The Twilight Zone 1.13 – Night of the Meek / But Can She Type? / The Star

So last time, we looked at a remake of an episode that we hadn’t watched, and this time, we looked at a remake of a story that we really enjoyed. The ’80s version of Rod Serling’s “Night of the Meek” was scripted by Rockne S. O’Bannon and it’s… okay. The problem with remaking something that’s really well known and really, really good is that it’s always going to suffer by comparison. Richard Mulligan is fine as Henry Corwin, if tactfully less pathetic than Art Carney’s original, but poor William Atherton seems to have been cast specifically to replay his needlessly obstinate antagonist character from Ghostbusters. On the other hand, the scale of the production is a little larger and there’s a real sense of redemption when the grouchy department store owner finds a little happiness on Christmas Eve. Our son loved it.

He was a little baffled by the second segment, “But Can She Type?”. The first problem was that title. Obviously, to older viewers, this one’s about a secretary, but he asked “But why was it called that?!” Pam Dawber plays a mistreated and unhappy secretary in this segment, but with a little magic from a gigantic office photocopier – the comic that I used to draw when I lived in Athens was mostly printed on a beast this size – she can visit another world where secretaries are held in awe and esteem. For a comedy segment, it’s not bad, and it was fun to see Jonathan Frakes play a dude so out of his league that he can’t even talk to a secretary without spilling his drink.

“The Star” is based on Arthur C. Clarke’s story and it’s a really short segment, just about ten minutes long. Writer Alan Brennert hit the plot beats as quickly as the running time would allow, and Fritz Weaver and Donald Moffat, who passed away a couple of weeks ago, are very watchable as two old friends learning a surprise about the universe that sparks a crisis of faith. Our son had no idea at all what this one was about, though, because we’re not Sunday school types, you see. It’s a heck of a good premise for a story, and we explained what the revelation implied to general disinterest and shrugs. So this was an hour that he enjoyed a little less as it went on, basically!

Today’s feature was a gift from Marie’s brother Karl and we really appreciate it! If you would like to support this blog, you can buy us a DVD of a movie that we’d like to watch one day. We’ll be happy to give you a shout-out and link to the site of your choice when we write about it. Here’s our wishlist!

The Six Million Dollar Man 4.2 – Nightmare in the Sky

I enjoy seeing how television in the seventies was more modern than we might think. Look how they started the ’76 season of the Bionic shows. They opened with the crossover story with Bigfoot, and then in week two, they brought back arguably the most popular actress in America, Farrah Fawcett, for another appearance as Major Kelly Wood. Fawcett was starring in a new series on the same network that year. Charlie’s Angels had premiered six months previously as a movie-of-the-week. The first regular episode had actually just been shown four days prior to this. I bet ABC’s marketing team enjoyed that. I wonder why they didn’t get Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson for guest star parts while the iron was hot, though!

But it wasn’t just Fawcett that got viewers tuning in to the new season. This one’s about an experimental jet that can be disassembled in just ten minutes – that’s actually a plot point – and I bet the TV commercials were full of footage of the aerial dogfight between the jet and a “holograph” of a Japanese Zero over the southern California desert. Any under-tens in the house would be in heaven watching the airplanes roaring around each other, just like ours was. (And here’s another note about the evolution of the language we use; I bet any modern TV show would use the word “hologram” instead.)

The villains this week are played by Dana Elcar and Donald Moffat, who were probably a little familiar from all the one-off guest roles they’d played until that point. The following season, Moffat would appear as Rem in Logan’s Run, and Elcar would later land the role of MacGyver‘s boss.

Logan’s Run 1.14 – Stargate

It’s always a pleasure to see a story by Dennis O’Neil, who wrote many comic books that I enjoyed as a kid, and other good ones that I came to later, like the labored but incredibly influential Green Lantern/Green Arrow series. He got to write what turned out to be the final episode of the series, about some aliens from a very hot world who have landed on Earth and, finding it suitable if uncomfortably cold, plan to colonize the planet via a matter transporter since their own is threatened by an exploding sun.

Once again, our kid got really frightened by this story, particularly a sequence where the aliens dump our heroes in a swamp and leave them for dead among the mutants and creatures, just like a fifties monster movie. Fortunately, he shouldn’t have anything too scary for the next couple of evenings.

