In this poignantly haunting episode of the Twilight Zone, Gladys Cooper plays a lonely widow who starts to receive mysterious phone calls from a stranger.
This episode was written by Richard Matheson (and based on his short story Long Distance Call) and it was directed by Jacques Tourneur. Tourneur is probably best known for directing moody horror films like Cat People and Curse of the Demon and he brings a similar atmosphere to Night Call.
Night Call originally aired on February 7, 1964.
Having started off well, Marvel’s Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s second episode hoped to keep the show’s momentum going. While it manages to keep everything moving, it kind of feels a little too familiar to anyone who’s watched Whedon’s work. It’s not a terrible thing, but this might not bode well for the series overall in the long run. At the rate the show is going to make references to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they could conceivably run out of them by episode 6 or 7. Then again, they can always add to the MCU by way of elements in the comics themselves.The second potential problem is that the show could end up feeling like Thor, with S.H.I.E.L.D. playing the clean up team after the big superheroes. It may have worked in that film, but for the length of a series, I can’t say for certain it’ll work. Then again, they can always add to the MCU by way of elements in the comics themselves. Look at Smallville. That got stretched out to 10 seasons. We’ll have to see.
The episode opens up with an explosion on board the S.H.I.E.L.D. plane that sends at least one person flying out into the open sky. We then move back some 16 hours before the event, with the team on it’s way to Peru to discover the source of the 0-8-4 reported in the Pilot. An 0-8-4 is an Object of Unknown Origin, the last of which was Mjolnir in Kenneth Branaugh’s Thor. I thought that was a cool connection to make there.
We find Skye getting herself settled in, joining the team. The scientist pair of Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons are happy to have her aboard, but Ward is skeptical over bringing her along. The most he says to her when she arrives is to suggest she read the manual but Coulson points out that having hacked S.H.I.E.L.D. twice, they could definitely use her services. Ward and May go on to complain that there are only really 2 people on the team who are combat ready. Since Fitz and Simmons aren’t likely to use weapons, so there’s not much they can bring to the table in Ward’s and May’s eyes. Coulson disagrees and goes with keeping Skye. With Skye being new, she won’t think the way the rest of the team does – Ward’s words. Here we find the theme of the episode: Teamwork. This episode is basically written to show how the team can mesh under certain circumstances. I’ll admit that I liked the theme, but I really had a problem with the way Ward was in this. Granted, he was drugged and forced to be cooperative in the previous episode, so Skye is aware that he’s attracted to her, but this episode felt like that didn’t happen. It’s a classic “Mal won’t be with Inara because she’s a Companion, despite having feelings for her, and thus has to berate her for what she does” situation from Firefly.
While in Peru, the team stumbles on an Incan Temple. Inside, they find the artifact, which appears to be partially encased in a stone wall. In examining the object, they find it appears to have been in the rock for about 1500 years, but the craftsmanship of if it is German in design. This was something of a hiccup for me, considering what we find out later in the episode. I’ll get to that later. Agents Ward and May have a small discussion about her background and a legend known as “The Cavalry”, where May saw some type of serious action in Bahrain. She dismisses most of it, but before Ward can get May to say more, a small fight breaks out. The fight leads to The attackers are revealed as the Policia Militar de Peru, lead by Camilla Reyes (Leonor Varela, from Blade II), who has a history with Coulson. As Coulson and Camilla get re-acquainted, Skye and Ward get into a mini argument over Skye’s association with Rising Tide. Being someone who throws himself into the thick of things, Ward has issues with the safety Skye has making her reports from her van. Again, more of the “I hate you, I think” banter. It’s cute in some ways.
Shortly after the introduction, there’s an attack that has everyone rushing to pack up and go. With Fitz-Simmons and Skye stuck at the entrance of the temple, one nice scene has Ward using a stun device similar to the one Simon Tam had in Serenity that knocks most of the guards out. There’s an additional moment where Fitz-Simmons and Skye are nearly shot, but May uses the team’s armored SUV to cover them. It all shows that the team really isn’t battle ready, but everyone manages to get back to the plane and escape. The team also manages to take along Camilla and some of her men on board. It’s here that Fitz mentions that the device was probably part of the Red Skull weaponry using Tesseract energy from the 1940’s. So…how does something made in the 1940’s get carbon dated as being in the rock of an Incan Temple for over 1500 years? Unless there’s some kind of time travel element we don’t know about in a future episode, that could be a mistake on the writers part?
