Retirement home resident Roger Leads is having another one of his nightmares.  He is in a dark room lit only by many candelabras.  An old woman is crouched in the corner, terrified of what is trying to get in the door.  She pleads with him to help.  This is too much for Roger and he wakes up shivering, although that might be because the staff turns the thermostat down to a chilly 85 at night.

The narrator tells us that since the death of his wife three years ago, he leads a life where “he touches no one and no one touches him.”  That is about to change as his pal Frank says the room next door to him is getting a new resident.  I wonder what happened to the old res . . . oh, right.

A nurse wheels in his new neighbor — it is the woman from his dream.  Unfortunately, his dream about the frightened old woman, not the other one about Angie Dickinson.  Roger’s pal Frank says she hasn’t spoken a word in 10 years, so she really is the girl of his dreams.

Later, Roger’s pals are passing the time playing cards.  He sees the new gal, Laura Kincaid, has her chair parked across the room.  She is catatonic, also silent and unmoving, as she has been since her husband died.  Roger recalls his dead wife and realizes how much he needed her.

That night, Roger again dreams of being with Laura in the dark room.  She is begging him to help her again.  When he accidentally burns his hand on a candle, he wakes up.  He is stunned to see his hand actually is burned.

The next day, he sees her sitting outside.  He asks her some questions, but the woman seems to take no notice of him.  Join the club, pal.  He asks, “That is you, isn’t it?  In my dream?  Even before you got here, you were there!”  He asks how she picked him, and pleads with her to pick some else.  He feels unworthy because he couldn’t save his wife.  He shouts at her to “get out of my head!  Leave me alone!”

That night, he has the same dream again. As always, Laura is begging him to save her from the thing behind the door.  Roger has the revelation that “you’re not keeping someone out, you’re keeping someone in!”  Roger opens the door and a respectable looking old gentleman enters.  It is Laura’s dead husband.  He tells her she has got to let go.  And so on . . .

This is yet another episode where I think it is fine, just not what I’m looking for from a series called The Twilight Zone.  I know the original series had its share of sentimental episodes, but the 1980s reboot feels like I’m watching Kick the Can every other week.

Taken on its own, there is a lot to like here.  There is a lot of yakking, but well-done for a change.  It is not the printed prose torturously forced into a screenplay like Ray Bradbury Theatre, nor is in the nonsensical padding of The Hitchhiker.  I appreciated that it was natural dialogue which brought depth to both the story and the characters.  Eddie Albert, who seemed so feeble just 2 years later on RBT, carries most of the episode.  Whether he is angry, scared, or just curmudgeonly, he nails it throughout.

Other Stuff:

• Holy crap, Laura was only 61!  That seems pretty young for these shenanigans.

A kid wearing a red beret and an ascot saunters across an open field.  Either he is intended to be a generic Boy Scout knock-off, or he’s just a real dandy.  He falls through a hole into a pretty nice multi-level set which conveniently has a raised area under the hole so he was’t sent to the final Jamboree.  This scout is preparedness incarnate — despite the fact that he is crossing an open field at high noon, he has a fleshlight flashlight on him.  When he sees something moving around, he goes to get the sheriff.

The sheriff shines his bigger light around and sees paintings on the walls of the cave.  He calls in Dr. Cline from the local college to check it out.  She says the paintings are 12,000 years old.  There are buffalo depicted, and hunters stalking them.  Another item is just a blob which Cline suggests might be spiritual doorway or a circle where they all got together for protection.  It looks more like the space shuttle to me, but I might be watching too much Ancient Aliens.

Sometime later, topside, Cline tells the sheriff she needs the site guarded because there have been some disturbances.  The sheriff suggests it might just be raccoons.  Cline persuasively disagrees by showing a huge sheep carcass literally two feet from where they were standing.  They had just had a little walk & talk, so this could have been blocked much more effectively.