The show had started on Friday nights, following Wonder Woman, but the network decided to rearrange its schedule just one month later, in October 1977. Madly, CBS had decided to counterprogram a show called Young Dan’l Boone opposite the established NBC hit Little House on the Prairie. It sure sounds like both programs were trying to capture the same audience. CBS canceled Boone after four bottom-of-the-ratings weeks and moved Logan’s Run against it. I don’t believe that it fared all that much better – Little House was a ratings monster – and its fate was sealed.

But there’s some dispute over when it was axed. There’s an urban legend that says that the final three episodes were not shown on the West Coast, which seems incredibly strange. I can certainly believe that some CBS stations got sick of Logan‘s ratings and axed it in favor of something else, but did CBS actually broadcast the last three episodes of this series in the east and something different in the west? If so, what? Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh’s argument-settling The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present says that the last episode aired on January 16, 1978, which seems to be the date that “Carousel” was shown. Wikipedia and IMDB, neither of which are foolproof, have later dates (1/23, 1/30, and 2/6) for the next three installments. Perhaps these were shown in New York but not Los Angeles, and surrounding markets followed suit? I’d sure like to know what CBS showed instead of this series if this is true.

Logan’s Run 1.13 – Turnabout

Our son enjoyed this much, much more than the previous episode of Logan’s Run. It’s got some good action scenes, including Francis having a desert canyon shootout with a pursuing posse, and later having a darn good swordfight with guest star Gerald McRaney. He was a few years away from his co-starring role in Simon & Simon. This was just one of more than a dozen times in the seventies where he played some villain’s main muscle.

This was, however, perhaps the only time in the seventies that McRaney played a baddie in quasi-middle Eastern garb. This society is interesting in that they’d met some runners from the City of Domes before. The runners stayed a couple of nights on their way to Sanctuary, and caused such a ruckus of wild, free ideas among these uptight turban-and-veil types that they closed their borders. The word Islam isn’t mentioned, but it’s pretty clear.

Logan’s Run 1.12 – Night Visitors

I honestly wasn’t expecting a haunted house story in this show, but here it is. George Maharis, Barbara Babcock, and Paul Mantee play “Satanic ghosts,” I guess you’d call them, who sold their souls to the “Prince of Darkness,” probably because you couldn’t say “Satan” at 8 pm on CBS in the seventies, and now want Jessica to join their coven.

Fortunately, Logan doesn’t have to get into a fistfight with Maharis’s character, because I’ve seen all the fights that Maharis had in the first season of Route 66, and I don’t care that he was fifteen years older when this episode was made; I wouldn’t be able to believe Gregory Harrison would win any such scrap with him.

Our son did not enjoy this one even a little bit. All the ghost and haunted house imagery scared him senseless and he watched most of the episode from behind the safety of his security blanket.

Most of the episode was filmed in this house, which is full of antique furniture. It seems to be one of those historic homes in California that are open for tours. If anybody can identify the house, leave us a comment!

Logan’s Run 1.11 – Carousel

Rosanne Katon and the Man With the Hairiest Chest guest star in tonight’s episode, in which, inevitably, our heroes go back to the City of Domes. Oh, all right, it’s Ross Bickell. It’s a good installment, even if the logic necessary to temporarily wipe Logan’s memory is pretty tortuous. The appearance of the most technologically advanced people we’ve met so far is glossed over to get to the events in the city.

Our son didn’t remember Katon, whom we saw in a few episodes of Jason of Star Command that originally aired a little later in 1978. Tonight, I got a good demonstration of just how six year-olds aren’t very good with faces. The plot this time requires Jessica to change her hair and clothes and see whether Logan’s memory might have returned a little after he’d been shot with an amnesia dart a little earlier. In the next scene, Logan meets up with an old girlfriend named Sheila, played by Melody Anderson. “Wow, Jessica looks different with her hair combed,” he said, as the dialogue went completely over his head. When Jessica does show up with a new ‘do and a green-blue dress, I made sure to point out it was really her. “Yeah, she combed her hair,” he said.