In flight, Coulson apologizes to May over throwing her into a combat situation. She has nothing to say on the matter, though we clearly know she can handle herself just fine. Fitz-Simmons continues their analysis of the Tesseract/Hydra Artifact in the lab. They discover the energy output of it is potentially huge, and were lucky their drones didn’t accidentally cause it to go off. Again, Ward notes the team wasn’t ready, and he could have easily handled it all if he worked alone. This causes Fitz-Simmons to argue they are just as important to the team as anyone. Coulson arrives on scene and points out that each of them have qualities that are useful for the team and tells them to just make it work. Everyone goes their separate ways on the plane.
Throughout the episode, Skye is having a tough time finding her place in the team. In just about every scene she’s in, she tries to assist but finds herself either pushed aside or feeling out of place. Acting as the character we see everything through (as newbies to S.H.I.E.L.D., she’s a lot like Winifred Burkle in Angel trying to find out way after being rescued from Pylea. She has a talk with Ward over their perspectives with problems. Skye sees the beauty of multiple people being able to bring part of a solution like a puzzle piece, while Ward has always seen himself as the whole solution. They agree on their differences and bond a little over a drink when Ward notices the other members of Camilla’s group haven’t touched the drinks they’ve had.
Camilla makes a move on Coulson, who catches her intentions and reveals that he sees what she’d need to do to take over the plane. It’s here that the Militia starts attacking. Ward takes out a few of them, holding his own as well as Coulson does with Camilla. May is taken out of the equation with sleeping gas and the scientists are captured. Coulson stands down is taken hostage with the rest of the team.
Tied in a room, Coulson is kept alive because he needs to keep the lines of communication open. Camilla tells him that he went from a large group of combat ready people to a crew of five in a big plane, liking it all to a mid-life crisis of sorts (“An After-life thing” Coulson mentions). In Camilla’s eyes, the team exists to give Coulson a sense of relevance – they need him for guidance, it makes him important. He counters by saying that they don’t really need him, they need time…and a common enemy, which Camilla just provided. I liked that, actually. It reminded me of the turning point in the Avengers where the team finally began to work together.
As a group, the rest of the team are contained, trying to figure out a way to get out. Ward realizes that Skye’s idea of each one of them being part of the solution can help in this. With May’s assistance – The Calvary coming to the rescue – they manage to get out, subdue a few of the guards and use one of the drone devices to active the Artifact. The Artifact blasts a hole in the plane, causing the distraction to give them all the upper hand.
So the first half of this episode was okay, but the second half requires one to suspend a bit of logic. As an action sequence, the in air shootout and explosion on board the plane falls in line with something similar to Executive Decision with Kurt Russell or maybe even Goldfinger. Theoretically, I’m thinking that most of the people on the plane should have found themselves sucked through the hole unless the altitude was low. However, this is tv, and I guess that for the sake of the story, we’ll just overlook it.
We have this fight going on, and Coulson manages to secure Camilla so that she doesn’t fly off. Tethered together with cables, Fitz-Simmons gets a hold of the device and Skye is hit with a copy of the pamphlet that Ward gave her earlier. A quick glance at it and she unhooks herself from the group, opening a raft in the plane which is drawn to and effectively plugs the hole. She saves Ward in the process and finding something – something big – to do. Not the most believable of situations by a long shot, but it was fun.
With everything back to normal, the team celebrates their coming together by watching a rocket take off. When asked by Coulson about who decided to blow the hole in the plane, they all take responsibility for it. Skye receives a text from Rising Tide, asking her whether she’s in on their next plan. Looking around the rest of the group, she texts back that she’s in, showing that though things worked out here, she’s not entirely sure she belongs there.
The cameos in the last episode featured Ron Glass and Cobie Smulders. This time, Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury returns for a funny debrief scene that for me was the best part of the entire episode. He yells at Coulson for needing only 6 days before causing so much damage to the plane. Coulson states that the team acted with Authority, to which the common line comes up, “Talking to me about Authority”. I found that to be a great touch and a good scene overall. I think it also hits home to what scares me a little about the show on a whole. Part of me wants more of those cameos, but I’m hoping that the rest of the show gives me enough so that I won’t feel like I’m relying on them to make it all feel like something special.
And that’s the episode in a nutshell.
I’d like to take a moment to both apologize for the delay here in getting this out. I had to watch the episode a total of 8 times just to keep up and hold on to everything I was seeing, something very different for me compared to watching movies. I give all the kudos in the world, and bow like an Ewok to the rest of the Shattered Lens crew for their ability to get TV reviews out there. That is not easy stuff.
