We first meet Dr. Sears when the parents of an anorexic girl hire him to heal their daughter.  He has the “talent or a curse” that he can “feel what other people are feeling.”  He can draw their illness out of their mind into his own.  Moments later, the girl is chowing down.  In a really clever shot, Sears later sees his reflection in the elevator door and perceives his reflection as a fat bastard.  Well done.

In the next scene, he has ordered enough room service food to cater a wedding.  As he gazes upon this borgasmord laid out in front of him, he perceives the grub as rotten and covered by roaches, beetles and literal grubs.  He forces himself to dig in.  I’m not sure this makes sense — isn’t anorexia more about body-image and not about food being gross?  But it works.

His doctor is concerned that it is taking Sears longer and longer to row back from absorbing his patients’ maladies.  Taking a few days off, he is tracked down by a woman seeking help for her son Mark.  She takes Sears to the boy’s bedroom where is is rocking and repeating over and over, “Now he’s coming thorough the woods. Now he’s coming through the yard.  Now he’s coming in the house.  Now he’s coming up the stairs.”

This started after an accident where his mother ran over a pedestrian. The victim’s head smashed into the windshield right in front of the boy. Sears feels his pain and the boy suddenly runs downstairs to his mother.  Their maid goes to see Sears and he has collapsed on the bedroom floor. After a handful of psychotropic drugs, or possibly hawaiiantropic drugs given the fruity mixture of colors, he feels much better.

Everything is both hunky and dory as Sears is back on his feet, then sitting down at their kitchen table.  Mom and the nanny are happy, and the boy is chirpy.  Until he isn’t.  The boy is suddenly terrified.  He runs back to his room and starts his “Now he’s coming thorough the woods” shit again.  Sears goes to the window to show him that there is no one coming through the yard, but is interrupted by the man coming through the yard.

The kid continues his screaming four sentence play-by-play more obnoxiously than John Madden as the man comes in the house and up the stairs.  Sears is baffled and says the condition can’t manifest itself physically.  The non-manifested condition pounds on the bedroom door.  Sears believes this is all in his head, but Carol tells him she and Mark are real.  He screams at her that she is not real and suddenly finds himself alone in the silent bedroom.  He walks out into the house and finds everyone brutally murdered before he is himself attacked by the mystery man.

That’s it, end of story.  You can validly interpret the killer as a “physical manifestation” or the doped up doctor.  The gravitas of the two murdered women and the child effectively trumps any churlish plot issues.  Except it is not the end.

Snap — we loop back to the just-cured boy running downstairs to his mother.  The nanny goes upstairs as she did in the first iteration.  She finds Sears sitting in the corner blankly rocking back and forth repeating those same four sentences.  The end.

Thumbhead’s closing remarks did not offer any revelations this time. I am at a loss to explain how something this egregious comes from a good writer, gets past a story editor, and into the final product.

Nevermind the logic of the hallucination, what really bugs me is the very ending.  The zinger is that Sears is sitting on the floor rocking back and forth just like the boy.  But that should be no surprise — it is his standard reaction. Just the way curing the anorexic girl gave him the symptoms of anorexia, it is perfectly predictable that he would have reacted by mimicking the boy.  In fact, following the logical course, shortly thereafter he should have metabolized the symptoms and be back to normal.  It’s a happy ending for everyone — who wants that?

In fact, so wrong is this ending, that I think it would have improved the episode to have the two iterations in exactly the opposite order.

Post-Post:

• The episode kept reminding me of The Empath on Star Trek.
• I really enjoyed Allison Hossack as Carol.  She was believable as the mom and also believable as the anonymous, slightly androgynous cutie in the restaurant (not that they would be mutually exclusive types).
• The nanny, on the other hand, was a mess.  She seems to have been coiffed by Ayn Rand’s hairdresser on a bad day.  Or was she the nanny?  Maybe they were a couple.  Carol was rocking that man’s blazer and a snappy short haircut.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Not.  At.  All.
• Theresa falls up the stairs, Theresa falls down the stairs.

Before watching: Airing as the 2nd half of the episode that began with A View Through the Window, there is just no way this can’t suffer by comparison.

After watching:  They pulled off a truly great hour.

Cary Elwes is being tormented in bed by noises from the street below. There is music, but strangely no thumping rap.  And vehicle sounds, but strangely not the worst noise offender on earth besides rap — Harley Davidsons.

He tries to watch a little TV, but it is all stories about crime, murders and explosions.  He chances upon a documentary set in fictional that Archer State Park, and sets out that weekend for a little peaceful rest & relaxation.

