Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, we learn about the dark side of celebrity.

Episode 2.4 “Rerun”

(Dir by John Auerbach, originally aired October 22nd, 1989)

Allison (Rachel Jones) and Max (Mitchell Whitfield) are anthropology students and roommates.  Max would like to be even more but Allison is hopelessly in love with a man who she has not only never met but who is dead!

Tony Sterling (Max Nassar) was an actor who starred on a show where he drove a motorcycle across America.  Tony recently died but Allison keeps a big poster of him hanging in her bedroom.  Allison says she isn’t worried about studying for her upcoming exam because she’s been praying to the poster.  Uhmm …. okay …. I mean, I had a huge crush on James Franco back in the day but I never prayed to him….

Suddenly, Tony appears in the bedroom and declares his love for Allison.  Allison is so overjoyed that she doesn’t care that he’s dead and that he keeps biting her neck.  Max, however, is a bit more concerned so he goes to see Tony’s agent (Kaye Ballard), who explains that Tony was a Satanist who couldn’t even ride a motorcycle!  In fact, Tony couldn’t even talk to people.  He had to have his small talk written out for him by a crack team of publicists.

Max returns to the apartment to confront Tony with proof that he’s both a talentless hack and a lamprey-in-human-form.  (Earlier, Max talked about a tribe that believed that everyone’s soul was an animal.  Apparently, Tony has the soul of a lamprey.)  Realizing the truth about Tony, Allison rejects him.  Tony attacks Max.  Can Allison flush a ring that Tony gave her down a toilet quickly enough to send Tony’s soul back to Hell?

Fear not — she can!  This is one of the few episodes of Monsters to have a straight-up happy ending and I’m glad that I did.  Allison and Max were a cute couple and it would have been unbearably cruel to not allow them to be together or to have one of them turn out to be a demon.  You want them to get together and if it takes dealing with an incubus for them to come together, so be it.

Actually, this episode is probably more relevant today than it was when it was first release.  There’s not much difference between Allison praying to her poster of Tony and the people who spend all day searching social media for any heretics who fail to worship at the altar of their favorite performers.  If this episode were made today, Allison would be praying to Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Swift.  That’s not to say that Timothee and Taylor are lampreys, of course.  It’s just that people have always worshipped those who have accomplished some sort of celebrity.  Anyone who is anyway famous has at least a few people who have devoted their lives to them.  It’s creepy but it’s the way of the world.