When I first decided that I wanted to devote some of October to horror-themed television, I knew i wanted to feature a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After all, Buffy is one of the most acclaimed and influential shows of all time. On a personal note, the show started when I was 12 and it ended right before my senior year of high school. As a result, Buffy was a show that I watched during some of the most emotionally turbulent years of my life and, as a character, Buffy Summers was the type of role model that I needed.
However, what i quickly discovered was that there really aren’t any full length episodes of Buffy on YouTube. There’s plenty of fanvids. There’s a lot of music videos featuring clips of Angel and Buffy staring soulfully at each other. But, because of copyright issues, there aren’t any full-length episodes available on YouTube.
However, there is the unaired pilot.
This was a 30-minute “sample” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that was written and directed by Joss Whedon in 1996. The episode was never meant to be televised. Instead, it was a tool that Whedon used to pitch the concept of Buffy to the networks.
So, since I couldn’t find Hush on YouTube, here’s the 1996 unaired pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Originally broadcast in the UK on September 27th, 1980, this episode of Hammer House Of Horror deals with a sleazy real estate agent (played by Denholm Elliot) who finds himself besieged by dreams about seducing his assistant Lolly (Lucy Gutteridge) and murdering his wife Emily (Pat Heywood).
Featuring an outstanding lead performance from Elliot and strong direction from Peter Sasdy, this is a good one.
Today’s episode of televised horror is The Silent Scream, the seventh episode of Hammer House of Horror. It was originally broadcast in the UK on October 25th, 1980.
This episode features an odd pet shop, a youngish Brian Cox playing an ex-con, and — best of all — the iconic Hammer horror star Peter Cushing!
Seriously, how can you do a horror month without featuring at least one appearance from Peter Cushing?
Today’s episode of televised horror comes from the UK.
First broadcast on October 11th, 1980, the fifth episode of Hammer’s House of Horror was entitled The House That Bled To Death. It’s about a family who buys and moves into a house that has a sordid past. The family plans to fix the house up and then sell it for a profit. The house has other plans.
(Incidentally, The House That Bled To Death would have been a great title for one of Lucio Fuci’s later films.)
Tonight’s offering of Horror on TV is another episode of The Twilight Zone.
In The Howling Man, H.M. Wynant plays a rational man who, during a walk across Europe, finds himself in an isolated monastery. Wynant discovers a bearded prisoner (played by Robin Hughes) who explains that he’s being held prisoner because he was caught kissing his girlfriend in public. However, Brother Jerome (played by the legendary John Carradine) claims that Hughes is the devil himself! It’s left up to Wynant whether to set the man free or to leave him imprisoned…
Written by Charles Beaumont and directed by Douglas Heyes, The Howling Man is a favorite of mine. Not only does the show establish and maintain an atmosphere of palpable menace but it also features a brilliant ending.
Enjoy The Howling Man.
Tonight’s televised horror story is Twenty-Two, the fifty-fourth episode of The Twilight Zone.
First broadcast on February 10th, 1961 and written by Rod Serling, Twenty-Two tells the story of a dancer (Barbara Nichols) who is in the hospital, suffering from fatigue. As she tries to recover and get out of the hospital in time to catch a flight to Miami, Nichols finds herself having a reoccurring nightmare. In her dreams, Nichols goes down to the morgue and is told, by a smiling nurse, “Room for one more, honey.”
This episode seriously freaks me out! Perhaps it’s because I’m a dancer who, in the past, has suffered from fatigue or maybe it’s because I’m scared of flying but this episode scares me to death. Though the episode’s final twist may have been spoiled by far too many inferior imitations, Twenty-Two, as directed by Jack Smight, manages to perfectly capture the feel of a nightmare.
It’s the perfect episode for an October night.
Along with starting each day of October with a horror film here at the Shattered Lens, we’re going to end each day with a horror-themed television show.
While I had previously caught a few episodes of the Twilight Zone during one of the annual holiday marathons on SyFy, I didn’t truly appreciate the show until I first exchanged e-mails with my friend in Australia, Mark. Among other things, Mark expressed a very eloquent appreciation for The Twilight Zone and that inspired me to watch quite a few episodes that have been uploaded to YouTube. Along with being an essential piece of television history, the best episodes of the Twilight Zone remain watchable and entertaining 50 years after they were first broadcast.
Considering the esteemed place that the Twilight Zone continues to occupy in American culture, it seems appropriate to feature it during Horror Month here at the Shattered Lens.
The episode below is called The Jungle and it first aired on December 1st, 1961. It was written by Charles Beaumont and directed by William Claxton. John Dehner plays an engineer who, having recently returned from overseeing a project in Africa, foolishly believes that he’ll be safe from a tribal curse just because he’s in New York. This is an effectively creepy 23 minutes of television and the ending is a classic.