Some of the elements of this show really do frustrate me. We’ve frequently rolled our eyes whenever Logan zaps a sandman with his freeze ray and doesn’t take the man’s gun. Even if Jessica is reluctant to use one herself, any gun and any car that they destroy is one that can’t be used against them in the future. Their refusal to stray any farther than a day’s drive from the City of Domes is maddening. Even if Rem doesn’t have a 24th Century road map on him, surely he knows how huge the continent is and can advise them to go to the other side of it, where Francis is far less likely to follow. Now we’ve got these “higher power” dudes in the forest, who sort of feel like the spiritual TV descendants of the sort of aliens who’d routinely freeze the USS Enterprise in space and yell at Kirk in a booming voice. I think the next thing I’d do if I escaped from the city this time is head straight back to those guys and ask for some more information I can use. Surely some of this occurred to the writer, D.C. Fontana?

Logan’s Run 1.10 – Futurepast

As clip shows go, this is a really good one. There aren’t very many clips, for starters, mainly from episodes one and two (including the repurposed footage of Carousel from the movie, without the explosions on the people flying to their deaths), and they’ve been reassembled and remixed to form new scenes along with other psychedelic imagery as Logan and Jessica have nightmares in a dream research lab. The lab is run by an android played by Mariette Hartley, and she and Rem are delightfully cute together in some of those common-to-the-genre scenes in which androids or robots ask “could these be the emotions that humans call… love?”

Central to Logan and Jessica’s shared nightmare is a skull-masked figure that urges Jessica to join him in Carousel, with his red chest unit blinking. There’s one repeated scene in which he walks down a stairway, vanishes, and reappears closer to the camera, while Jessica turns and flees. This really got under our son’s skin and he retreated behind the sofa because it was “super creepy.”

“Futurepast” is the only episode of the series written by Katharyn Powers, who’d been writing for television for about four years, starting with some work on ABC’s 1974 flop frontier drama The New Land. The season before this, she had worked with this show’s script editor, D.C. Fontana, on the Bermuda Triangle series The Fantastic Journey, where she wrote a third of the episodes. In all, she seems to have contributed to about two dozen series and seems to have retired after writing thirteen episodes of Stargate SG-1 in the late 1990s.

Logan’s Run 1.9 – The Judas Goat

I wasn’t very interested in the previous episode of Logan’s Run while our son enjoyed it, and tonight’s was one that I quite liked while he grumbled “This is the wrong episode for me.” He wasn’t interested in this at all. In it, the Sandmen use that face-change machine shown in the movie to give a Sandman the face of Hal 14, a dissident that Jessica knows, hoping that he can find Logan outside and persuade our heroes to return and become the figureheads of a (non-existent) rebellion.

But things get complicated in a very unexpected way. Logan, Jessica, and Rem are considering returning to the City of Domes when they get captured by the very first known runner to escape, a guy named Matthew. He has enslaved a small group of simple farmers who see him as their provider, and guard his complex in exchange for a daily hour of computer-controlled “joy.” It’s a complex and clever story with a couple of satisfying twists by John Meredyth Lucas, who had written a few episodes of Star Trek, Mannix, and The Six Million Dollar Man.

The most interesting bit for me, however, was the casting. The Sandman wearing Hal 14’s face is Nicholas Hammond, who was occasionally appearing in CBS’s Amazing Spider-Man specials at this time, and the lead slave, Garth, is played by Spencer Milligan, who had left Land of the Lost a couple of years before. So here’s a rare picture of three seventies sci-fi leading men all in the same TV episode!

Logan’s Run 1.8 – Fear Factor

Most of these episodes have been a very pleasant surprise, with even the weaker episodes better than I’d figured they would be. “Fear Factor” is a pretty weak one, though. Jared Martin plays our heroes’ ally in a weird community where a so-called doctor is trying to neutralize all the compassion of the people in his clinic and turn everyone into perfectly reasonable worker drones who don’t question anything. Not a bad premise, I guess, but it isn’t explored or developed. He’s trying to build an army, but he doesn’t know who they’re meant to fight. The most memorable scenes are set in some underground red hallways where the doctor is testing Logan’s bravery, precisely the same sort of test that Lex Luthor tried on Superman in the 1978 movie.

