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.
In this episode, a new lifeform is discovered.
Episode 2.20 “Micro Minds”
(Dir by Anthony Santa Croce, originally aired on March 4, 1990)
In a college science lab, astronomy student Paula (Belle Avery) is convinced that her personal computer is picking up communications being sent to her from an extra-terrestrial civilization. When Dr. Thomas Becker (Troy Donahue) comes by the lab to find out why Paula hasn’t been coming to class, he is at first dismissive of her theory. But then he hears the voice of Grok (David Parmenter) coming through the computer and he realizes the truth of what has happened.
Paula has made contact with another lifeform.
But it’s not an lifeform from another planet. Instead, it’s a microscopic protozoa that has evolved in the laboratory’s cooling tank. Grok can speak but it doesn’t know much about the world outside of the tank. When Becker shines a light over the tank, Grok thinks that Becker is God. Becker, to Paula’s alarm, rather likes the idea of being God.
Soon, Becker is pouring salt and sugar into the cooling tank, all in an attempt to speed up Grok’s evolution. Paula thinks that Becker is moving too quickly. Eventually, a giant version of Grok (imagine a slimy version of the killer carpet from The Creeping Terror) materializes in the lab and attacks Paula. Paula destroys it and Becker, realizing the Paula also means to destroy the rest of Grok, responds by killing her. Becker, thinking that he has saved Grok, does not realize that Grok is planning on using him to destroy the human race.
I had a bit of a hard time following the plot of this episode, as you may have guessed from the somewhat jumbled synopsis above. This episode of Monsters is an homage to the B-science fiction films of the 50s and 60s and, as such, there’s a lot of technobabble which doesn’t make much sense but which is there so the viewer can at least pretend like the story is rooted in some sort of reality. In this case, the incoherence is the point.
The casting of former teen idol Troy Donahue as the professor is another call back to the 50s. After Donahue’s star faded, he appeared in his share of low-budget horror and sci-fi films. Donahue gives a good performance here, doing a nice job of portraying Dr. Becker’s growing megalomania. (That said, whenever anyone referred to him as “Becker,” I was reminded of that terrible Ted Danson show where he played the doctor who was always pissed off whenever he got off the subway.)
As for the episode’s monster, it looked awful and fake but again, one gets the feeling that was deliberate. To be honest, it didn’t look any worse than some of the monsters that showed up in Roger Corman’s alien invasion films.
This was an okay episode. Even if I couldn’t always follow the plot, the story held my attention. It was a well-done homage to cheap sci-fi, even if it never was quite as much fun as Plan 9 From Outer Space.