He hikes up the side of a mountain. Well prepared, he pitches a tent (heh, heh) and cooks up some grub.  That night, his sleep is once again disturbed.  He finds another camper (Brian Dennehy) close by, hammering tent pegs into the ground, although it sounds more like he is forging a sword on an anvil.

They have a fairly cordial exchange, but it is a testimony to Dennehy that there is feeling of menace even though nothing overt I can point to.

The next morning, Elwes is awakened by a police scanner.  He again goes to visit his noisy neighbor.  Dennehy warns him that he “stumbled over a pile of bear crap the size of a Honda.”  When Elwes confronts Dennehy about the scanner, he nicely offers to turn the scanner off.  But when Elwes suggests that he was here first and that Dennehy should more on, he is not so friendly.

Later Elwes is fishing, Dennehy interrupts him to offer some tips on fishing.  He also offers several ideas on what is wrong with the country.  Again, there is nothing explicitly threatening, but Dennehy is just so intrusive and overly friendly.  He tells Elwes about the serial killer that has been terrorizing the town.  He also mentioned that he found tracks of the bear.  Inexplicably, he also says that a bear has the exact same skeleton as a man, which is just absurd.  When Dennehy pulls out a Rambo-esque knife, Elwes decides to take off.

The next night, Dennehy is again pounding his peg (heh, heh) within earshot of Elwes’ new campsite.  When Elwes accuses him of stalking, Dennehy is a little nasty this time.  The next morning, Dennehy brings his dead dog, killed by a grizzly, to Elwes and together they bury him.

Elwes and Dennehy both pull off their characters perfectly, providing just the right amount of misdirection to make the episode work.  I could bitch about that pile of bear crap, but I don’t think we’re supposed to think too much about that.

Post-Post:

• Brian Dennehy hassled another outdoorsman and got what was coming to him.
• His daughter hassled the Borg.

This is the one.

Major Ben Darnell is summoned to the middle of the desert.  This might be the best thing for him as his son has been killed in a car accident and his wife blames him.  She flatly tells him she doesn’t care where he is going.

He arrives in the desert and is shown the phenomena that prompted his trip.  And it is kind of trippy — as he walks over a ridge, in the middle of the desert he sees another reality intruding.  The titular window, if you will, into another time and another place.  In a landscape of sand and dull earth-tones sits a brilliant oasis of Middle-Earth-tones ^[1].  Darnell sees a farmhouse in a lush, wooded area and a boy playing with his dog.  By the boy’s knickers and suspenders we can infer that this is a window into long ago; or that the kid is a bit of a dandy.

As with all windows, this one gets more interesting when there is an unsuspecting hot babe seen through it.  A woman in a 19th century dress only slightly less conservative than a burka strolls into the yard.  Darnell is transfixed by this hottie who can neither see nor hear him, just like his wife.  He continues watching as a young daughter shows up and the family is frolicking in this pastoral paradise.  With his binoculars, he is able to see that she has no ring — so possibly a young widow living with her father.

I can see why these images stuck with me for so many years.  They are haunting in both technique and emotion.  Just the voyeuristic act introduces a basic tension because we know it is wrong.  But there is also the fascination with watching someone who doesn’t know they are being watched.  For Darnell, watching this happy — except for, you know, the dead father — family just compounds his pain at the literal loss of his son and the figurative loss of his wife.

On a technical, level, I appreciated that the camera mostly kept its distance.  The family was usually observed from afar as Darnell watched from outside the barrier.  If there were close-ups, it was because a family member approached the barrier, or was observed through binoculars.^[2]  This maintained the other-worldliness of the situation and also illustrated Darnell’s detachment. He was clearly grafting himself into this happy scenario.  Not being able to interact or hear them, the fantasy was perfect, but impossible.

Using an ice-Cube Goldberg device to launch an ice cube at the barrier every 3 seconds, Darnell is able to determine that the barrier drops every day for 15 seconds. Naturally, since Darnell is making progress and intelligently investigating this amazing phenomena, the Army decides he must be stopped.

While he hanging out in the canvas prison, he hears a commotion at the barrier — it has dropped again.  He belts the guard and makes a fast break for the barrier, leaping through the wall.  Now he can’t see the desert or the Army, but the woman can see him.

And then it ends.  Awesomely.  An ending so excellent that I hope I can forget it and be thrilled by it again some day.  They could have gone a few different ways, but they NAILED IT!