The promotional blurbs on A&E’s cover packaging for the various box set and stand-alone DVD releases of Patrick McGoohan’s classic series The Prisoner refer to it as “television’s first masterpiece,” but let’s be brutally honest here — for a good long time there it probably stood as television’s only “masterpiece.”
Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been some good shows over the years, but start-to-finish, wire-to-wire masterpieces have been pretty tough to come by. I won’t speculate here as to why that’s been with any kind of probing analysis, apart from making the obvious observation that American TV, in particular, has been geared to appeal to the so-called “lowest common denominator” for so long now that frankly most people don’t even expect for there to be anything good on the tube when they turn it on, even with 200-300 channels to choose from. We all just sorta watch it anyway.
I’ll be the first to admit that my two favorite shows of all time — Doctor Who and Twin Peaks — hardly fit the definition of “masterpiece” even though I love ’em dearly. Hell, one of the best things about Who — and I’m referring to old-school Who here, not the current abomination running around cloaked in its title, which hasn’t held much of any appeal to me since the end of its first return season with Christopher Eccleston in the lead role — is that it’s so damn imaginative and clever and stupid in a fun way and addictively, insanely watchable and re-watchable in spite of its glaring production value weaknesses, often hammy acting, and atrocious dialogue that those so-called “deficiencies” actually become part of its charm. And I’m willing to be that “charm” is one of the things that has engendered such a strong following for various other “fan-driven” series, such as Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, both of which have rabid cult followings, to be sure, but neither of which, I think, even the most zealous Whedon fan (and there’s plenty of competition for that title) would admit, at least in their more honest moments, was anything like a “masterpiece.”
Charm is not something that Breaking Bad ever had much of, though, is it? From the outset, we knew we were being asked to become involved in the life story of a guy who was dying, and furthermore was broke and dying. It’s been a pretty “heavy” show from day one, hasn’t it?
Which isn’t to say that it didn’t have lighter moments interspersed here and there throughout, because of course it did, and in early days it even looked like Dean Norris’ Hank character was never going to amount to much more than bog-standard, albeit well-written, comic relief. But as things progressed, even he became a more multi-dimensional character, and as Bryan Cranston’s Walter White sold out more and more of his soul to purportedly “provide for” his family, a show that started out heavy only became heavier.
And yet — lack of charm and a general “bummer” tone don’t preclude a show from being great, do they? And I would contend that Breaking Bad will be remembered as being more than just great, it will be remembered as — here’s that term again — a masterpiece (the third by my count anyway, in TV history — anyone care to guess what I think the second was? The only hint I’ll give is that it was a relatively recent show).
It was difficult, at times, to be sure. Watching the lives of all these people go to hell in a handbasket even became something of a chore during this final season, particularly the season’s second half following its over-12-month hiatus. Walt was a real bastard, wasn’t he? And that could be downright excruciating to witness. But here’s the thing:
You just never knew what the hell was going to happen next. Series creator Vince Gilligan and his coterie of writers always had another rabbit in their hat, another brightly- colored handkerchief tied to that long string of them coming out of their sleeve. The show never once lost its power to surprise.
Until tonight’s series finale, “Felina,” written and directed by Gilligan himself, which pretty much saw all loose ends tied up more or less exactly as you thought they would be.
I’m sure there might be some hand-wringing among fans that long-suffering characters like Anna Gunn’s Skyler and Aaron Paul’s Jesse weren’t given necessarily “that much to do” in this wrap-up episode — hell, RJ Mitte’s hapless Walter Jr./Flynn didn’t even have a single line of dialogue! Meanwhile, a couple characters we hadn’t seen much of since the second season, Gretchen and Elliot Schwartz, played a pivotal part in Gilligan’s last script.
And yet — everything ended on just the right note for all these people, whether they were given too much to do, too little, or just enough. Events played out more or less in exactly the fashion we expected them, maybe even needed them, to.
And that, finally, may prove to be Breaking Bad’s greatest trick of all : a series that thrived on the element of surprise gave us an entirely predictable conclusion that nonetheless felt exactly right.
Walter White is dead and gone now, and Heisenberg with him. His hat’s off. And so is mine. This series hit it out of the park from the word “go” to the word “stop.” As a slow-burn tale of human tragedy — hell ,of loss of humanity altogether — it stands unequaled. A “happy ending” or “loose, interpretive ending” would have been a huge cop-out. There’s only one way things could have gone here — only one way they were ever going to go.
That’s how they went. And that’s just perfect.
Through the Shattered Lens 