danny confirms with the entity that he is safe; it responds, “I am the Shadow Man and I will never harm the person under whose bed I live.”  As catch-phrases go, this one could use some tightening up. Knowing he is safe, shows up at Liana’s house to tutor her.  She is initially not interested, but does invite him in.

The next day, he is a hero at school.  His apparent bravery has made him a stud.  Eric is having none of this, so challenges Danny to a fight.  Danny says, sure, howzabout they meet in the park that night at 9:00.  Boom!  I’m starting to like this kid.  Not wanting to look like a coward, Eric reluctantly agrees.

As Danny is getting ready that night, the entity emerges and says “I am the Shadow Man and I will never harm the person under whose bed I live.”  Alright, we get it!  Christ, what windbag!  Hmmm . . . I wonder if this bit of repeated exposition will be important.

Danny has kind of become a jerk in the one day he has been popular. He even abandons his only previous friend.  It is nice to see the segment return to a 1960s style of cosmic / karmic justice. It is especially satisfying to see it meted out to a kid, which I don’t think the original ever did.

So kudos on a very satisfying segment.  The only negative was that it had me thinking of the tragic Slender Man stabbing the whole time.  I can’t blame TZ for that, though.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Minor issue:  The lithe Liana is wearing a pink sweater in this scene that makes her appear to weigh 300 pounds.
• 

As I’m watching this on YouTube, I am distracted by the other videos listed off to the side.  It’s like how you think “Look what he’s having” as the waitress carries a tray to a nearby guy with a really cute date.  I see Cold Equations — a sci-fi classic.  Nightcrawlers — a great episode already viewed.  Escape Clause from the original series.  And here I sit with . . . what?  I was going to name some mundane Chinese dish, but all of them I thought of seemed pretty tasty now that I think of them.  Plus, racist.

Or maybe that’s appropriate.  The only blatantly Asian name in the TZ cast & crew — William F. Wu — just happens to write the episode about Mr. Wong?  Hu knows, maybe he sought them out.  Write what you know, they say.  But this was season one and they never brought him back.  It just smacks of Tales From the Crypt’s infamous African-American episode.

David Wong enters a San Francisco porn shop seeking the titular Lost and Found Emporium.  Since the title is Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium, I bet he finds it.  The clerk ^[1] is pretty slippery — more slippery than the floor of his shop, I imagine.  He says sometimes the emporium is there and sometimes it is not.  He suggests Wong try in the rear, as he does with many customers.

Wong sees two doors in the back of the store.  One opens into a rat-infested alley.  The other opens into a space where the alley should be, but actually leads into a large storeroom.  Which, I guess makes sense, as it is a room in a store.  He enters and inexplicably closes the door behind him.  The door then disappears from the wall.

As he is searching for a clerk, Wong sees another magical door appear.  It opens and he correctly guesses that it is sunny Fort Lauderdale outside.  A Springbreaker walks in, although sadly from Spring of 1936. She says she is searching for lost time.  She became an artist late in life but confesses she didn’t have the patience or discipline to stick with it. I would think those were actually virtues more likely in an older person, but I ain’t no artist.

As Wong is whining — and he really is obnoxious — about how long it took him to find this place, he spots a floating orb behind the woman.  They follow it until it settles on a box of white mice.  There is an instruction card which says to stroke the mice until calm, at least five minutes.  The woman places the box on the floor, but the mice scamper away on little cat’s-dinner feet before she can find relief.  She is distraught as she has lost her last chance at happiness.  “Well, those are the breaks,” Wong says to the heart-broken old woman.

Wong soon encounters a man wandering through the aisles.  He has been a self-absorbed jerk up, but he’s really started getting to me now.  He is just pointlessly belligerent and sneering at the man.  “Tell me something, Pops.  You lose anything valuable?  Lost hope?  Lost dreams?  Lost love?”  The old man speaks of losing the respect of his children.  Wong sympathetically responds, “If I hear one more sob story, I’m going to puke.”

He sees another orb, though, and follows it to a mirror.  The instructions tell the man to stare into the mirror for five and a half minutes.  The mirror shows him as a monster, so he shatters it, squandering any future reconciliation with his children.  On the plus side, he did give Wong a good laugh.

Wong next meets a young woman. He explains his bad attitude by saying what he lost and what he seeks is his compassion.  What really pushed him over the edge was the murder of Vincent Chin.  He tells the tragic real-life story of Chin who was murdered by two idiots in Detroit.  Despite being Chinese, they mistook Chin for being Japanese and blamed him for the collapse of the US auto industry. ^[2]   They beat him to death with a baseball bat and were given probation for their actions.  She agrees to help him find his compassion in exchange for him helping her to find an item to be named later.

Oh yeah, this disembodied head shows signs of life a couple of times. I have no idea why.

He sees her orb descends on a canister.  The instructions tell her to inhale for five seconds.  She does so, and the magic seems to work for a change.  She bursts out laughing, so I guess she had lost her sense of humor; or just noticed Wong’s haircut.

She sees Wong’s orb and they follow it to three bottles, one of which contains his compassion. Yada yada, Wong screws up the test tube that contains his compassion, and just uses the bottles that contain his integrity and childhood memories.  The woman assures him he will still regain his compassion because that comes with integrity.  Not sure I go along with that. Integrity is being honest and living by solid principals.  Ayn Rand novels are full of such people, but I must have missed the chapters describing their compassion.

Wong becomes compassionate enough to stay on at the store as the new manager.  The woman decides to stay on with him.  She hangs a sign on the door which says “Under New Management, Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” — an ending efficiently spoiled by the episode’s title.

Again with the kindler, gentler Twilight Zone.  In this 1980’s series, To Serve Man really would be a book about curing diseases, ending poverty and driving people to the airport.  Still not what I’m looking for from TZ.  I’m starting to think I’m looking in the wrong place.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] The porn clerk is such a doppelganger for Best-of-Show-era Christopher Guest that it is distracting.
• ^[2] Maybe they also mistook him for Roger Smith.
• ^[2] I guess it would be churlish of me to point out the producers apparently also think Asians are interchangeable as they cast an actor of Japanese heritage to play a man named Wong — typically a Chinese name.  But it’s OK when our moral superiors in Hollywood do it.
• Also, one incident that led to Wong losing his compassion was the reaction of some bigots when he was out with a Caucasian woman.  I notice the producers were careful to have him end up with an Asian woman in the episode, though.  But it’s OK when our moral superiors in Hollywood do it.
• Brian Tochi (Wong) was one of those punks on Triacus.
• TZ Legacy:  None except to make me long for a cruel, ironic twist of fate.