Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, Jack is on vacation so Ryan and Micki try to retrieve an antique on their own.  Near disaster ensues.  I swear, why is Jack always running off?  How can you take a vacation when your job is to literally save the world?  You know who never got a decent vacation?  Atlas.

Anyway, onto the episode….

Episode 2.3 “And Now The News”

(Dir by Bruce Pittman, originally aired October 14th, 1988)

With Jack on vacation, it falls to Micki and Ryan to track down the latest antique, a cursed radio that will reveal information to its owner as long as the owner uses the radio to kill a certain number of people.  (The radio brings people’s greatest fears to life.  So, if you’ve got a thing about snakes, watch out!)  Micki and Ryan discover that the radio is currently in the possession of Dr. Avril Carter (Kate Trotter), who works at the local mental hospital and who is murdering patients so that the radio will help her with her research.  Dr. Carter really wants to win that Nobel Prize.

Ryan and Micki really probably should have waited for Jack to come back because their attempts to get the radio back leads to one disaster after another.  Ryan even manages to get electrocuted while trying to climb over the hospital’s security fence.  Micki, meanwhile, does manage to get into the hospital but she is soon reminded that the majority of the patients are serial killers and perverts.

The best thing about this episode is that radio actually has a voice.  Henry Ramer provides the voice of the “radio announcer,” who says stuff like, “And now the news …. after this murder” and such.  At the end of the episode, it even taunts Dr. Carter when she fails to kill the required number of people and announces that Carter will never win a Nobel Prize.  (The radio then proceeds to electrocute her.)  In a nice touch, the announcer continues to talk to Ryan and Micki even when they’re taking it down to the vault.  It offer to help them out in their quest, in return for a certain amount of murders.  Micki and Ryan end up tossing the radio back and forth between the two of them.  The episode even ends with a freeze frame of the radio in the air.  Hopefully, they got it into the vault eventually.

This was a fun episode.  The mental hospital was a atmospheric location, the radio was an inspired antique, and Kate Trotter gave a good performance as the villainous Dr. Carter.  After two less than enthralling episodes, And Now The News was a definite return to everything that worked about the first season.