This Night Visions is 20/20, baby!

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Referring to the Shire or New Zealand in general.  Mordor, not so much.
• ^[2] My only minuscule criticism is that I wish the binocular POV shots had used the hokey black matting.
• Title Analysis: Although the window metaphor is also used within the episode, it isn’t accurate — the phenomena is actually 3-dimensional rather than a 2-d window.  Possibly, however, it was also meant as reference to a window into the soul.
• I saw that Karen Austin was in this, and remembered her from Night Court.  Turns out it is a different Karen Austin.  I thought the Union had rules against that.  There are actually 6 Karen Austins listed on IMDb.  WTH?
• Only the 2nd (and last) directing gig for Bill Pullman, who starred as Darnell.  Too bad — there was nothing flashy, but damn if it wasn’t just about perfect.

The Millers look at a house that could charitably be called a fixer-upper and honestly be called a tearer-downer. They take their baby with them as the realtor opens the house. It is strange that once Keith sets the baby’s carrier on the floor, he is completely ignored.  In fact, I must have blinked and missed him being carried into the house — until I rewound 30 seconds, I actually thought it was a ghost-baby they couldn’t see.

The realtor is required by TV-law to tell them that a murder occurred there 30 years ago. Keith says that is OK if it saves them $100,000.  Seeing this house, he must be expecting the seller to pay him $75,000 to take it off his hands.

Flash-forward to the Millers living in the house.  Keith comes home from the hardware store which Arriane takes as bad news, as she thought he was at an Alcoholic’s Anonymous meeting.  He awakens that night hearing shouts from the night of the murder.  Like any responsible parent, he pulls a loaded pistol out of the nightstand to investigate.

As he begins the titular renovation, a door slams and he hears a more voices from the night of the murder.  Arriane comes in and suggests the “christen” every room in the house. She suggests starting in the dining room, which is indeed suggestive.  I wonder if the writers intended that.

As they start making out, we see the murderer in the background and Keith gets a chill and leaps up.  He gets crap from Arriane who suggests that he see a therapist.  That night, after dreaming of M&Ms, he awakens to see the murderer enter their bedroom.  He watches the man grab a bottle of hooch from the closet and finish it off.  He tells Keith,  “Get some more!” and tosses the bottle against the wall.

When Arriane comes home from work the next day wearing a suit that would have seemed very 70s in the 80s.  She finds that Keith has pried the padlock off the basement.  You might think they would have checked out the basement before buying the place.  Next week, take a look at the backyard — I hear good things.

She finds the baby’s crib in the basement and comes back up to find a different crib in the baby’s room; also an empty whiskey bottle.  Keith, holding groceries in one arm and their son in the other, seems a little tipsy.  He then takes a belt right in front of his wife.  When she starts to nag him, be punches her out at the urging of the murderer.

As Keith is talking to their baby, Arriane emerges from hiding in the bathroom and does two very unlikely things.  1) she plans to get away and leave her baby there, and 2) when Keith asks where she is going, she gives the least believable answer possible: “Looks like you might need some more whiskey so I thought I’d run out and get you some.” He’s crazy and a drunk, not stupid and drunk.  She might as well have said she was going out to buy him some brass knuckles.

As Keith’s actions are paralleling the night of the murder 30 years ago, he takes a pistol out of the sock drawer.  Christ, is there a drawer in this house that doesn’t contain a gun?  BANG — he shoots her in front of the baby just as his predecessor did.

This was a fairly standard tale until the ending.  It really looked like they were going to go for something truly shocking.  Then it looked like they were going to settle for something somewhat shocking.  Then it was clear they were going to completely puss out.  Then we close on a shot that is supposed to be . . . profound? A revelation?

No-Neck Rollins: “They say you can’t go home again.  But haunted by the ghost of his past, Keith Miller couldn’t go anywhere else.”  Wait, what?  Is Butt-Chin saying that the baby who witnessed the murder 30 years ago grew up to be Keith?  Was there the slightest freaking clue to this in the actual story?  How then did this baby with the blonde hair grow up to be the black-haired Keith?

After close review, there actually is evidence for this twist, but you really have to work for it — the M&M dream turns out to be memories of colored balls in a baby’s toy.  That same toy is seen in the crib which was moved up from the basement. They botched this in a couple of ways, though.  First, the toy is half-hidden under a blanket.  Second, it was never established that the toy belonged to the original baby.