Our son really enjoyed it, however. At one point, Rem and one of the doctors get into a mental tug-of-war while wearing sci-fi headbands and he was hopping in his seat while drumming his legs he was so excited. Nice to have one of us be so excited by the experience.

The episode was written by John Sherlock, which certainly sounds like a pseudonym, and this seems to be his only screen credit, he is probably better remembered for his novels, which include 1964’s The Ordeal of Major Grigsby and 1986’s Golden Mile. A 1997 report in The Irish Times suggests that he credited himself as a “creative consultant” on several other movies and TV shows even if the Writer’s Guild doesn’t seem to have done that.

Logan’s Run 1.7 – Crypt

The grown-ups in the room sat up straight when we saw Harlan Ellison’s name in the credits. He wrote the original story of “Crypt,” with Al Hayes finishing the teleplay, and Ellison can typically be relied upon for something very interesting. He contributed a story with six scientists, frozen in cryogenic sleep for two hundred years and all suffering from an ancient plague, awakened today with only enough anti-toxin for three of them. Complications ensue when one of the six might be an impostor. One of the six is definitely a murderer, and then there were five.

I think the grown-ups might have been more entertained than our six year-old critic. The moral dilemma surrounding who will live was a bit over his head, and he also immediately identified the impostor. I’m not sure how he was able to nail his guess so accurately, but whodunits often lose their luster once you figure ’em out.

Of minor note: one of the six scientists is an engineer played by Christopher Stone, who was apparently contractually bound to appear as a guest star on every single prime-time drama made for American TV in the seventies. You know that guy with a mustache who was always being aggressive and rude? That guy. I believe we’ll see him again once or twice down the line.

The Six Million Dollar Man 3.9 – The Bionic Criminal

Monte Markham returned for a second outing as the other bionic man, now renamed Barney Hiller without in-story comment, in this pretty entertaining story by Peter Allan Fields and Richard Carr. This was the fourth of seven episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man that Carr wrote or co-wrote; he’d been writing for westerns and other dramas since the early 1950s. Among his credits is a first season Batman story for the Riddler.

Our son enjoyed this one more than Barney’s original appearance, which surprised me. It is a good story: Barney agrees to be reactivated for 48 hours in an experiment to see whether bionic powers can be turned off and on again in case of national emergencies, but is blackmailed by a former OSI scientist, played by Donald Moffat, into robbing banks. We know Moffat as Rem in Logan’s Run already, and I am pleasantly amused that we got to see one of his bionic appearances alongside our screenings of Run.

But while this episode does have another slow-motion bionic fistfight, which pleased our son, it’s nowhere as destructive and entertaining as the one in Barney’s first appearance. The deciding factor, it turns out, is a long scene where Barney tries to resume his career as a race car driver. A fast car put this one over the top. Six year-olds!

Two other thoughts strike me: there’s an incredibly long flashback with several clips to Barney’s initial outing. It seems really strange to devote almost four minutes to an in-story memory. This episode is one of the few we’ve seen that does not have a pre-title sequence at all, where a “Previously on…” recap might normally go. I wonder why they decided to build a nearly four minute flashback into the narrative instead of just cutting something shorter together before the opening credits.

But the really unusual surprise is that Alan Openheimer returns in this story as Dr. Wells. By chance, this morning’s viewing comes just as a couple of Doctor Who fans – there will always be a couple of Doctor Who fans to make you roll your eyes and sadly say “there are these couple of Doctor Who fans…” – are outraged and upset that the powers that be have recast the role of the First Doctor for a team-up episode. Apparently, every other recasting in all of television and film is acceptable, but because each Doctor is special and magical and sacred, and the show invented the concept of regeneration, then if any Doctor now or in the future were to meet an old version in a team-up, then they should only use one of the last few Doctors, and honorably retire the ones played by actors who have died.

So in The Six Million Dollar Man, we’ve got a character who’s been played by Martin Balsam, then Alan Oppenheimer, then Martin E. Brooks, then Oppenheimer again, and Brooks will take back over the next time Dr. Wells is seen. The world kept turning. But David Bradley playing the First Doctor is some kind of sacrilege despite William Hartnell being dead since 1975. It’s a fictional character in a popular drama, not a blessed holy relic, you know.