The sheriff goes about his sheriff business.  The developer who owns the land goes full Murray Hamilton, only with a bolo tie rather than that wacky anchor jacket.  The sheriff tries to calm him down, but I must say Dr. Cline is no help.  It’s admirable that she wants to protect the old artifacts, but she callously mocks the developer’s financial situation.  I’ve never seen a college professor so full of contempt unless someone was trying to exercise free speech on their campus.  The sheriff is also tracking some missing animals.  They appear to have been dragged to the excavation and cooked.

The sheriff spends the night in his car at the cave.  Dr. Cline hears noises and sees shadows darting around in the cave.  When she screams, the sheriff goes down to check things out.  He finds her lying on the ground with a spear in her back.  He too begins seeing shadows.  As he chases them around, he turns to see Cline’s body is gone.

He looks at the paintings on the wall and sees one is moving — a stick figure dragging Cline’s body away.  He gets a brush and starts scrubbing the other paintings from the wall.  And just in time — an Indian is about to spear him in the back.  As the sheriff erases the figure, the Indian fades away.

Can something be less than the sum of its parts?  That’s what we have here.  Louise Fletcher and Michael Hogan are recognizable faces.  The set was intriguing with both outdoor and subterranean areas.  I’m sure it’s racist in ways I can’t even imagine, but the idea of the ancient Indians coming back had great potential.  The idea of the paintings changing, especially when we actually see the animation, was fun.  They even had an experienced director.

And yet, it was something of a slog.  The feeling started early as Hogan seemed a little hammy and Fletcher just seemed miscast.  The episode really took a wrong turn killing off Dr. Cline so brutally.  I like a nice undeserved murder as much as the next guy, but TZ has always been more about just deserts and comeuppance.  This is just gratuitous.  Worse, it is almost amusing due to the sudden exposition — she was killed off-camera — and that giant spear sticking up particularly perpendicularly.

The final scene also bugged me for the most nit-picky of reasons.  I doubt either an archaeologist or a sheriff packs cleaning products.  So the sheriff had to go buy some and come back.  Or even if he or the doctor did have them, he had to get the bucket, some water, a brush, etc.  Yet the Indian stood around until he was actually erasing the figure to hurl a spear at him?  I know, drama.

As illogical as it sounds, it also bugged me that the sheriff started erasing the cave paintings.  Sure, it saved his life, but only because he stuck around to scrub the wall.  This is like idiots who leave graffiti in parks, or topple ancient precariously stacked rocks.

And what brought the Indians back anyway?  At least there was no cliched burial ground.  The doctor was not desecrating the area, although, the sheriff did almost trip over a bone.  I say almost, there was nothing going on here to warrant a murder. There was also no effort made to tie the drawings to the Indians.  Why were their movements reflected on the wall?  Compare this to a better episode in this TZ series, Still Life.  That also involved ancient tribesmen returning.  There, however, their return was explained by the developing of photographs which had stolen their souls.  Neat.

This is more like a Hitchhiker episode where they throw a bit of weirdness on the screen with no context or motive and think they have accomplished something.

It could have been great.

Other Stuff:

• Classic TZ Connection:  None that I see, but strangely, in addition to Still Life, the changing picture reminded me of The Cemetery from Night Gallery.
• The kid who fell in the hole was Charlie from RBT’s The Playground.

Following yesterday’s Tales of Tomorrow is like getting the slot after Spiderman at the dance contest.  Making the comparison even worse for TZ, this is a really mediocre episode.

Boring Father Mark Cassidy is working obsessively to raise funds for a new children’s hospital.  His boring assistant brings him some boring tea, but the coffee and cigarettes probably have him wired enough already.  Coming out of the rectory (hee hee), he sees an old family truckster passing by.  It disappears around the bend on a dirt road.  He hears a crash and runs down the road.  At the bottom of a hill, he sees the car in flames.  When his assistant arrives, she thinks he’s gone around the bend because she sees nothing.