This twist might be even more botched than I give it credit for. Arriane finds a white toy rabbit in the basement crib.  It is never established which baby this toy belonged to, however, new baby was seen in the company of a brown bear.  So if the rabbit belonged to original baby, why was that still in the basement while original baby’s ball-toy was upstairs?  Arriane carries the rabbit back upstairs as if it belongs there, so maybe it does belong to new baby.

And while we’re at it, they could have done a better job with the crib.  I do give them credit for making the original crib a dark color and the new one white.  However, they seem to have made this episode for NSA cryptographers.  We get to see literally about 3 inches of railing during the original murder.

But the hair thing really bothers me.  And if the original murderer was Keith’s father, wouldn’t he have recognized him during the hallucinations?  Granted, he was a toddler at the time of the murder, but wouldn’t he have seen pictures?  Or known this was the house he had lived in?  He was young, but he remembered the colored balls (which inexplicably whack him in the face in his dream).

So maybe it wasn’t him as a baby.

Although, having both men be drunks was probably intended to suggest a family history of alcoholism.  I’m thinking of suggesting it right now.

So maybe it was him as a baby.

I really have no idea.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Hunh?  OK, Keith was renovating the house, but that didn’t really impact the story.  I guess it was his personality also being renovated.  Just seems like more of a stretch than they could make work in 30 minutes.
• I was running out of gas at about the 300 word mark, then heard Tattoo-Boy’s closing.  Maybe I should start listening to the Cryptkeeper’s segments.  Nah.

We’re immediately on thin ice:  strike one, Henry Rollins.  Strike two, a story about a disc jockey.  DJ stories just never work for me because they always feature programs no sane person would ever listen to the in the free market — like NPR ^[1].

At least the episode is not pretending this guy is a saint.  Within a minute he has cut off a caller and insulted the station janitor’s wife.  Not that the truth would have been much of a defense, but she actually is kind of cute in a nerd-girl way.  Nadine doesn’t need this crap and she does a quick pivot back out into the rain.

Tom Fallor is working the graveyard shift at KLED.  His gig is to listen to callers’ scary stories and offer his evaluation.  Like anyone cares what this dope thinks of other people’s creative endeavors . . . two . . .three . . . four . . .

His next call is from Laura who is telling her story, but stops to take delivery of a pizza. Coincidentally, a pizza man shows up at the station with a pre-paid-pie from Tasty Mon Pizza. If they offer ganj as a topping, this could be an even better weed/munchies time-management combo than pot brownies.

He slips his hand in the box and pulls out a slice.  Laura calls back and tells him there is a huge dead rat on the pizza she just received.  He mocks her, but is appalled to find his own pizza also contains a huge dead rat; and anchovies.

Laura continues her call and really creeps Fallor out.  He puts on a little 5th Dimension and grabs his coffee. Unfortunately, he takes his coffee like he takes his plague — black.  OK, that doesn’t quite make sense — I mean he finds another dead rat in his conveniently rat-sized travel cup.  But really, he had it coming — who drinks coffee with pizza?

Fallor decides the rats are the work of the janitor whose gal he insulted.  The janitor proves him wrong by being found hanging by his neck.  He also finds the janitor’s girlfriend with a plastic bag over her head.  He finds that the exterior door is blocked by a car.  I might find this a little more menacing if he had tried calling the police.  Or if he wasn’t working in a place that could broadcast a 50,000 watt 9-1-1 call to thousands of people.

I’m no Don Draper, but wouldn’t it be a better sign for the business if it faced out instead of in?

The killer shows up, and I’m not sure it makes much sense.  It is hard to fairly judge this one because the YouTube video is of such low quality.  Much like Curtains, I don’t know how much better this would have been with a decent print.  My gut feeling is that with a clear picture, this would have been pretty good.  The plot doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, but as an exercise in suspense it works fine.  Even though DJs are notoriously bad characters, Lou Diamond Philips makes the most of what he is given to work with.

It is only a slight act of faith to say this is the best of the series so far.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] I last listened to NPR in 2012.  Just twice, and both times within minutes, they implied Mitt Romney was racist.  It really is a shame — much like the New York Times, NPR is excellent in many ways but so full of intolerance and bias that they are repulsive.  I’ll say this for the New York Times, though — they don’t take my money at the point of a gun.
• I assume the station call letters KLED were mean to suggest KILLED.  There actually is a KLED in Gillette Wyoming, but it began 11 years after this episode.
• Henry Rollins closing statement:  “For all you pains in the asses out there. Remember you can only irritate so many people before you piss off the wrong one.” Ooooh, TV-cursing makes you seem so edgy!