As Cassidy is updating the fund-raising graph, Monsignor Perot ^[1] drops by.  He says, “I remember when that children’s wing was just a dream.”  That’s nothing, I remember 2 minutes ago when it was a whole hospital.

These are literally the most boring characters I have seen this year.  Both are soft spoken old white men.  The Monsignor is a geezer who, at least, is puffing on a meerschaum to give him a little character. ^[2]  Cassidy is just a tall, blonde, angular non-entity.  Both speak somberly and slowly as if to add some gravitas to the scene.  The new announcer ain’t working for me either, but that can come later.

During a class about Father Damien and the lepers, he spots the family truckster through the window.  He runs outside, and after the car.  It again goes around the bend just out of budget range, and he hears the sound of a crash.  His mob of students chase him down like they just found out he believes in the 1st amendment.  He looks down the hill and sees the car on fire again — this time with a woman he recognizes inside.  Again the kids see nothing.

That night, staring at a fire — a real one, in a fireplace — Cassidy looks through some pictures.  He and the woman are in the same car, surrounded by kids.  It is never made clear what their relationship is.  At first, I though it was his family, but the kids are never mentioned.  Maybe they were camp counselors.  They are wearing camp tee-shirts and Cassidy has a whistle among his keepsakes; there is a lanyard, but that is inconclusive as there is no clipboard.

The next day, the Monsignor announces that after Cassidy’s years of hard work raising $2 million, the children’s wing can be built.  Not only that, it will be named after Father Mark.  He takes this news very somberly.  Later the Monsignor tells him to take some time off, but he is worried about the clothing drive, the pageant, the operating costs.  He is clearly driven, but it is the dullest drive I have ever seen.  Worse than Alligator Alley.

Cassidy spills his guts in the confessional.  He describes the actual accident from his youth when he looked exactly as he does now.  He was able to hear the girl call him for help as she burned alive.  He asks why he was thrown from the car and not her.  He asks if all his works have not atoned for his cowardice at not fighting the flames to rescue her.  He begs forgiveness at leaving her to die while he lawyered up with the family fixers, and wearing a fake neck-brace to her funeral in a laughably transparent ploy for sympathy.  No, wait, that was Ted Kennedy.

The confessional is a great made-for-TV location for exposition.  However, isn’t there supposed to be someone listening?  I’m not up on the rules, but isn’t that the point?  Isn’t the priest supposed to absolve you of your sins?  Cassidy spends a couple of minutes talking to the screen partition — there is no one on the other side.  I guess you could argue that he was talking to God, but that could be done anywhere.

He later sees the car outside again.  This time, he gets into the car beside the woman and they drive around the bend.  The screen goes black and we hear the same crash again.  If this episode were not so deadly dull and dreary, I would have thought they were going for a joke.  Actually, it is a pretty good joke, though unintentional.

However, the real joke is on the viewer as the episode continues at the funeral of Father Cassidy.  As his casket passes by, the woman who had appeared burning in the car places a rose on it.  She watches it be loaded into the hearse, then walks away.  That’s it.  Seriously, that’s it.

The script was nonsensical on a Hitchhikerian level.  As a full stand-alone 30 minute episode, there was no excuse for this.  Was the original crash his fault?  Who was the woman?  What was their relationship?  Why was he confessing to an empty chair?  How did he die? ^[3] How was the dead woman able to attend his funeral?  She left a rose — does she forgive him?  Shouldn’t she have faded away as she walked down the road?  Or maybe at the end, they could have both driven safely around the bend?  My only explanation is that the pace is so lethargic that scenes had to be cut for time.

The performances were so flat as to be tiresome.  This includes the new announcer.  I had hoped the person following the avuncular Charles Aidman would have a little more menace in his voice.  Unfortunately, it sounds like they just went for a younger Aidman.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Also boring.
• ^[2] OK, it’s just a boring regular pipe.
• ^[3] When he got into the ghost car and rode away, his assistant should have seen him hovering down the road in a sitting position.  To be fair, I’m willing to accept that anything in the car moved to a different dimension.
• Title Analysis:  No idea what they were going for.  Yeah, Cassidy crossed over at the end, but I don’t think that’s it.  The car accident was not at a railroad crossing.

40 year old disabled pro baseball player Ed Hamner is listening to his former team, the Detroit Tigers, on the radio.  His BFF, 12 year old Paula — wait, what? — drops her bike outside and comes in.  She is also wearing Tigers paraphernalia.  She jumps up into the chair with Ed — again I say, what!  This strange relationship is not even the first thing that jumps out when viewing the episode.  For some reason, Marc Singer has chosen to play this character as if he were borderline mentally challenged.

After the game, she shows Ed some of his old baseball cards which she just bought.  She says, “I hear 20 Ed Hamners will get me a Reggie Jackson.”  That might sound cruel, but she was being charitable.  Based on my brief flirtation with baseball cards, the figure should have been more like 2,000 ^[1].  But they’re pals, just joshing and giving each other shoulder and elbow shoves as they giggle.

She hands Ed her big surprise — an ancient card she found for a player named Monty Hanks.  Like Ed, he had a brief career.  Also, like Ed, he has Ed’s face — they are identical. Paula leaves, but Ed says he will come to see her pitch tomorrow.

Ed’s wife comes home and immediately starts nagging him in the most irritating way possible — deservedly.  She chews him out for playing with baseball cards when he was supposed to be working on his resume, although it is pretty much on the back of all of the Ed Hamner baseball cards Paula brought him.

Ed does make the effort to show up for an interview at Vectrocomp the next day, however, the boss keeps him waiting for over an hour.  He tells the receptionist he has another appointment and goes to Paula’s baseball game.  That night when he gets home, Cindy is swilling wine already.  She says, “Look who’s here, Rookie of the Year!”  I enjoyed that.

That night, sleeping on the couch, he is awakened by the Monty Hanks baseball card glowing in the dark.  Then it floats over to him and expands to the size of a door.  Ed walks through and is transported to 1910.  He no longer needs his cane, and is in a Washington Senators baseball uniform.  The bad news is that he is Monty Hanks and at bat facing the bean-ball that ended Hanks’ career.  Sure enough, he takes one right to the melon.  This time Hamner / Hanks is able to shake it off, though, and play out the game.

After experiencing the miracle of time travel, being healed so he no longer needed a cane, again feeling the passion of playing the game he so loved, Ed can’t wait to tell his soul-mate, his life-partner, his bestie . . . 12 year old Paula.  She is understandably skeptical until he shows her the stats on the back of Monty Hanks card which have changed to reflect Ed’s performance.  On the next trip, he takes Paula with him; to a simpler time when there was no crippling pain, no nagging wife, no pressure to get an office job, no consent laws.

After a few trips, Ed’s team is in contention to go to the World Series.  Cindy has set up a gig for Ed as a speaker at a convention, but he ditches that too as he can’t miss a crucial game.  Paula could not attend, but comes to his house later.  She catches Cindy tossing Ed’s baseball cards into the fire.  Paula enters and asks, “Where’s Ed?”  Cindy quite reasonably asks, “Don’t you ever knock?”  This gal is a keeper!  Paula is able to stop Cindy from burning the Monty Hanks card.

Cindy gives her the card.  Paula rips it in half, somehow knowing that will trap Ed in 1910 rather than, say, ripping him in half like Bishop in Aliens.  Wouldn’t Cindy burning it have also sealed him in?  Also, that’s a pretty presumptuous life choice for Paula to make for Ed and Cindy.  As she looks at the back of the card, the additional years’ stats that Monty Hanks never had are filled in.

Overall, a pretty good episode.  Marc Singer’s performance is a little over the stop with exaggerated facial expressions and speech affectations.  He confesses to his wife that he never really grew up, so I guess he is just a stunted super-fan.  His relationship with Paula might raise eyebrows in the neighborhood, but nothing salacious is implied here.  As usual, the wife doesn’t get much to do except nag.  She did get off some good lines though, and her scene with Paula was very believable.

I even liked the jaunty score they played when Ed went back in time.  It seemed more carnivally than basebally, but it did effectively evoke the past.  Even the little pixie dust flourish musical cue that usually signifies an awful TZ episode is appropriately-used here.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] Marc Singer (Ed) is 40, so Ed’s brief career must have ended about 15 years ago. ^[2]  This would have put his last year at about 1973, when Reggie Jackson was World Series MVP.  I’d say his wife has been pretty patient.
• ^[2] Or 3 years before Paula was born.
• Classic TZ Connection 1:  In Sixteen Millimeter Shrine, an actress disappears into an old movie rather than a baseball card.  But she didn’t take her paperboy with her.
• Classic TZ Connection 2:  Ed Hamner is suspiciously similar to TZ writer Earl Hamner, but I see no other similarity.  Maybe he was a Tigers fan.
• IMDb erroneously calls him Hamler, but it says Hamner on his cards.
• Ed Hamner was such a Tigers fan, I wonder why TZ didn’t have Hanks play for the Tigers in 1910.
• From the director of the dreadful Banshee on RBT.  The weakness there was more the script than his direction, though.

The curious case I got was a curious case of deja vu back to the Patterns episode of Night Visions.  In that post, I had a paragraph stating how each step of the plot was evident from the start:

Of course Martin’s OCD tics are going to be the glue that keeps the world together.  Of course Critchley is going to be skeptical.  Of course Martin is going to be found to be telling the truth.  And of course Critchley will inherit the burden that he was skeptical of.

Change the names, and this is exactly the same story.  That is not necessarily a bad thing.  I guess it is a broad enough trope, like time-travel, that no one can claim to own it.  And I am a sucker for this particular trope, so case dismissed.  I give it a Trumpian pardon — maybe not deserved, but who’s going to stop me?

I deleted about 500 words above that just seemed superfluous; although beautifully composed.  Harry Morgan played Edgar Witherspoon perfectly.  As a young man — or at least as young as Harry Morgan ever was — he was a bit of a stiff.  The laughs he got back then seemed to be from hamming it up or due to funny words coming out of his Dragnet facade.  In this episode, he seems to have arrived at peak coot-hood.  He is a fun old guy, believably sincere with his krazee ideas.  Unfortunately — and I’m going to use that word a lot — the psychiatrist seems to be in a different episode, and the rest of the cast are just non-entities.^[1]

Unfortunately # 2:  This is the first episode of the 3rd season (although the 4th episode on the DVD?) and the first appearance of Robin Ward as the announcer.  I was often critical of Charles Aidman’s avuncular voice undermining many episodes, so a change was welcome.  I’m not sure this is an improvement, though.  From one outing, he strikes me as if he is trying to emulate both Aidman and Rod Serling.  I hear shades of them both in his delivery.

Unfortunately # 3:  The score, as is frequently the case, is just entirely inappropriate.  Harry Morgan was fine being eccentric, but I would rather have had the score show a little more seriousness.  These scores too often cheapen the stakes with musical flourishes and little pixie dust sounds.  The psychiatrist’s performance was grimly at odds with the rest of the episode, but maybe he was closest to getting it right.  The island of Tuatau was destroyed by a tidal wave for cryin’ out loud!  Do you have no feelings atoll — heyooooo! ^[1]

And yet, for all the belly-aching, I really enjoyed it.

Other Stuff:

• ^[1] This is not so funny after the events of Barbuda.  Or before.
• Yikes, what a dreadful pedigree:  The psychiatrist was on an episode of Ray Bradbury Theater, his secretary was also in a RBT, Edgar’s niece was in the dreadful Poltergeist remake, and the new announcer was in a Hitchhiker.